Session #5 Religion and Punishment Resource Guide on Mass Incarceration.

Session #5Religion and Punishment

Resource Guide on Mass Incarceration

Religion &Punishment

In this unit, we will consider how certain Christian beliefs have shaped the racism that underlies mass incarceration in the United States.

“Misdirected” Christianity is a fear-based form of faith that stresses human sinfulness and God’s relentless, unchangeable anger toward sinners. This approach to Christianity lies very close to the root of American criminal justice.


“Misdirected” Christianity also underpins the idea that people of color are somehow “less than” white people when it comes to personal discipline and responsibility.


Yet it is also true that “good” Christianity teaches forgiveness and upholds the idea of second chances. This approach takes its name from Genesis 1:31:

“God saw everything that he had made,and indeed, it was very good.”


“Good” Christianity insists that each and every person is made in God’s image. We are all valuable in God’s sight.


In “good” Christianity, we are also equally prone to sinning. This means that those who judge and punish others actually have more in common with those being judged and punished than they are likely to recognize.


Leaving race aside, many Christians frequently still fail to distinguish between “sinners” and “people who have sinned.” (Remember the previous discussion of stigma in language?)


We have learned to make a parallel distinction between “disabled people” vs. “people with disabilities”—but it seems much harder to learn to drop terms like “criminal” and “ex-con.”


Somehow we have forgotten that, even after the Fall recorded in Genesis, humans—all humans—did not lose their claim to be made in God’s image.


• Scholar T. Richard Snyder wrote a book titled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment.

• In this book, Snyder reflects on the popularity of the hymn, “Amazing Grace.”


Snyder notes that British poet and clergyman John Newton published the hymn “Amazing Grace” in 1779 after repenting from his earlier years as a captain of slave ships.


“Amazing grace! How sweet the soundThat saved a wretch like me.I once was lost, but now I’m found,Was blind, but now I see.”


Snyder observes that this idea of a “before” and “after” in relation to God’s grace is especially noticeable among people who really did think of themselves as wretchedly sinful during their “before” times of life.


As a result of this “before” and “after” way of thinking, many in both the white and Black Protestant traditions have developed a distorted view of how grace and salvation operate.


From this viewpoint, all individuals are hopelessly cursed until the Holy Spirit showers God’s grace on them, at which point they are plucked up and out of their depravity.


It is not uncommon for the “saved” to behave like the Pharisee in Luke 18:11 who, when he prays, thanks God that he is not like those other people—the rogues, thieves, adulterers, and so on.


The “saved” then find it easy to deny any involvement or participation in what causes human suffering, which they understand as the rightful suffering of “the damned.”


God’s grace was understood to be limited to those who have been saved by the Holy Spirit and who, as a result, were now more fully human. All other people were seen to be “damned,” living in “original sin,” and less than fully human.


The Notion of “Limited Grace”What experience have you had with “misdirected Christianity” or “good Christianity”? Does it make sense to you to think this way about religion’s impact on racism?

Break for Discussion

The beliefs about limited grace— that “the damned” live in “original sin” and are less than fully human – were used to conquer, subjugate, and oppress whole groups of people. They underpin racial inequality in the USA.


Example: European colonists denied the equal humanity of Native Americans, sometimes calling them “children of Satan.” When the natives resisted embracing Christianity, this was an excuse to kill them & wipe out their cultures.


Example: When colonists began importing large numbers of Africans to work in rice & tobacco plantations, then in cotton fields, they placed those Africans in a separate “damned” category…


… calling them “the children of Ham”—Ham being the third son of Noah who, with his offspring in Genesis 9, was supposedly cursed by God because Ham wouldn’t cover his drunken father’s nakedness.


The conversion to Christianity and baptism of enslaved Africans made no difference to most white slave-owners. Africans and their descendants were still not fully human, let alone equal. They were “property.”


Even President Abraham Lincoln, known as the “Great Emancipator,” made it clear that even when Black Americans were equal under law, this would never amount to social equality with white Americans.


The hard-won legal equality briefly enjoyed by African Americans after the U.S. Civil War made the ensuing social stigmatization even worse.


The original “Jim Crow” laws of the late 1800s—which established “separate and unequal” status for Black Americans—flowed from a continuing cesspool of frustrated white supremacy.


Some 50 years after the end of the Civil War, a best-selling Christian image of Christ—Harold Copping’s “Hope of the World”—depicted this “separate and unequal” reality in faith terms.


“Hope of the World” pictures children of all races in actual contact with Christ—except for one. A Black child is shown faceless, seated awkwardly on the ground, with no physical contact with Jesus.


The notion of limited grace, and the idea of racial subordination, reinforced each other through the first 350 years of the American experience. They continue to reinforce each other even today.


How else can we explain that more than 80% of capital cases in the U.S. criminal justice system involve white victims—despite the fact that at least 50% of U.S. murder victims are Black?


The data suggests that in the eyes of prosecutors and judges, the taking of a white person’s life is seen as a more serious matter than the taking of a Black person’s life.


It is important to acknowledge that most Christian churches have been willfully blind and unengaged around the huge growth of mass incarceration, just like most other human institutions.

Christian Faith &The New Jim Crow

Many of our congregations today strongly support greater opportunities for low-wage workers, immigration reform, economic development for low-income communities, etc.


But this issue of the New Jim Crow—the challenges of limited grace that represent the unequal, racialized system of U.S. injustice— have not been very important for most American Christians.


Perhaps the way to focus our attention on this issue is simply to open our eyes, as Michelle Alexander urges in The New Jim Crow.


Then we can reflect on what our faith and biblical testimony has to say about our justice system in relation to values like forgiveness, mercy, grace, healing, and reconciliation.


We may also wish to reflect on the extent to which religion has helped maintain a hierarchical caste system and social order—even at the expense of equality and justice.


We may discover the extent to which those of us who are white have received psychological, even material, benefits from this enduring system.


If we can agree that mass incarceration is a social sin of the worst kind, then we also know that the only way forward is the way of repentance.


Sincere repentance and changing our ways over our indifference and/or our active collaboration with the system can open a pathway to redemptive action.


Redemptive action, in this case, means accepting the role of servant leadership in relation to communities which have borne the weight of oppression.


Redemptive ActionHow do you feel when you consider taking on a role of servant leadership in relation to communities oppressed by racism and mass incarceration? Why?

Final Discussion and Q & A

Session #6Religion and Punishment

Resource Guide on Mass Incarceration

Completed

Session #5 Religion and Punishment Resource Guide on Mass Incarceration.

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Transcript of Session #5 Religion and Punishment Resource Guide on Mass Incarceration.