Month: January 2022

1 Corinthians 13:1–13

We typically relegate 1 Corinthians 13 to the province of sentimentality, using it at weddings and even funerals to do the emotional heavy-lifting for us. While Paul’s exposition on the significance and nature of love is entirely appropriate for those occasions, limiting it to those type of events is not. The understanding of love in 1 Corinthians 13 is a radical ethic that we need to embrace in every part of our lives — it’s not just the proprietary of loved ones gained and lost. 

Abolition is an ethic of love, one that rejects patterns of retributive violence and vengeance that dominate much of the world. The entire police state and prison industrial complex is based on an ethic of punishment, fear, and profit. Punishment because the system believes (or teaches us to believe) that punishment will satisfy the demands of justice and somehow make up for whatever crime the system claims has been committed. Fear because the system believes (or teaches us to believe) that police and prisons deter criminality rather than create and expand it. Profit because the system knows (and wants us not to know) that there’s money to be made in prison beds, militarized police, and complex legal systems. 

1 Corinthians 13 rejects all of those things: punishment, fear, and profit. 

In particular, Paul rejects rejoicing in punishment, itself a “wrongdoing” (v. 6 NRSV) meant to correct another “wrongdoing.” Instead of an ethic of punishment, an ethic of love rejoices in telling the truth (again, v. 6), being patient and kind (v. 4), and not embracing resentment (v. 5). Systems and ethics of punishment obscure the truth of what people need to change and create a culture of resentment toward those who have experienced the systems of police and prisons. 

Elsewhere, Scripture says that love is the rejection of fear, the currency of police and prisons. “There is no fear in love,” 1 John says, “but perfect love drives out fear, because fear expects punishment” (4:18, CEB). Fear reinforces the things that love is not. Fear is rarely patient (v. 4), it does not prioritize kindness (v. 4), and it certainly does not hope (v. 7).

Paul’s ethic of love here, too, presumes that profit is not the point. Before you can even entertain the idea of love, Paul presumes that acts of charity are second nature (v. 3). Systems of fear and punishment do not presume the sharing of resources, mutual aid, or any sort of generosity. Yet these things seem to be part and parcel of the culture of love Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13. 

Love is eternal, according to Paul. It never ends. If that’s true, we can have hope that love will outlast systems of punishment, fear, and profit. We exist in an imperfect world dominated by these ethics, but Paul promises that we will fully see love in time (v. 12). In the meantime, with that hope we need to act with love and that means letting every aspect of our lives (both individually and collectively) be governed by love. That means police and prisons have to end. 

Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a Baptist pastor and writer in North Carolina.

Luke 4:14–21

The gospel appointed for this week is one of the texts most often used by Christian prison abolitionists, to show how Jesus, in declaring his mission, points to the liberation of captives as essential work for which he has come. Many Christian abolitionists written on this extensively elsewhere, so for this week I will just point you to a couple of resources:

Illustrated introduction to Christianity and prison abolition by Hannah Bowman (hosted here on Christians for Abolition), which includes discussion of this passage

“Prisons and the Bible,” an excerpt from Lee Griffith’s book The Fall of the Prison, made available by Black and Pink, which goes into great detail about the context and interpretation of this passage

The key questions abolitionists ask are these: why are we quick to apply Jesus’ words in this passage to spiritual captivity and not also to material ones? And — without restricting the broader vision of liberation from both material and spiritual powers presented in this text — how do we see the spiritual forces of sin, captivity, and death playing out in real material ways in our current systems of policing and prisons? The point is not to restrict Jesus’ message to the issue of abolition, but to allow Jesus’ promise of new creation and the coming reign of God to really “dwell richly” in our current material reality.

—Hannah

John 2:1-11

In the story of the wedding at Cana, Jesus shows up in power to bring sufficiency — enough wine, enough joy, enough celebration, enough strengthening of community through communal life — to an event strengthening family and community.

What does this have to do with abolition?

As Josie Pickens wrote yesterday on Twitter, about how abolitionists should avoid over-focusing on “alternatives” to policing and prisons: “Often, the question isn’t what the “alternative” should be to an oppressive/harmful system, but rather how people  can have their needs met when these failing  systems cease to exist. And also what individual and community needs look like.… abolition work is about presence— not absence. We should be focusing on the many ways we can imagine and build safe and sustainable communities where folks needs are met.”

Abolition is presence; life-giving sufficient presence in community relationships that already exist, instead of the enforced absence and exclusion provided by police and prisons. What Jesus is offering to the wedding at Cana is the power of presence. We can imagine him there, already bound by relationships of family and community, and able to meet needs as they are pointed out to him by those in those existing relationships (in this passage, memorably, by his mother!). 

And this passage reminds us that the needs of communal life which we invest in by presence, in order to make possible a world without police and prisons, are not only basic, minimal needs for food and shelter, but also the needs for connection, beauty, celebration, joy. Jesus is blessing a wedding, a time of deepening relationship. He provides wine for the sake of the celebration. Sufficient presence is presence that meets every person’s need for beauty. Beauty, joy, and relationship are the opposites of the ugly goals of dehumanization and exclusion that feed the prison-industrial complex.

The question for abolitionists is not only about how to deal with harm — although that is essential — but also about how to make visible the sufficiency of communities that already exist, and how to strengthen communities through existing relationships. The wedding at Cana provides a picture of God’s action, alongside us, in that community work.

Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.

Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell

Becoming Abolitionists is human rights lawyer, Atlantic staff writer, and community organizer Derecka Purnell’s debut book. An exploration of her journey toward accepting police abolition as an inevitable answer for safe communities, it is part memoir, part history lesson, and part invitation to join a movement. Incredibly convincing in its arguments, there’s an earnest warmth running through it that welcomes questions and celebrates the grassroots efforts of the people working toward change. Becoming Abolitionists is a personal window into the injustice of the police state on the world’s poor and oppressed, and a guide for those who want to understand its history, and work to abolish it. 

Purnell grew up in St. Louis; after her father was killed in a work accident, her mom, siblings, and occasionally grandma shuffled between apartments in the same complex. Aspects of her life, from her father’s death and industrial toxins hanging over her childhood, to post-9/11 security checks and student resource officers in high school, and the murder of young men she knew and loved reflected something that she felt was off. Purnell’s proximity to this world jump started her awareness of state-sanctioned violence on the country’s poorest. When people hear about police abolition and dismiss it as abandoning neighborhoods and people to violence, she says, “…they tend to forget that often we are those victims, those survivors of violence.” 

Purnell does a brilliant job of bringing to light what exactly felt off, and of highlighting the absurdity in the systems that our law is designed and instructed to uphold. From taking children away from parents for poverty-related offenses and then responding by increasing funding for foster parents, to George Zimmerman’s acquittal under a law that makes shooting an unarmed teenager permissible, the book is filled with examples of these inconsistencies. Much of the book is spent in clear, thorough examinations of these anecdotes, which are fleshed out at times to humanize the oppressor as well the oppressed. 

Purnell expounds on policing as a system rooted in oppression all over the world; from Ferguson, to South Africa and the Caribbean. The book is packed with history that traces our young country’s dependence on genocide and slavery to one that’s evolved to be characterized by “militarism, policing and a concentration of wealth for a few.” She builds the reader’s understanding of the many intersections of racial violence through chapters on sexual violence, ableism, and environmental justice. The realization that police reform has only failed, that ending policing outright is the only option feels like a big moment; we’ve tried the body cameras, the decreased funding, the accountability laws. But a system rooted in upholding wealth and power for a few is a system that won’t ever allow itself to make any lasting or real change. 

Within Becoming Abolitionists is an invitation to take a deep breath and meet questions and uncertainty with honesty. What about murderers and rapists? Purnell is comfortable with there being no simple, or single answer. With an astronomical budget to supposedly keep us safe from these things, why isn’t our expectation that societal violences be eradicated? When broken down through a human lens into what she calls “digestible social problems,” what’s stopping us from working together to address these things? Grassroots efforts that respond to specific issues like mental health, lack of access to childcare, etc. are cheaper, build communities, welcome creativity, and are successful at preventing harm. Purnell imagines a holistic future for a society of people that supports one another and their diverse needs. 

Becoming Abolitionists is somehow both a fiery and a welcoming invitation to join a community focused on taking care of one another. It’s a reckoning with the failures of all of the police reforms that have seemed like wins and good ideas. It’s a celebration of the giant web of grassroots efforts that are already ushering in change. Derecka Purnell is convinced that our focus need not be on the utopian ending, but on the process that’s rooted in loving, learning, and leaning on one another. When that happens, we’ll forget there was ever a time that calling the police for help was a thought.

Caitlin Spanjer works learning about history with middle school students in Oregon, and in her spare time turns to fiction and non-fiction to dream up a world of restored relationships and perfect beauty.  

Luke 3:15–22

The Baptism of Jesus is always a curious text. Baptism is something the church does (or at least, should be doing). But when we baptize a person in our churches, it doesn’t look like the baptism in the Jordan. John the Baptist isn’t there with me on Sunday morning. The heavens don’t open.
Baptism has been incredibly divisive in the history of the church because of this disconnect. Schisms took place over believer’s baptism or infant baptism. Schisms took place over baptism in moving water versus still water.

And yet we come back to the river, to the water, to the savior willingly receiving the washing of another. Luke doesn’t spend too much time on the act of baptism itself. Jesus is baptized with the crowd. As Katherine Sonderegger writes,

He stood with all sinners when He awaited John’s baptism, the washing in the Jordan as sign and act of repentance. He did not hold Himself apart and aloof from this evil generation; rather He joined it. Not for his sake. For ours. (Sonderegger, Systematic Theology I, 217)

All of this gets us to abolition because if baptism is true, if Jesus is true, if Jesus stood with sinners, if Jesus stood with us, we must with all. The baptism of Jesus did not take place in the middle of Jerusalem but on a margin, outside the city, at a location that looks a lot like where many of our prisons are located today. Out of sight. The kind of society that hides people, that dehumanizes people, that shuts them up far away, this kind of society does not believe in the power of baptism.

Did the heavens open? Did Christ stand with us? Then let us not rest in the brokenness of society that we ourselves have built. Let us dismantle it to offer new life fully, honestly, transformationally to all. 

Rev. Wilson Pruit is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.