The prophet Isaiah’s dramatic vision of God’s heavenly throne offers lessons to Christian abolitionists about where we look for leadership and whose voices guide the movement.
Abolition is fundamentally a grassroots movement, guided by those who are most affected by the system: incarcerated people organizing for their own liberation, formerly-incarcerated people, people with loved ones who are incarcerated or system-impacted. Allies on the outside dedicate themselves to following the leadership that already exists.
What does this have to do with Isaiah? In Isaiah’s vision, he sees the seraphs around the throne of God crying out: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” Every place on the earth is full of the glory of God. The glory of God which is the impetus toward justice is everywhere—there is nowhere on the earth that is God-forsaken. This means that every prison, every jail, every place where humans try to exclude or banish people is nonetheless a place where God is present and working toward justice. This fact illuminates for us the divine reality behind the practical reality that incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated folks are leading the organizing toward abolition.
Isaiah’s vision also speaks to the ability of everyone to participate in God’s work for justice, no matter what we may have done in the past. He says: “I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips” — yet the seraph cleanses him and sends him out for God.
Outside allies sometimes are uncomfortable following the leadership of incarcerated organizers who may have done serious harm. For those people, it is important to recognize that having done violence or harm does not prevent someone from also being a leader for abolition. In terms of Isaiah’s vision, Christian allies on the outside can recognize that anyone, no matter what they have done, can participate in the work of justice and thereby answer God’s question: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
But “living among a people of unclean lips” is also a description of those on the outside, who live freely in a society that has determined that some people should not have freedom; who participate as citizens in a country that talks about liberty and justice but provides exclusion, control, and punishment. Failure to take action for justice makes one complicit in the injustice of white supremacy and mass incarceration. Yet, the call to Isaiah is also a call to those who are complicit. God calls us, all “people of unclean lips,” from our complicity. God cleanses us. And God makes us ready for God to send us out, to go for God and do the work of justice and abolition.
We follow the leadership of those most affected and we look for God whose glory is present everywhere, leading the whole earth to renewed justice.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
On a street corner halfway between our homes in south Minneapolis, the final groanings of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 turned the world on its head. The viral video later catalyzed another wave of protests in Minneapolis and across the world. George Floyd’s final groans and gasps embodied the bondage to sin, death, and decay in which the whole of creation is held. As Silvia C. Keesmaat and Brian J. Walsh write in Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice, “…creation is groaning for the same reason that believers groan: because it is suffering under the exploitative economic practices and violent militarism of Roman imperial rule.”
George Floyd’s groans amplified the groans of all that suffer under the exploitative economic practices and violent militarism created and reinforced by policing and the rest of the prison industrial complex. The toil, suffering, and death perpetuated by policing has been revealed in different ways since George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis Police Department and this city, and cities everywhere, rose up in the largest protest movement our country has yet seen.
In the wake of property damage during protests, the city of Minneapolis became a showroom of plywood. Windows were boarded up to replace glass that had been broken or to prevent glass from being broken and those stretches of plywood became canvasses for artists across the area. As Toni Cade Bambara said, “[t]he role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible” and the revolutionary shift toward abolition became newly irresistible for many of us. Muralists painted prophetic images of a world without police, introducing many people to the idea of abolition for the first time. The murals told us that we could defund the police, that we could abolish the police, that we could break out of the endless cycles of police violence and cries for reform and blowback and repression and more police violence.
Abolition is both a horizon of the future that we strive toward and a practice of hopeful lament that exists in the tension between what is seen and what is unseen. Keesmat and Walsh write, “Lament is an act of hope. In fact, it is an act of ‘passionate expectation.’” In the streets and parks, in organizing meetings, in political education sessions, in our demands of the powerful across this land, we lament the violence of the prison industrial complex in all its forms. We lament the ways it fails to offer interruption, healing, restoration, or transformation of interpersonal events and cycles of harm and violence. But as abolitionists, we don’t offer these laments without hope, or with an empty hope that these systems can reform themselves, that only the systems we see now are possible. We offer a disciplined, practiced hope that, as Mariame Kaba writes, “there’s always a potential for transformation and for change.”
George Floyd’s groans were those of suffering and death at the hands (or knees) of violent Empire. The groans that we carry forward in organizing, protest, and other abolition work are more akin to the groans of new birth.
The same street corner that bore witness to George Floyd’s final groans has become a place in which the community has been birthing new ways of practicing safety, meeting needs, and dealing with harm. Over the past year, George Floyd Square has become a hub for community practice, community mourning, and mutual aid. People bring objects to the community run greenhouse; they bring their kids to the community bookshelf or the clothing closet, they walk the labyrinth marked by flowers and photos or they walk the streets that are closed to cars but filled with the names of people taken from us by policing across this country. Signs of what abolitionists and others seek to reject are everywhere, as are signs of what we believe is possible instead. At least three organizations have been birthed out of this space that didn’t exist before: the group that runs the “autonomous zone,” the group that caretakes the memorial space, and protest medics who have supported movement across the region. Beyond the confines of George Floyd Square, the caretaking work of memorial and spacemaking has grown to include a new memorial space where Daunte Wright was killed in nearby Brooklyn Center in April 2021.
George Floyd Square is a lab of sorts, creating and experimenting with what can be, rather than what has been. As Mariame Kaba said in a recent interview, “I don’t know what the end result is going to look like. But it’s part of a long legacy, what we call la longue durée.” We don’t always know how to create these things, and many things happen at once rather than the single narrative of progress many people would want to tell, but we learn as we build together.
God’s Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. Abolition is one of the ways, one of the most broad and deep reaching ways available in our time, that the Spirit intercedes and helps us in our weakness. Abolition is one of the ways we reach out with hope for something we’ve never seen. It is one of the ways the Spirit is offering us to deal with human weakness and pain, not by continuing to perpetuate harm but by creating conditions where we can live otherwise.
We don’t always know how to articulate what abolition will look like; it is always a horizon that is in front of us even as we create it. We are invited to stay grounded in the groanings and longings and hope that the Spirit gives, through individual spiritual practice, through communal spiritual practice, and through organizing toward a new world.
Rev. Dana Neuhauser is the Racial Justice Organizer for the Minnesota Annual Conference of the UMC and Minister of Public Witness at New City Church in Minneapolis.
Jonathan Stegall is a faith-rooted organizer with Reclaim the Block, and a user experience designer, in Minneapolis.
Jesus’ prayer in John 17 offers a repeated prayer for followers living in the world: “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.”
The challenge for the church is of being a body “in the world but not of it” and in some ways this tension between Christ and culture (to borrow language from H. Richard Niebuhr) is made explicit in the context of abolition.
Abolition and restorative and transformative justice require us to admit that we are in the world and to look harm squarely in the face (as Mariame Kaba puts it); to be honest about our own capacity for harm and the harm others do. An abolitionist praxis in the church does not allow us to deny, minimize, cover up, hide, or try to avoid recognizing harm when it happens. An abolitionist praxis means that the church should embrace being present in difficult situations of harm and take up the goal of transforming harm.
But abolition also requires the church to insist on a justice that is not the world’s justice. To deny the evil bargain that (to use Kaba’s language again) replaces “safety” — mutual care for all — with “security” — safety for some at the cost of domination over others. The church, to live into its calling as not of the world, must reject all forms of retribution, exclusion, and disposability, and insist upon real accountability that begins with compassion.
Meditating on Jesus’ prayer can help us find support from God in a practice of opposition to structures of oppression and authentic engagement with the world in all its complexity.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
In Ephesians, we find Paul writing to the believers and giving thanks for their faith in Jesus Christ. He prays for their reception of God’s spirit, and revelation, “the hope to which he has called you,”and “the immeasurable greatness of his power.”
One wonders if Paul had any trouble writing this, or if the church in Ephesus doubted this immeasureably great power. As tradition holds, Paul wrote this letter from prison. But Paul does not leave us with doubt as to where this hope and power come from.
“God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” (1:20-21)
The message is clear: Even those in prisons and jails, even those oppressed and persecuted, can take faith in the power of Christ. And the proof is that Jesus was raised from the dead, and ascended to the right hand. This gives Christ rule, authority, power, dominion. And just as he has the power now, he will have it “in the age to come.”
This tracks with what the apostles were told when they watched Jesus ascend: “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Jesus’ power is not just restricted to what was seen in his life, or at his ascension. His power remains and continues for all time. Paul, one of the first prisoners to teach the church that prisons have no power over the reign of Christ, models a faith and resistance that is stored in the hope of the ascension.
Mitchell Atencio is a discalced writer and photographer in Washington, D.C.
The prophets are often connected with abolition because of the clarity of the words around setting captives free, but the Psalms are also filled with words of abolition because the Psalms are filled with praise of the victory of God.
Ultimately, abolition points to the victory of God. When humans obsess over justifying the status quo criminal justice system, they deny the victory of God. We must mete out justice ourselves because all we have is ourselves.
The Psalms point to a different expectation of reality. “O sing to the LORD a new song, for he has done marvelous things. His right hand and his holy arm have gotten him victory.” If God has won the victory, that means that we don’t need to save ourselves. As well, that means that we don’t need to save others. We are not the messiahs. You are not the messiah. The State is not the messiah.
If we sing a new song to the Lord, that means we don’t need to sing the old song before we knew of God’s victory. We don’t need to sing the song of the status quo and taking justice into our own hands. We are in the season of Easter where God’s justice is most clearly seen in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from death and torture. Death has no victory here. Justice is not understood by what we do but by who God is.
Make a joyful noise to the Lord. Can we make a joyful noise while supporting the Prison-Industrial Complex? Can we sing praises to the Lord and ignore those chained up by our society? Can we hear the hills and the seas sing of God’s victory and deny the power of God to transform every heart and mind?
As well, are we ready for God’s judgment of the world with righteousness when we accept and ignore such an unrighteous mark on our society? The Psalms speak of justice and righteousness. God’s justice is not just found in our hearts but poured out across creation and all human society. God calls us to participate in the world being made new through the righteousness of God. God calls us to make a joyful noise. God calls us to abolition.
Rev. Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.
