John 17:6–19
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.