Earlier in 2021, I did an interview with student Noémie Bach, who asked me perceptive questions about Christianity and abolition. She has given me permission to share that interview here — I hope it will be helpful to folks! In solidarity, Hannah
I was hoping that first, you could give me an overview of your own religious and political journey, and the path that led you to Christian Prison Abolition.
When I was in college, shortly after my conversion to Christianity, I started taking part in a Bible study at a juvenile detention center. It was the kind of unforgettable transformative experience that changes the course of your life. Once you’ve seen the reality of the injustice of our system and the incredible compassionate community that incarcerated people can build within the confines of their environment, you can’t go back.
I was interested in prisoner support work (mostly I thought of it as “prison ministry” at that point) from then on, although I took a few years after college to begin my career and stepped away from it, and then gradually found myself drawn back into it. I reached a sort of personal crisis and a desire to reorient myself to that work in late 2014/early 2015. It was also shortly after the Ferguson uprising and the importance of questioning the unjust systems of our prison-industrial complex was on my mind. As I applied myself to learning more about the systems, I began to see both the importance of divesting from prisons and the possibility of more restorative or transformative forms of justice.
The epiphany for me was reading Maya Schenwar’s book Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better on a train late at night. As she laid out a case against incarceration and proposed restorative-justice solutions, I suddenly had a profound sense of relief, that I didn’t need to keep defending prisons as a tragic necessity but could just admit that we didn’t need them, and let them go. That was the moment I started to identify as an abolitionist.
I remember Micah Herskind said in one of the seminars on ‘The Fall of The Prison’ that “as Christian Abolitionists, we are a political minority in religious spaces and a religious minority in political spaces”. I was wondering to which extent you resonated with that.
I think the tension has been less present for me. The tension I have felt has had more to do with figuring out how to live out my beliefs publicly and authentically across the various aspects of my identity — how to integrate my organizing and my academic interests into my professional life, for example, and how to integrate my faith into my organizing and justice work. The reason I frame it as a personal rather than structural tension is because I have actually been positively surprised by how well this transparency has been received as I’ve begun to be more open about the facets of my work. Activists, even non-religious ones, are not bothered by Christianity that’s not exclusivist, supremacist, or proselytizing. And while Christians don’t always agree with abolition to the degree I think we should, people are pretty accepting of my own principles about it.
I have been curious of why it is important to claim both identities (being a Christian and an Abolitionist) at the same time, and to explicitly tie in your religious and political lives?
For me the reason to tie the identities together is really a theological one: it’s about holding the church, as a whole, to account for its complicity in systems that bring death and marginalization, and about insisting on Christian witness taking the form of resistance to such systems. I am glad for Christians to bring their witness and privilege to the fight for abolition, because allyship can be effective, but ultimately I think the church needs abolition more than abolition needs the church!
On the Theology of Christian Abolition:
In his book, Griffith says that “the point is not to try to understand the bible socially or politically. The point is to try to understand our political and social life biblically” (p.23). Do you think Christian Abolition theology is coming back to an original and more literal understanding of biblical texts or is it, on the contrary, about creating a new interpretation of these texts according to our current political necessities?
I’m not particularly interested in biblical literalism! I think there is a valid exegetical case to be made for taking seriously the material implications of, for example, Jesus’ declaration of jubilee (André Trocmé’s book Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution makes this case well). But for me, what’s more important is interpreting biblical texts and theology in correlation with what we learn from abolitionists, and to understand biblical texts and theology as providing a sufficient answer to the challenge and questions posed by our current systems of inhumanity and injustice.
Coming from a structural analysis that understands the double standard between what is immoral and what is legally a crime, how do you understand the notion of sin?
For me, the first definition of “sin” comes down to harm — what do I do that harms others, myself, the rest of the creation? How do I participate in systems of harm? This is a notion of sin that is more concerned with our relations to each other than with our relations to God, per se, although I do think there is space for recognizing the roots of such harm in a dysfunctional relationship to God — which has harmful effects we can identify in ourselves or others. This is not to say that sin is only about individual acts, though. Especially as we consider the ways we are complicit in systems of sin and the ways such systems take on a life of their own, I think it is also very reasonable to conceive of “sin” as a power, a force within existence that pushes us and our systems toward harm. That interpretation of the power of “sin” (or the demonic) gives immediate material relevance to the Christian myths and symbols of God in Christ overcoming sin and death. God is undoing the systems and structures by which we inevitably choose and participate in harm to one another.
Again, quoting Griffith, he says that “the victory is won through love and suffering” (p.21). What is the place of suffering and self-sacrifice in Christian Abolitionist theology?
This is a challenging question — and opinions vary! The point is never to encourage suffering for its own sake. At the same time, I tend to agree with liberation theologians like Jürgen Moltmann and Jon Sobrino that there is something liberative or transformative in the idea of God coming in solidarity with those who suffer, in order to overcome their suffering. I do think an essential part of our Christian discipleship is solidarity with those in need/oppressed/suffering, and sometimes suffering is the result of such solidarity because of the powers we face. But, again, suffering is not the goal. Womanist theologians, in particular, have made powerful critiques of glorifying suffering. Nikia Smith Robert’s work on this in the context of mass incarceration is particularly relevant. It is possible to instead focus on life-affirming and community-building activities of resistance, and emphasize that suffering, if it comes, is part of the evil system we are resisting, not something to be given positive meaning. I think this is a place where we have to be flexible in finding the theological vocabulary and the breadth of ideas that will help us move our own thinking and practice in liberative directions.
On Christian Abolitionist praxis.
What makes the specific power of Christianity and the name of Jesus in dismantling the PIC?
I think there are two answers here: a political and a theological. The political answer is that the church still holds some cultural power, and it’s important for white mainline Christians to bring their privilege to bear supporting the work of directly-affected organizers and movements. The second, theological answer is that the promise of Jesus’ resurrection is that God is already at work to free prisoners and vindicate the victims of oppression and state violence in our world — and so we can contextualize our work not as ours alone but as participation in God’s work.
What kind of knowledge do you think Christians can contribute to the abolitionist movement?
I think there’s a deep resonance between the work of non-punitive accountability and restorative/transformative justice and the Christian practices of mercy and forgiveness in community. Too often, I think that theological heritage has been twisted in the church, as forgiveness is weaponized against victims and survivors and “reconciliation” is used to prevent necessary conflict! But ultimately I do believe that Christian communities are intended to be communities where the work of self-examination, repentance, and repair for harm done can occur in a safe and non-punitive context. I think the theological resources of the gospel offer an additional perspective for making sense of what justice can look like in situations of harm and building the capacity to respond to harm in restorative, transformative, non-punitive ways. Although the church has often not been good at applying those resources to the task and differentiating itself from the wider culture! Too often it’s gone along with punishing already-marginalized people while simultaneously abusing reconciliation to allow others to avoid accountability.
And lastly, this is a very big question, but what would a Christian Abolitionist future look like?
A Christian abolitionist future is a future of community. Ultimately, the promise of Christian abolitionism is of radical inclusion into accountable community. No one is left out or excluded, even eternally (Christian abolitionism, I think, has to be universalist); no one is exiled to prisons; instead we hold harm together and respond to it together in ways that emphasize accountability but never impose suffering. Our churches and our congregations and our communities should become places where we practice the alternatives (“rehearse the revolution,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says) that will transform our society — that would make the church leaven for the world, as Jesus promises it should be.