Author: Hannah

Letter-writing guide

One of the best ways to get involved in abolitionist work is to write letters to prisoners. Survived and Punished and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners offer these helpful guides for writing letters to incarcerated people.

Letter writing provides safety as well as emotional support for those imprisoned. It also lets advocates on the outside develop lasting friendships with incarcerated people.

Looking for someone to write to? Some possibilities:

New resource: What Does the Bible Say About Prisons and Justice?

A new addition to our Resources page: a trifold brochure, What Does the Bible Say About Prisons and Justice?

This is intended as a brochure that can be printed and shared with incarcerated people. It includes an introduction to our theological principles, devotional materials of encouragement, and a mailing address if they wish to reach out to us directly.

If you write to or visit prisoners, please share these materials with them if you can!

Abolitionism as Self-Emptying Political Theology

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.

A Homily for the Feast of Christ the King

Excited to start a new series for the blog today! “Chaplain Barb,” a clergywoman who is a friend of Christians for Abolition and functions as our chaplain, is offering sermons based on the Revised Common Lectionary texts read through a prison-abolitionist perspective.

Here’s her first homily for us, based on the readings for this coming Sunday, 11/25/18, the Feast of Christ the King:

A Homily on John 18:33-37

The former Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts-Schori, tells the story of going to the prayer service after the inauguration of President Obama.  The Presiding Bishop was in full vestments, carrying her shepherd’s staff.  When she posed with Obama and VP Joe Biden for a picture, President Obama saw her staff, and said, “I need one of those sticks!” 

All leaders, she opined, yearn for something that will make the work of leadership easier or more straightforward.

In today’s Gospel passage, Pontius Pilate has plenty of signs of authority, and not just symbols of power, but actual physical evidence of it.  Pilate was cruel and unpredictable, with an inclination to violence. So it is completely natural, Passover being historically a time of unrest and rebellion, that Pilate is in Jerusalem to keep things under control.  He is worried, and for good reason.

The guards bring Jesus before Pilate.  Jesus is beat up from his previous interrogation.  Pilate gets snarky with Jesus.  “Are YOU the king of the Jews? … What have you done?”  You can imagine what Pilate was thinking but didn’t say out loud…who are YOU, you pitiful prisoner? 

Jesus answers, “My kingdom is not from this world.”

Pilate asks, “So you are a king?”

Jesus says, “You say so. But my purpose is to speak the truth.  And if you had a bone of truth in your body, you would listen to me.”

Pilate doesn’t understand.  He can’t.  Pilate can’t conceive that the beat-up prisoner in front of him is any kind of king.  What kind of king could this Jesus character possibly be?

The answer is that Jesus is a different kind of king than Pilate could ever possibly imagine.  He is a kind of king whose authority is not based in brute force, or violence, but in speaking the truth.

During the height of the midterm campaigning a few weeks ago, just after the pipe bomb mailings and the synagogue shooting, a news story about a congressional candidate in Florida caught my eye.  It caught my eye because it was such a different kind of story from all the others we have heard over and over again. A death threat against the congressman was posted on Twitter.  The Capitol Police and FBI  tracked down the 19 year old fellow who tweeted the death threat, and arrested him.  What happened next really caught my attention: the congressman asked to meet with the man who issued the death threat.  The two talked. 

The congressman later said, “First, I want to understand why it is someone would say something like this or express themselves with so much hate, and secondly, I’d really like to try to turn this into something positive … He explained to me that he had some issues in his personal life that he thinks pushed him to do something like this, and he also talked about how nasty and negative everything is …”

The young man apologized.  And the congressman asked the attorney general to drop all charges. 

How amazing.

THAT is the kind of king Jesus is, and that is what life is like in his kingdom.  The main weapon of Jesus’ kingdom is not violence; but truth.  The sticks in Jesus’ kingdom are not the kind that break your bones, but the sticks that form a cross. 

There is a prayer in the Morning Prayer service in the Book of Common Prayer called a “collect for peace:”

O God, the author of peace and lover of concord, to know you is eternal life and to serve you is perfect freedom…

The paradox of the kingdom of God is that in submitting ourselves to truth and non-violence, we discover what perfect freedom is.  It is the freedom of Jesus, the freedom of every prisoner like him who possesses no sign of office and exercises no authority except to the extent that the truth is spoken.

We celebrate this feast of Christ the King on the very last Sunday of the Christian liturgical year.  It reminds us in no uncertain terms from where real authority comes.  Not presidential powers or bishops’ staffs.  But truth spoken by a powerless prisoner.

Amen.

Credit: the story about Obama is from the November 2009 Episcopal Diocese of Central New York Diocesan Convention address of the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts-Schori.

American Prison Writing Archive

Here’s a new resource to check out, the American Prison Writing Archive, which is a collection of thousands of essays written by incarcerated people, covering every aspect of prison life.

The most powerful way to change hearts and minds about prisons is by exposing people to the stories of those incarcerated in exile. Please read, and pray for the authors, and share!

Community in Prison

Well worth reading today’s newsletter from The Appeal, which has a spotlight on various stories of community within prisons: The community and care that people in prison offer one another.

Even though prisons are designed to destroy community and solidarity, prisoners still create community wherever they are. Our job as abolitionists—and especially as Christian abolitionists committed to the creation of the beloved community of God—is to see how we can enter into their communities, and how we can re-envision justice as something that happens within our own communities. What if the community, relationships, and solidarity built within prison walls were happening outside them instead?

Karl Barth once said that “the first certain Christian community” consisted of Jesus and the criminals crucified alongside him. When we share in the community of prisoners, we share in the community of Jesus.