Note: This essay was written in response to the prompt: “To whom should we, working in political theology, listen, and how?”
On August 21, 2018, a nationwide prison strike began across the US. Prisoners, with the coordination of the Incarcerated Workers’ Organizing Committee, demanded more humane conditions, sentencing reform, and payment for their labor: dignity due them by right as human beings.
Churches, even liberal ones, were by and large silent—as they are too often silent, uncomfortable with demands for justice that seem too radical or threaten their social positioning. “Black Lives Matter”—as long as the church can also maintain good relationships with police and be respected community stakeholders. “War Is Not The Answer”—as long as nothing the church does could be conceived as threatening our respect for the American flag, which still flies in many sanctuaries. The church tends to associate the kingdom of God with peace and love found in personal relationships and lack of overt conflict within its own community rather than with the oppressed claiming power for themselves. That’s a political theology, even if an unintentional one.
This broken theology that the church has stumbled into should not surprise us: politics, and thus political theology, is about power. Since the 4th-century emperor Constantine, Christianity has aligned itself with power: temporally, socially, spiritually. But political theology, if it claims to be Christian, should align itself with Jesus who identifies with the powerless.
Take Philippians 2: in the beautiful and ancient Christ-hymn in this chapter, we read that Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Philippians 2:6 NRSV) or “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (NIV). This kenosis, or self-emptying, is the ultimate affirmation of powerlessness. God the Almighty, the very ground and power of being-itself (to use theologian Paul Tilllich’s terminology) becomes literally nothing, emptiness, non-being.
What does a “kenotic” political theology look like? It looks like listening first to those who are most marginalized. It says, by faith, that power is found in the powerless. Distinct from pragmatic movement-building, it prioritizes the needs of the weak and despised even when they don’t have the political capital to meet their stated goals.
The prison abolition movement provides us with a model for how to listen. Churches and Christians are comfortable with support of prison ministry (“we kind Christians take Jesus to those incarcerated”) or criminal justice reform (“we good law-abiding citizens try to make a more just system”). But abolition goes further.
Abolition does not let practicality take priority over justice. Abolition recognizes the truth that none of us will be free until all of us are free, and makes no apologies about demanding justice for everyone. Abolition won’t allow us to pursue reform for “nonviolent offenders” at the expense of violent ones, or to end the death penalty only by further retrenching the reliance on life-without-parole and other sentences that lead to death by incarceration. Abolition requires us to look first at the most reviled, most dangerous person in our prisons and say, “What can we do to make incarceration unnecessary even for this person? What does real justice look like, even for them?”
(If you don’t believe this, try telling people you’re a prison abolitionist. The first question, reliably, is: “What about serial killers?” Abolitionist beliefs require you to grapple with that question immediately.)
Abolition forces us to break down the distinctions in our thinking between “good” and “bad” people, between the “law-abiding” and “criminals,” between “legal” and “illegal”—and thus to see Jesus as most present in the people it’s easiest for our society to hate.
Abolition forces us to confront the limitations of our commitment to liberation. To overcome these limitations means turning to those who are most marginalized for answers. It means trusting them, even when the answers they give make us uncomfortable. Even when they seem to go too far in claiming power for themselves.
As St. Paul wrote, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27, NRSV).
Unsurprisingly, the church has failed to heed Paul’s words.
At the end of his life, Søren Kierkegaard did some of his most incisive writing, criticizing the Danish state church and, more broadly, the alignment of Christianity with power. He touched on the hypocrisy with which the church tamed Paul’s radical exhortation by seeming to adopt it: “In the magnificent cathedral the Honourable and Right Reverend Geheime-General-Ober-Hof-Prädikant, the elect favourite of the fashionable world, appears before an elect company and preaches with emotion upon the text he himself elected: ‘God has elected the base things of the world, and the things that are despised’ – and nobody laughs” (181).
We must laugh. Laugh at the temerity of a church that shamelessly proclaims these words of Paul while nonetheless trying to maintain social capital and power in the name of kindness and decency.
We must mourn. Mourn with those who mourn (Romans 12:15), seeking solidarity with those who have emptied themselves or been emptied by a society that forces many into servitude to power.
We must make ourselves uncomfortable: not just by listening, for the sake of civility, to the diversity of viewpoints of the powerful, but rather by listening to the anger of the marginalized and despised.
We must risk our right to be considered “the elect favourites of the fashionable world,” by standing with those who are hated.
We must build on the framework of abolition. The abolition of prisons correspondingly casts doubt on every hierarchy and authoritarian system, even those within the church.
We must listen to those weak in the world who shame the strong—and so develop a new political theology: a theology of liberation, because it is a theology of kenosis.