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John 6:56–69

In the sixth chapter of the gospel of John, Jesus covers a lot of challenging topics. That is, topics that have challenged the church over the last 2000 years. What goes on with communion? What is the bread of life? Who is the church? In response to the words of Jesus, many disciples say “This teaching is difficult. Who can follow this?”

The Greek word translated as difficult is σκληρός, it more often means hard or strong. For instance, in the middle of the parable of the talents, the servant who buries his talent, does so because he knows the master is a hard (σκληρός) man. The problem for the servant is that he doesn’t understand who the master is so he assumes the master is hard.

When we read the words of the prophet Isaiah tell us to break every chain, we today may also think, “This is a difficult teaching.” We may think to ourselves, “This is impractical. Isn’t the status quo good enough?” We may think we understand more than Jesus the bounds of God’s mercy in this world.

The response of Jesus to his disciples is telling. “Does this offend you?” For many Christians today, abolition does offend them. Their worldview has been shamed by a Manichaean expectation of good guys and bad guys and a just society separates the good guys from the bad guys. “Does this offend you?”

Jesus doesn’t soften the teaching on communion. John says that many disciples turn away, but Peter does not. Peter says, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Abolition is a crucible for the modern church as the Eucharistic controversies of the past have been. Does Jesus have the words of eternal life? Is mercy truly offered by God? Should we break the chains? 

“Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

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

1 Kings 3:3–14

It is not in the aesthetic of abolitionists to be complimenting and praising kings and rulers. But here, as we attempt to learn from this week’s lectionary, we find ourselves in the position to learn from Solomon in 1 Kings.

God shows up in Solomon’s dream, asking what he should give Israel’s new king. Solomon, as the story goes, requests wisdom and is granted it (along with riches and long life, evidently because he passed the ethics test and asked for wisdom rather than riches or long life). 

Whether we choose to accept this literally or not is somewhat besides the point for the purpose I hope to utilize this story. As I look at this story, I see a specific reason for Solomon’s pursuit of wisdom that I had previously overlooked: the people.

The role Solomon embodied as king of Israel was a fundamentally political one. For curse or for pleasure, he held the task and ability to rule the operations of a nation. And Solomon, in the throes of this new task, turned to God for guidance. 

“Your servant is in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a great people, so numerous they cannot be numbered or counted. Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people,” Solomon asks God.

Here, we see a wisdom worth replicating. (In other areas of Solomon’s story, this is not the case). The wisdom is to seek out God’s guidance and discernment as we love and care for our neighbors, a great people — God’s people.

As we consider the political power we wield in a democratic republic, or even simply as people with some sense of agency, we must seek out God’s wisdom and direction and we must seek it not because we have a necessity to be right or correct, but because we love the people around us. 

Loving those around us, believing in their best and believing that they are fundamentally worthy of the best is at the root of the work we do as abolitionists. No one is to be thrown away or dismissed, all are God’s people, and we are to love them with our political activity.

Mitchell Atencio is a discalced writer and photographer in Washington, D.C.

Ephesians 4:25–5:2

The reading appointed for this week from Ephesians offers suggestions for what it looks like to live in a community established by the abolitionist values of mutual aid, accountability, and compassion, as opposed to a community governed by carceral ideals of surveillance and punishment. Looking at these instructions line by line reflects multiple facts of abolitionist praxis in our communal life:

“So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.”

Central to an understanding of building what Connie Burk of NW Network calls “accountable communities” is truth-telling and honesty: both with ourselves and with each others. Accountability is a practice of radical honesty with ourselves, including the honest recognition of when we have done harm to others. It also requires vulnerability, as we listen to the truths of others. Building spaces for compassionate, vulnerable listening and exploration of difficult truths with transparency requires that we remember the holiness of our relationships with each other. As we hold space for one another to take accountability and be vulnerable because we have built a foundation of trust, we prove that we are “members of one another.” I have explored the role of honesty/truth-telling and of the concept of the body of Christs in our practice of accountability further, in our Accountability Toolkit.

“Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.”

What is the difference between being angry and making room for the devil? I wonder if one answer to this difficult question is to interrogate our desire for vengeance and retribution. To be angry at harm is natural, just, and good. But to turn that legitimate anger into structures of punishment and retribution is, I think, answering harm with further harm. Such structures become the demonic institutions of policing and prisons that we see acting as forces of death in our society. Characteristic of abolitionist community is to be angry, but not turn to retribution. Or, as Mariame Kaba and Rachel Herzing write, provocatively, “Abolitionism is not a politics mediated by emotional responses. Or, as we initially wanted to title this piece, abolition is not about your fucking feelings.”

“Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.”

In the response to thieves, we see the most concrete example in this passage of a restorative-justice response. There is no thought of punishment or incarceration for thieves — instead, the importance is living a new, accountable life in Christ. Repentance means that theft must stop, but there is no response of punishment. Instead, penitent thieves give back to the community, caring for the poor. Such care for the needy from their own labor is not only an actualization of mutual aid in the community, but also a form of reparations for theft.

Particularly given the ways the early church fathers wrote about wealth as theft, this injunction to thieves also reminds us that redistribution of wealth, mutual aid, and concrete care for those in need are an essential part of abolitionist politics. Those who have wealth should turn to labor for the sake of the needy. Instead of shame or punishment, the response to theft is reparations and care for one another so everyone will have enough.

“Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

Compassion is a hallmark of communities of abolition and accountability. The language of “tenderheartedness” or forgiveness here is not, I am convinced, intended to preclude legitimate anger. Nor can forgiveness be commanded of those who are survivors of harm, nor can reconciliation be insisted upon when there hasn’t been accountability for harm done. At the same time, a process of accountability begins with an openness to recognizing the humanity in those who have done harm to us — what Miroslav Volf calls the “will to embrace,” or what we might think of as compassion for the common humanity of all. It is because of this compassion that our demands for accountability and justice must not rely on degradation, retribution, or exclusion for those who have done harm. Perhaps forgiveness — although it cannot be commanded — can find a beginning in this compassion, a baseline desire to seek transformation of harm done rather than retribution for it.

“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

Ultimately, we are reminded, the mutual, everlasting love of the persons of the Trinity is at the basis of our Christian communities of accountability and abolition. To follow the example of God and to participate in the triune compassionate being of God insists that our way of living — communally, materially, and practically — is characterized by love. To structure our communities by such love means to structure them around honesty and accountability to one another in our relationships, the rejection of retribution, reparations and amends for harm done and mutual aid and care for one another, and compassion for everyone’s inherent humanity.

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

Ephesians 4:1–16

Ephesians 4:1-16, a reading from this week’s lectionary, is full of abolition-adjacent imagery. Paul calls himself “the prisoner in the Lord,” he quotes scriptures declaring “he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.” And he alludes to the ascension and descension of Christ.

But it’s the imagery of the body, Christ’s body, that is perhaps most compelling to me in this moment. “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” 

It is the declaration that Christ is above all, through all, and in all, that ought to compel us as Christians and abolitionists. Where others see outcasts, we are to see Christ, and ourselves. Where others drive to division and dissension, we see that we are connected. And we understand that this connection is not a false harmony built on centrism, but instead a declaration of our mutual benefit when we live together under the Lord. 

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All [people] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” 

“Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions,” abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore declared. 

It is my hope that we will take this lesson and seek to better love and care for those imprisoned, as we are intimately connected and dependent on them, through Christ, and through our commitments to God. 

Mitchell Atencio (he/him/his) is a discalced writer and photographer in Washington, D.C.

Psalm 14

There are atheisms of the mind and atheisms of heart. The psalmist points to atheisms of the heart. “Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good.” We see quickly what is implied by an atheism of the heart: doing abominable deeds, going astray. Christians in the United States have focused so much energy on atheism of the mind that we have lost sight of the atheism of the heart. This is especially clear in the relationship between the Church and the Prison Industrial Complex. The Church has been complicit in narratives of “good guys” and “bad guys” that ignore the teachings of Jesus and Scripture around the image of God, reconciliation, conversion, and the possibility of justice and righteousness here and now.

The justice of God is not found in punishment. Jesus never said, “well, he got what was coming to him.” And yet the complacency with the reality of sin that is our contemporary system of Justice echoes the words of the Psalmist: “fools say in their heart, ‘there is no  God.’” This is what we say by ignoring injustice. This is what we say by turning from the sins of which we are complicit. 

Psalm 14 does not end with its powerful first words but reminds us that God is not a bystander in the ways we treat others. “You would confound the plans of the poor, but the LORD is their refuge.” No matter what we say in our hearts, God is the refuge of those who are spurned by society. No matter what we do with our actions, God is the deliverer who will restore true justice. Where do we hope to be? Whose side do we hope to be on?

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

Ephesians 2:11–22

The second chapter of Ephesians is one of my favorite passages in the New Testament because it provides an alternative framework to how I’d often heard the work of Jesus characterized. The writer takes on a metaphor of citizenship to explain salvation rather than a metaphor of retribution. “Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel,” they write, “and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (v. 12). The letter continues, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (v.19). The foundation of God’s salvific work is in what we today call might amnesty, the granting of citizenship regardless of status under existing legal frameworks.

While I’ve found this passage illuminating in work concerning migrants and the immigration system in the United States, it applies equally well to the carceral system in my country. Preaching about our salvation through the lens provided in Ephesians 2 rather than various metaphors that use retribution and punishment as their base can help us provoke our imaginations when it comes to the prison system and conceiving of its abolition.

Often, when Christians speak of the role of Jesus, they do so in terms (consciously or unconsciously) of a punishment avoided. Salvation is not about the construction of a new world and new relationships, but of Jesus absorbing the punishment we deserved. Penal substitutionary atonement theory certainly has some strong roots in the New Testament (e.g., Romans 3), but it is far from the only biblical metaphor to explain the work of Jesus. Additionally, speaking constantly and exclusively in these terms bolsters our (again, conscious or unconscious) support of systems of incarceration. Penal substitution elevates a retributive theory of justice, which (along with white supremacy) is at the heart of justification for the American penal system. Ephesians elevates a different way of speaking.

The author mixes a few metaphors, one of citizenship and one of architecture. In the first, in salvation, Jesus provides a legal status that was not afforded to us under the existing law. We become citizens not through existing provisions, but by the “amnesty of grace” (a phrase borrowed from theologian Elsa Tamez). If our own salvation depends on rejecting legal frameworks and overturning the existing system, how might imagining the abolition of prisons become more reflexive and natural for us?

 The second metaphor is one of architecture. God’s work in Jesus destroys and builds—it destroys the wall that divides citizens and non-citizens and rebuilds a structure that is a “dwelling place for God,” in its place. In the United States, the prison system often strips people of many of their rights as citizens, creating a “dividing wall” between people who have endured the caceral system and those who have not. If our own salvation depended on the destruction of these kinds of walls, again, how might imagining the abolition of prisons become easier for Christians? Further, salvation does not simply destroy (or abolish, a term Ephesians even uses in the NRSV) the systems that create “the hostility between us”, salvation requires the building of something new. In Ephesians’ vision of salvation, our relationships are righted and we are “built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” Many Christians conceive of their salvation individually, but the author of Ephesians resists that impulse. Instead, our salvation results in a righted arrangement of our relationships with one another. The prison industrial complex consistently and persistently disrupts our relationships with one another and actively dehumanizes those within its walls. Such a system is diametrically opposed to Christian salvation as conceived in Ephesians (as opposed to receiving some support through a penal substitution metaphor). How much easier would it be to bring Christians to the gospel of abolition if we actively spoke of salvation, justification, and grace as Ephesians does from our own pulpits?

Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his)is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina. You can find more of his work at wespearsnewsome.com.

Mark 6:14–29

This week’s gospel from Mark, a flashback to the murder of John the Baptist, provides a complex picture of pain wrapped up in death at the hands of political power. The story of the murder of John the Baptist sets John against kings and those that influence kings, and in equal measure, people willing to use manipulation to commit grievous acts.  The ultimate killer of John the Baptist is tangled up in layers upon layers of relationship, muddying the water of guilt so much so that guilt touches everyone involved.  Years later, as evidenced by the flashback, John the Baptist’s death haunts Herod so much so that the stories of Jesus shame him with the decision he made to kill a prophet.

Ironically, the person in prison – John – is not the person in the story committing murder, an important feature of the story that can call us to remember the “crimes” of those imprisoned versus the criminal actions of those who, on the “outside,” determine their fate. While King Herod fears John, he fears John because John spoke the truth to him. Again, it is John – the imprisoned – who names that King Herod’s actions are not lawful, a voice of truth coming from behind the proverbial bars to incriminate power.  The fate of John – death at the hands of a King who pleases the people inside his ear – is not unlike the fate of imprisoned people who, even in speaking truth, are only further incriminated and forbidden the freedom offered to the people on the “outside.”  The people of power who hold them captive are often able to engage in criminal activity, because it comes from a place of unjust power that serves to preserve their own freedom.

Aside from the obvious power dynamics at play between King Herod and John, this gospel text also calls to mind the dire decisions that can be made when power concedes to people pleasing and manipulation.  King Herod has somewhat of a respect for John, and the gospel notes that he knew “he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him.”  However, whatever affection he had for John is rendered useless when Herod feels bound to an oath to Herodias, an oath specifically made out of old grudges that, again, are based only in John’s propensity to tell the truth. Even as King Herod is “deeply grieved” he continues with his action of holding to an oath born out of a grudge, rather than care for the life of a one who he believed was a righteous and holy man. In this specific dynamic of the gospel we are shown with startling clarity the cost to human life and dignity that is paid when power pleases the voice of the people, the voice of the masses, with an oath to preserving the grudges of humans over truth professed by prophets.  King Herod serves as a reminder of what happens when politics and the highest givers allow their grudges to become death sentences for the very people who, like John, are left to the fate of kings more occupied with their standing in the public square than to their oath to serve anything resembling the justice of God. 

Abolition requires the acknowledgement of these dynamics in our world and a resistance to the ways we might feel called to people please. If we live as King Herod, with the voices of grudges in our heads speaking against human dignity, then we have aligned ourselves with injustice and, in time, we will face the same haunting memories of the ways we silenced prophetic voices in service to our own power.

Erin Jean Warde (she/her/hers) is a priest, writer, spiritual director, and recovery coach in Austin, TX with more writing at www.erinjeanwarde.com.

Mark 6:1–13

What do you take when you go on a trip? It is an odd time for such a question, but pre-COVID, most of us have moved or travelled or visited relatives at some point. What did you take? What was important? What was for comfort? What did you have just because?

When Jesus sends out the disciples, he prepares them for what is going to be required of them. They don’t need to bring food or extra clothes or really much of anything at all. Jesus, in fact, orders them to carry nothing except a staff. They don’t know how long they are going to be God. They don’t know how they are going to eat or drink. 

This asceticism is shocking today. Nothing? Really? 
But they lack of luggage is not the shocking thing but what they do, and Mark lists it clearly in verse 12: So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent, or convert. Metanoia. The disciples don’t need anything save the word of God that goes with them. 

The church today, in most places, has grown complacent. We pay more in HVAC bills than support for our neighbors in need. As well, the church needs to repent for the way we have become complicit in the prison-industrial complex. We need to repent in the way we have sold out the Good News of Jesus. We have focused more on respectability and responsibility than the possibility that God may be making something new right here and now. We don’t need to wait around until people are ready. Like Jesus send the disciples, we don’t need anything other than the word of God to change the world. Prisons are not more powerful than God’s love. Respectability is not more powerful than God’s love. The status quo of injustice will not last forever. May we dust our feet off at its door. 

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

Psalm 130

Psalm 130 offers one of the great Biblical calls for deliverance from God: a promise of God’s presence in every place and situation, and of the divine movement always towards liberation and reconciliation.

The psalmist writes: “Out of the depths I cry to you…” The language of “depths” operates at multiple levels. It brings to mind for me the concrete realities of the darkest hallways I have seen inside a jail, the places where human ingenuity and architecture are turned toward torment and inhumanity. Jails and prisons, designed to cage people, are locations where the evil powers of sin and death are made manifest in the very building, yet at the same time, God is always — always — present with those who are incarcerated.

The language of depths also draws on the psychological: the depths of our own suffering from harm done to us and of despair or guilt over the harm we have done. The cry from the depths is a cry for healing. The cry from the depths is also the psalmist’s cry for forgiveness, made in the sure and certain knowledge that God does not “mark iniquities” but instead forgives and restores us to health and peace where we have done harm. The justice of God is the justice of ongoing restorative accountability and healing, not punishment and suffering.

Finally, the language of depths raises the specter of the ocean depths, which in the Tanakh often represent the forces of chaos, pagan gods, or danger. The language of “depths” in this way brings to mind Psalm 107, where God calms a storm on the sea to deliver God’s people. Psalm 107 is a psalm of liberation as well: in addition to delivering people from the power of the deep, God “breaks bars asunder…shatters the doors of bronze and cuts in two the bars of iron” (v. 14-16), explicitly setting free prisoners. God hears the cry of those in prison and those in danger from the depths, and sets them free.

It is true that Psalm 107 also shows the overthrow of the wicked and powerful. God transforms conditions of oppression and harm. But the promise of Psalm 130 is that God is always on the side of those in the depths. God is on the side of the incarcerated and imprisoned. God is on the side of those who suffer from harm done to them — including the state violence of incarceration. God is on the side of those who suffer pain and despair as they seek to make amends for harm they have done, and so God offers a way out, through restorative and transformative processes of accountability that provide pathways to healing rather than punishment and imprisonment.

God hears the cry from the depths and God brings liberation and healing. This is the promise of Psalm 130. Abolitionist efforts by allies should always remember to take leadership from incarcerated and directly impacted individuals; from those who have done harm and from survivors of harm. In that way, allies hear and respond to “the cry from the depths,” and the abolition of policing and prisons becomes a human response, out of the depths and supported by God’s ever-present solidarity.

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

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.