We are excited to kick off our Religion and Mass Incarceration: New Scholarly Directions series with a blog post from Aaron Griffith on the role of evangelicals in the rise of the prison industrial complex!

Reconsidering Evangelicals
and “Tough on Crime” Politics

by Aaron Griffith

Charles Colson | Jerry Falwell

Evangelicals make an appearance in a good deal of the writing about religion and prisons, and they usually don’t look too good. To reference just two examples, evangelicals are often linked to the rise of the prison industrial complex either in their seeming unwillingness to challenge its growth or, as Winnifred Fallers Sullivan writes about one evangelical prison ministry, in their inherently complementary nature:

Whether one can conclude that dominant contemporary Christian theologies of punishment actually contributed directly to the increased punitive nature of U.S. society, there is no question that the two are culturally congruent and mutually recognizable (101).

But what if the linkage between evangelicalism and the post-1960s rise of mass incarceration (as well as the “law and order” rhetoric and politics that undergirds it) isn’t so clear cut? To be sure, there were some conservative Protestants very much in support of making laws tougher and punishments harsher. In general, these evangelicals would fall under the broad Christian Right umbrella, seen most prominently in groups like the Moral Majority and in leaders like Jerry Falwell. The Christian Right saw recovering law and order as part and parcel of their broader culture war agenda from the 1970s onward. Jerry Falwell penned newspaper columns that lamented how “Crime is epidemic” and that “Criminals are better protected by the law than the people on whom they prey.” His organization hosted rallies for political candidates that promised to toe the law and order line. The Moral Majority also successfully pushed Congress to get tougher on crime, calling for stiffer penalties and use of the death penalty while causing some congressmen to withdraw their support for bills that would have taken criminal laws in a less harsh direction.[1]

Thus far it would seem that the prison industrial complex and modern evangelicalism are indeed comfortable bedfellows (though it is important to remember that similar “tough on crime” efforts showed up in American culture from all sides of the political spectrum). But this story is an incomplete one, for some evangelicals fought harsh retributive rhetoric and questioned “tough on crime” policies. Though I’m exploring multiple ways that evangelicals challenged the criminal justice status quo in my research, here I will simply discuss one, a misunderstood figure who often is lumped in with the Christian Right by both scholars and popular critics: Charles “Chuck” Colson.

Colson’s story is well known: he converted to Christianity while under investigation for Watergate crimes (he would later serve one year in prison) and eventually founded and led the evangelical Prison Fellowship Ministries. Colson frequently spoke out against the injustices of the U.S criminal justice system and the political culture that sustained it. Consider three examples. In 1981 he called U.S. prison conditions “revolting” and its unfair sentencing laws “insane” and “ludicrous.”[2] In 1983 he wrote approvingly of two courageous judges who bucked callous trends in their state by declaring mandatory minimums unconstitutional and who attempted to grant leniency to a reformed convict. According to Colson, those who are willing to fight the cruel overreaches of American penal practice are heroes; in contrast, “Lady Justice, blindfolded to avoid partiality, is sometimes just plain blind.”[3] Though his conservative political advocacy intensified in the 1990s, Colson maintained his strident views on criminal justice. In a column in the early 1990s he decried politicians’ use of law and order tropes to further their own agenda. “Willie Hortonism” (a reference to the George H.W. Bush race-baiting campaign commercial) and pandering to the public via support of the death penalty were in Colson’s eyes absolute moral scandals.[4]

Much more could be said about Colson and other evangelical attempts to challenge “tough on crime” criminal justice and the rise of the prison industrial complex. And, as scholars like Winnifred Fallers Sullivan have indicated, the story of Colson and Prison Fellowship’s actual work in reforming American prisons is complicated by missteps and overreaches. But the contrast between Falwell and Colson is clear enough. Two questions remain: will scholars recognize this contrast in future studies of evangelicalism and prisons, and will activists committed to challenging the American system of criminal injustice be willing to see certain evangelicals as friends more than foes?

——

[1] Beth Spring, “Moral Majority Aims at the Criminal Code,” Christianity Today, February 5, 1982, 49.

[2] Tom Minnery, “Lawyers Are Challenged to Battle Secularist Inroads,” Christianity Today, May 29, 1981, 31.

[3] Charles W. Colson, “Taking a Stand When Law and Justice Conflict,” Christianity Today, February 4, 1983, 41.

[4] Charles Colson, “Voting for the Executioner,” Christianity Today, October 8, 1990, 112.

Aaron Griffith is a doctoral student studying American Christianity at Duke Divinity School.

“An Ordinary Kind of Ornament,” installation by Hannah Bertram at Eastern State Penitentiary. Photo by Laura McTighe.

Mass incarceration and, more broadly, the US criminal justice system are attracting an increasing amount of scholarly attention. From anthropology to sociology, from critical criminology to critical race studies, from literature to history, scholars are turning their attention to perhaps the most pressing social problem in the US today. What can explain the explosion in the prison population? What can explain the continuing, largely ignored violence of “justice” afflicting the most marginalized?

Religious studies scholars and theologians are beginning to address these same questions. We are beginning to ask whether there might be a uniquely religious history of mass incarceration. We are beginning to ask whether the theological significance of such concepts as law and justice, violence and peace has not so much been forgotten as it has been repressed or transformed. We are beginning to ask how religious practices, languages, and histories might be recovered in order to challenge the enormous injustices routinely enacted by the US “justice” system today.

In late October, 2014, we brought together, in Syracuse, NY, an exemplary group of the next generation of religious studies scholars and theologians: graduate students from around the country writing their dissertations on religion and mass incarceration. What made the conversation so exciting was not only the intellectual vigor of our discussion but also each participant’s deep commitment to social justice and grassroots activism.

The graduate students presented works-in-progress, often portions of their dissertations, and faculty experts responded, asking probing questions and suggesting new ways to broaden and deepen our conversation. Participants found the experience exhilarating and inspiring, and we look forward to continuing the work – both scholarly and activist work – in conjunction with the Religion and Incarceration Network in the months and years that follow.

In the posts to appear here in the coming weeks, these graduate students will be presenting summaries of their research projects. We believe that these projects will provoke and inspire, opening new ways to think about mass incarceration inflected by questions of spirituality, church history, political theology, feminist theology, and more. Sometimes the connections between these scholarly endeavors and grassroots activist praxis are obvious; in other cases, querying those connections may lead in unexpected directions. In all cases, we hope that these posts will encourage both scholars and activists to join in the conversation, whether in the classroom or in the office or in this blog’s comments section.

We are grateful to the Religion and Incarceration Network, the Syracuse University Religion Department, and the Central New York Humanities Corridor, through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for supporting this work. We are especially grateful to Laura McTighe, Joshua Dubler, Vincent Lloyd, and Debbie Pratt for providing the logistical support to make the event, and this blog series, possible.