Finding Sanity in a World Gone Mad: Lessons from James Cone

Listen to the full podcast conversation on this topic.

By Aaron Van Voorhis, Pastor at Central Avenue Church

Lately I’ve heard more and more mental health experts saying something interesting: anxiety, depression, and emotional exhaustion are on the rise to such a degree that some researchers wonder whether we’re actually over-pathologizing normal human reactions to living in a deeply troubled world. 

In other words, you’re not crazy. The world has gone crazy. 

Feeling anxious, angry, or sad right now may not be a disorder. It may simply mean you’re awake. You’re paying attention. You’re responding honestly to the reality around you. 

If that’s you, congratulations. You might be one of the sane ones. 

But even if that’s true, the question remains: Where do we turn for hope? Where do we find wisdom strong enough to sustain us in times like these?

Learning From the Black Church

As we enter Black History Month, I find myself turning to the wisdom of the Black community and the Black church, especially James H. Cone, renowned founder of Black Liberation Theology. Not because our present struggles are equivalent to the centuries of suffering endured by African Americans (they are not), but because the question Cone asked still matters: 

How did Black Americans survive four hundred years of terror, oppression, and violence and remain spiritually alive?

Cone believed the answer lay in two forms of faith:

• faith in God

• and faith in themselves

What astonished him most was this paradox:

White Americans often used Christianity to justify oppression. Black Americans used Christianity to resist it. The same religion. Two radically different outcomes. How is that possible?

The Power of the Cross

Cone argued that Christianity became a powerful tool of resistance because of one central symbol: the cross. 

If Christianity were merely about moral teachings or heavenly rewards, it would not have held the same power. But at its center stands a lynched and crucified Messiah, a poor Jewish peasant executed by political and religious authorities for siding with the marginalized. 

The cross was, in essence, a first-century lynching.

Jesus stood with the poor, the powerless, and the excluded. For that, he was labeled dangerous, an agitator, a troublemaker, a threat to order. 

And that mattered deeply for the Black church. Because if God was present with Jesus in suffering, then God must also be present with those suffering under injustice.

Writer James Baldwin once captured this paradox beautifully:

The White man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the Black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.

The cross becomes a declaration that God is found not in power, but in solidarity. God is not above suffering, but within it. 

And that belief helped generations endure the unendurable while keeping their humanity intact.

Can This Story Still Sustain Us? 

That raises an honest question for communities like ours, many of us former evangelicals, many of us people who have deconstructed earlier forms of faith: 

Can this story still hold meaning for us? Can faith still be a source of sanity after we’ve burned the bridge back to certainty? 

I can only answer personally. For me, my faith has become what I call a cruciform faith, a faith shaped by the cross.

What I Mean by a Cruciform Faith

A cruciform faith is not belief in a supernatural being waiting to swoop in and rescue us if we pray hard enough. 

The all-powerful “old man in the sky” version of God no longer works for me. Radical theology, influenced by thinkers like Peter Rollins, helped me recognize that such a God often mirrors systems of domination rather than liberation. 

Instead, my faith finds the divine here:

• in compassion,

• in justice,

• in empathy,

• in the neighbor standing before me.

It’s the God of Matthew 25:35:

“I was hungry and you fed me. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” 

This is not an otherworldly faith. It is a this-world faith. A faith that embraces life as it actually is: joyful and tragic, beautiful and broken.

The Faith We Inherited and the Faith We Missed

I grew up evangelical. I went to church multiple times a week for 25 years. And yet I never once heard about Jesus as a political victim executed by empire. I heard endless sermons about heaven, hell, personal salvation, and prosperity. 

Looking back, I have to ask: Whom did that version of Christianity serve? 

Cone argued that an otherworldly Christianity allowed the white church to avoid confronting injustice in this world. By focusing on the afterlife, it sidestepped the radical demands of love, justice, and solidarity with the oppressed. 

In doing so, it often rejected the very meaning of the cross.

Faith as Story

Today, my faith is also a faith in the power of story. Believing in the story of Christ doesn’t require me to treat the Gospels as literal biography or historical proof texts. What matters is that the story reveals enduring truths about what it means to be human, and what divine love looks like lived out. 

Our rituals are stories too. Every time we share communion, we retell a story of suffering, solidarity, and hope. Shared sacred stories connect us to one another and to something larger than ourselves. 

We need stories that help us remember who we are, and who we can become together.

We’ve Been Here Before

Recently I watched a video by activist Andre Henry, who reminded listeners:

Don’t despair. We already know how to resist authoritarianism. 

For many communities, especially Black Americans, struggles against oppression are not new chapters but familiar ones.

The Civil Rights Movement was an anti-fascist movement. The fight for LGBTQ+ dignity is an anti-fascist movement. The struggle against Christian nationalism today is part of the same story.

We are not starting from scratch. We inherit courage from those who came before us. History tells us something important: 

The problem isn’t just bad leaders. It’s systems built on broken values. And that means change requires all of us.

Keep the Faith

So if you feel overwhelmed right now, hear this: You are not alone. You are not irrational. You are responding honestly to a difficult moment.

Take hope. Keep a cruciform faith, a faith grounded in compassion, in solidarity, in shared stories, and in one another. 

Have faith in yourself. Have faith in your community. And have faith in the stories powerful enough to help us imagine and build a better world together.