Fall 2014 insights

The Crisis of Incarceration

Insights The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary

Fall 2014

Todd • Corrie • Carter • Carter • Faraji Artmann • Isaac • Merritt • Johnson • Monie

Insights

The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary Fall 2014

Volume 130

Number 1

Editor: David F. White Editorial Board: Gregory Cuéllar, Blair Monie, and Randal Whittington The Faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Whitney S. Bodman Gregory L. Cuéllar Lewis R. Donelson William Greenway David H. Jensen David W. Johnson Paul K. Hooker Timothy D. Lincoln

Jennifer L. Lord Blair Monie Suzie Park Cynthia L. Rigby Kristin Emery Saldine Asante U. Todd Theodore J. Wardlaw David F. White

Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary

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Contents

2 Introduction

Theodore J. Wardlaw

The Crisis of Incarceration 3

“Mass Incarceration,” War, and the Great World House

by Asante Todd

10

Understanding the Causes of the Incarceration Crisis

An Interview with Asante Todd

15

Reflections

The Church as Peacebuilder in the War on Kids by Elizabeth Corrie

When Justice Means Challenging the Rules by Bill Carter & Tina Carter

Reversing Injustice: Combatting the Criminality of an Apartheid State

by Salim Faraji

29

Pastors’ Panel

Tommy Artmann, Brittany Isaac, Brian Merritt

31 Required Reading

Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, written by Andrew Louth, reviewed by David W. Johnson; Capital in the Twenty-first Century, written by Thomas Piketty, reviewed by Timothy Lincoln

33 Christianity and Culture Leadership in an Age of Anxiety

by Blair Monie

Introduction

T

he lead essay that follows is particularly riveting and important—and, I suspect, unusually difficult to read. It explores, after all, deeply troubling and often dysfunctional issues related to what we call “the criminal justice system” in this country. Asante Todd, instructor in Christian ethics, rehearses with us an exhaustive history of the impact of this so-called system, focusing especially on its impact in Texas, and he reflects upon how it has targeted people of color and, perhaps most notably, African-American males. From the vantage-point of Martin Luther King Jr.’s own vision of justice in America, Todd points us toward a better way. In King’s own words, the “great new problem of mankind (sic)” is that “we have inherited a big house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other in peace.” From the generous angle of King’s “great world house,” Todd invites us to ponder new possibilities.

This image, a “great world house,” hovers over the rest of this timely and thoughtful issue of Insights, and offers us a sturdy Christian hope. Elizabeth Corrie, in her essay on the challenges facing adolescent youth in our culture, refers to the “warfare” language that Todd introduces earlier (“war on crime,” “war on youth”) and calls us also to the power of hope embedded within Christian language and imagery. Tina and Bill Carter, from the perspective of their ministry in one particular Austin parish, chronicle the inequities of our culture’s warfare in references they make to the struggles of those with whom they work. Salim Faraji’s piece crackles with moral urgency as he diagnoses the criminal justice system. Our guests in this issue’s Pastors’ Panel speak similarly from their various ministry perspectives, and you get a couple of good suggestions on books to read.

Zbinden Chair-holder Blair Monie gets the last word in this issue, in a spoton analysis of the anxiety at the root of our polarized society, and certainly at the root of our church. Monie shows us what hope looks like in the anecdote he recollects from an early moment in the life of a historic church he once served. It was an instance in which a pastor exercised leadership to move a wall that had divided persons, and to make it large enough to include them all. In these times of persons being frozen out by unjust policies, or sorting themselves into voluntary tribes of likemindedness, is our work not also the mission of moving walls?

Theodore J. Wardlaw

President, Austin Seminary

“Mass Incarceration,” War, and the Great World House Asante Todd Before I was formed in my mother’s belly, both God and government knew me; and before I came forth out of the womb, both sanctified me and ordained me, albeit to different ends.

W

hat is “mass incarceration”? This phrase signifies the U.S. surpassing the 2 million mark in its prison and jail population.1 Today the U.S. incarcerates approximately 2.2 million people—one in one hundred of its adult population. Although the language of “mass incarceration” is popular, “unnecessary incarceration” or “over-incarceration” is probably more accurate. Also, incarceration should be understood as one piece of a larger net of punitive social governance, which also includes the police, courts, and corrections (i.e. the fractured criminal justice system). Incarceration is not spread evenly across states or people groups. Southern states, headed by Texas, lead the way, and black boys and men are the most incarcerated group in the country. In this brief article I want to suggest that mass incarceration, and its attendant politics of “war” or “law and order,” stand in tension with certain Christian convictions, especially as expressed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Specifically, it clashes with his vision of

Asante Todd (MDiv’06) is instructor in Christian ethics at Austin Semi-

nary. He is a doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University where he was a member of the Theology and Practice Program. A graduate of Austin Seminary, Todd worked in the Texas State Legislature, the Urban League, and as a youth minister. His general area of research is in religion and politics, with special attention to African-American political theology.

3

The Crisis of Incarceration the “Great World House,” where all are raised in conditions that facilitate freedom, regardless of race, religion, or nationality. Before making this claim, however, I do two things. First I move historically, looking at the cultural and political dynamics that gave rise to mass incarceration. Then I discuss its effects on the criminal justice system.

“Mass Incarceration,” the Net of Punitive Social Governance

T

he phenomenon of mass incarceration may be separated into three phases.2 The first was from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, during which time the assumption that harsher punishment deters crime was popularized. The result was that the imprisonment risk increased dramatically for those committing crimes. Said another way, those convicted of crimes, especially misdemeanors, were more likely than ever to be incarcerated. The first phase was followed by a second from the mid1980s to the mid-1990s, wherein the increasing likelihood of imprisonment shifted from all offenders to drug offenders specifically. This phase was driven largely by the policies and practices associated with the War on Drugs. A noteworthy policy during this time was the 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which enables local law enforcement to take advantage of military technologies, thus living more fully into the highly influential “War” metaphor that drives America’s crime and drug policies. Another is the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986), which not only legalized the well-known crack/cocaine disparity, but also officially shifted the agenda of the criminal justice system from rehabilitation to punishment, introducing “mandatory minimums.” Phase three, from the mid-1990s to present, is marked by “truth-in-sentencing” legislation which requires that offenders serve a substantive percentage of their sentences (85% in most states) before qualifying for parole. This policy has effectively nullified parole boards (some have been outright liquidated) and ensures that offenders remain incarcerated for a greater amount of time, regardless of their varying circumstances, cases, and histories.

Today, in the wake of a two-score-long “grand social experiment in punishment,” the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world.3 Americans born after 1973 have never known a time when the number of people in prison was not rising. Incarceration has persisted during good and bad economic times, war and peace, when crime rose and when it dropped.4 From 1980-2010, the prison population increased by 373% (319,598 in 1980 to 1,543,206 by the end of 2010), and at year end 2010 the overall incarceration rate had reached 731 inmates per 100,000 residents.5 Incarceration is only one aspect of a larger net of punitive governance.

The thirty years between 1980 and 2010 also saw a rise in the number of probationers (from 1 million to 4 million, a steep jump). The number of parolees also grew, from 220,000 in 1980 to 841,000 in 2010. All four branches of corrections (jails, prisons, probation, and parole) experienced consistent growth from the mid1970s–2012.

Again, punitive governance didn’t spread evenly across states or people groups.

Although northern and southern states experienced fairly substantial prison population growth, growth has stayed strong in a few states, slowed in others, and re4

Todd versed course in at least half of the (northern) states. Southern states lead the way in numbers incarcerated. At the end of 2010, five southern states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama) each had imprisonment rates higher than 600 prisoners per 100,000 residents. More than half of adult prisoners are under 35 years old and almost 9/10 are under 45. Over 90% are men, and without question, the net falls most frequently on black males from impoverished city neighborhoods: nearly half of men in prison (40%) are African American (we make up only 12% of the U.S. population). Criminologists Todd Clear and Natasha Frost argue that “incarceration rates are at least five times higher [for blacks] than for white males across every age group. Of black men in their late twenties, one in eight is currently behind bars … and … one in five black males can expect to be imprisoned sometime during adulthood … These numbers are so staggering that it has become impossible to talk about incarceration rates without talking about its disparate impact on minority communities.”6

Contributing Factors

A

longside the highly influential “war” language that circulates in our media, a key contributing factor to the enlarged net has been the “law and order/tough on crime” rhetoric in political discourse. The language emerged as early as the 1950s from a number of southern governors and law enforcement officials who interpreted the civil rights movement as the breakdown of “law and order.” As the civil rights movement went national over the next decade, so, too, did oppositional “anti-crime” rhetoric. (This rhetoric was also picked up by those opposed to social welfare). Thus, argues sociologist Katherine Beckett, the crime issue was introduced and constructed into “national political discourse in the 1960s …[by] southern officials.”7 Americans began to support “tough on crime” policies only after certain politicians and interest groups presented “the crime issue” as a priority and argued that control and punishment were the best solutions. These claims were not based on actual data on crime but on the myth that the causes of crime are biological or cultural rather than environmental. In spite of this, “law and order” rhetoric has been a primary determinant of crime policy since the 1960s.

Punitive governance also works through policy. As early as 1967, federal policy on crime invented and introduced “the negro delinquent” into discourse on crime.

In turn, the conflation of delinquency with black male youth legitimated various forms of governance over urban blacks’ families and social lives. This begins in The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (1967), a report by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. Focusing on crime prevention, the 300+ page national crime strategy argues that “delinquents” should be identified and controlled. But who, its asks, are delinquents? They are, first, youth.

They are “predominantly male … disproportionately in the cities … children from broken homes … grades are below average … from backgrounds of social and economic deprivation … directly related to conditions bred by poverty … Thus Negroes, who live in disproportionate numbers in slum neighborhoods, account for a disproportionate number of arrests.”8 Although the report acknowledges that 5

The Crisis of Incarceration “what matters is where … one is growing up, not religion, or nationality, or race” and later acknowledges racial barriers (residential segregation, restricted access to jobs), this truth is later dismissed: “It is likely that the official picture exaggerates the role [of] social … economic conditions … [S]lum offenders are more likely than suburban offenders to be arrested and referred to juvenile court … [T]here is … no reason to doubt that delinquency … is committed disproportionately by slum and lower class youth.”9 The Commission’s policy has unfolded over the last four decades, which has ironically created a situation where today, many urban youth have few options beyond a life of crime.

The Fracturing of American Criminal Justice

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he widening of the net of punitive governance has not occurred without fracturing the American criminal justice system. The late Harvard legal scholar William J. Stuntz uses the language of “collapsed” to describe the situation. The marks, he says, of our broken system are bureaucratic detachment, legal procedure, and the politics of race having taken the place of the rule of law and judicial authority.10 He also notes a significant change in the character of criminal law, namely a substantive change in mens rea (the law of criminal intent). Up until the 1950s, proof of criminal intent meant proof of moral fault. In most cases today, findings of criminal intent are automatic—no proof is needed. Stuntz sees mass incarceration as one aspect of the larger problem that no stable regulating mechanism governs the frequency or harshness of criminal punishment. “The justice system,” he says, “is not hard wired to punish excessively—or if it is, it became so only recently. A mere forty years ago, America’s justice system seemed hard wired to avoid criminal punishment, not to impose it. In the age of pendulum justice, American criminal justice seems prone to excess in both directions.”11 In the wake of the decline of the rule of law and judicial authority, racialized police discretion has increased and the criminal justice system has harshened its attitude toward blacks and criminals (and struggles to distinguish the two). Politics—racialized politics and not law—regulates law enforcement, and the justice system tries fewer cases (thus nullifying habeas corpus) and pleads out most. In the eyes of the Supreme Court, discrimination is impossible to prove (McCleskey v. Kemp, 1987) and government has unfettered discretion to choose when to enforce the law and when to ignore it (Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 2005). As it currently stands, then, blacks and Latinos do not receive equal protection under the law. Instead, they are abandoned by the law and are in many ways denied the means to equal participation in society and politics.

Stuntz traces the roots of this fracture to the latter part of the twentieth century, when criminal law became “rationalized” and bureaucratized. The Model Penal Code of 1962 (updated in 1981) best demonstrates rationalization. As states adopt more aspects of the code, criminal law is less informed by impartial judges and takes on a more rigid character. There is also bureaucratization, a prime example of which is the U.S. Sentencing Commission (1984). The commission was created to make criminal justice more uniform. However, to the extent that it precludes the 6

Todd will of the populations it most heavily effects, it stands opposed to the aims of a democratic republic. The overall effect of these strategies is that drug/non-violent offenders are subjected to mandatory sentences, often harsher than those for violent crimes. Stuntz surmised that we need a constitutionally grounded criminal justice system based on equal protection and more jury trials and to make guilty pleas more costly. Along with these goods he suggests an (unintended) evil—local city decisions for more, not fewer, police on our streets. Stuntz’ believes that more police produce greater safety, but he doesn’t seem to understand that in our current cultural and political climate, more police can only mean more discriminatory governance for blacks and Latinos. As for the race issue, “this” says Stuntz, is a “tougher nut to crack.”

Texas Tough: Law and Order in the Lone Star State

I

t is fitting to include a note on Texas, not only because of a postmodern commitment to “the local,” but also because “in the realm of punishment, all roads lead to Texas.”12 From 1970 to 2000, the state’s population nearly doubled, growing from 11,196,730 to more than 20 million, and the proportion of nonwhite citizens increased from roughly 13% to more than 40%.13 Urban growth was exceptional; by 2000 Texas boasted three of the nation’s ten largest metropolitan areas (Dallas, Houston, San Antonio). Indeed, during this time, no state experienced more socioeconomic shifts, and no state responded more punitively (with the possible exception of California) to its crime, drug, and immigration “problems.”

The latest model of Texas’ racialized regime of punishment began under Governor William P. Clements (1979-1983). In 1982, Clements initiated the Blue Ribbon Commission on Criminal Justice, whose task was to study Texas’ “prison overcrowding” issue and recommend a master plan to carry the criminal justice system “into the twenty-first century.” Through the end of Clements’ first term, through Mark White’s term (1983-1987), and into Clements’ second term (1987-1991), Texas’ purpose, politics, and policies unfolded around a “build more prisons” agenda. This set the foundation for subsequent leaps in prison populations. In 1972, 7,725 people were under the surveillance of the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC/now TDCJ). By 1987, prison admissions had reached 35,007. During Clements’ second term this trend was exacerbated by truth-in-sentencing, new powers of prosecutors to try juveniles as adults, and powers of prosecutors to introduce illegally obtained evidence.14 Prison efforts were also helped by a federal government intent on expanding its racialized drug war. For example, the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act eventually awarded Texas $10.6 million for its Narcotics Control Program. Although some of these funds were directed toward education and social services, by far most were funneled toward enforcement and corrections.15 Federal drug-war initiatives in Texas included DEA/State and Local Task forces, U.S. Customs Service, U.S. Border Patrol, the El Paso Intelligence Center, and the National Narcotics Border Interdiction system.

Thus from the time that Clements started (1979) until the end of his second term (1991), the agency’s inmate count doubled and prisons under management 7

The Crisis of Incarceration grew from nineteen to thirty-seven. This trend continued under Ann Richards (1991-1995) and George W. Bush (1995-2000), with Bush especially notable, opening a new prison at the rate of roughly one per week during his first year in Austin.

These rates are especially troubling considering that shortly after Bush became president (2001), Texas was freed once again from federal oversight. In spite of racist policy, certain federal officers still held Texas to constitutional standards. For example, in 1979 U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice ruled the conditions of TDC “cruel and unusual,” and in 1999 ruled that “systematic constitutional violations remained” within TDCJ.16

Today Texas’ prison system is the largest in the U.S. It ranks dead last among states in the amount of money spent on indigent criminal defense, but it is first in prison growth, in for-profit imprisonment, in total number of adults under criminal justice supervision, and in executions. Texas drug policy is not racialized as with the federal government, but the effects of Texas policing are similar. African Americans comprise 13% of the Texas population and 32% of those in prison, and when combined with Latinos (~38% and ~35% respectively), these groups represent ~70% of the Texas prison population.

The Great World House

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he late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was no stranger to the net. In fact, the first of his insights germane to the problem of the net is found in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963). Specifically, it is his idea of “sameness,” or a willingness to make binding on oneself what one makes binding on others. It was never a central idea in King’s thought, but it slips out when he points out the unjust nature (i.e. lack of sameness) of Jim Crow law. “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.” For King, the Jim Crow law was unjust because whites were not willing to bind themselves by the same laws that bound blacks. King’s reflection on sameness is applicable today, not only with respect to law, but governance as well. If whites will not have their sons and daughters identified as primary targets for a national crime strategy, does sameness not require us to take a posture against this treatment toward blacks?

King’s second insight surfaces the following year during his 1964 Nobel Lecture. It is the vision of the great world house. “This,” he said, “is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a big house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other in peace.”

Theologian Hak Joon Lee notes that King’s image of the great world house carries 8

Todd with it a moral claim that all life is interrelated and that society should be characterized by inclusivity, justice, and love for all, where people are not treated differently “based on their race, religion, nationality, gender, or class, but rather voluntarily cooperate for the common good.”17

I find King’s vision of the great world house helpful for reorienting approaches to crime and penal policy. It provides a much needed alternative to the “war” metaphor that has until now served as the backdrop for policy initiatives. The prominence of the metaphor (combined with the prevalence of animalistic representations of blacks in media) puts many voters in a “state of nature” mindset when it comes to crime and penal policy: the law of punishment reigns supreme. King’s vision of the great world house reframes our political imaginations in such a way that we do not believe the hype which says that criminality or delinquency constitutes the blood lines of black male youth (or anyone for that matter). The great world house also implies that policy decisions should not be motivated by any sense of American exceptionalism, white supremacy, or even mere tolerance, but by the will for all to live lives of freedom. v NOTES

1. See Todd Clear and Natasha Frost’s The Punishment Imperative (New York: NYU Press, 2014).

2. See Franklin Zimring’s essay “Imprisonment rates and the new politics of punishment” in Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences David W. Garland, ed. (London: Sage Publications, 2001).

3. “Grand social experiment” implies a major overhaul in thinking and strategies around a social problem rather than a few new policies (e.g. Roosevelt’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society). See Punishment Imperative.

4. Clear and Frost, Punishment Imperative, 44.

5. Ibid., 25.

6. Ibid., 26.

7. Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 32.

8. United State President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, by Nicholas Katzenbach, et al. (Washington D.C. United States Government Printing Office,1967), 56-7.

9. Crime in a Free Society, 57, brackets mine.

10. See William J. Stuntz’ The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 250-65. Stuntz’ argument has been contested. For example, see former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ “Our ‘Broken System’ of Criminal Justice” review of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, by William J. Stuntz, The New York Review of Books, November 10, 2011, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/10/our-broken-system-criminaljustice/.

11. Stuntz, Collapse of American Criminal Justice, 246.

12. Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 4.

13. Michael C. Campbell, “Politics, Prisons, and Law Enforcement: An Examination of the Emergence of ‘Law and Order’ Politics in Texas,” Law and Society Review, 45.3 (Sept 2011): 631-665.

14. Perkinson, Texas Tough, 318.

15. See the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and the Texas Narcotics Control Program Statewide Drug Strategy: 1988 Update.

Continued on page 36

9

Interview Asante Todd

Understanding the Causes of the Incarceration Crisis Asante, first of all, I just want to say what a delight it was to see someone focus these difficult issues in such a clear and compelling way. The data on incarceration of especially men of color is really striking and disturbing.

Even for me it was striking. The whole project of going back and looking at how the program of militarization and incarceration unfolded is pretty awe-inspiring. Of course, there are some things I still need to think about, and then there are other things I wanted to put in the article that I couldn’t, but I tried to give an overview of some key moments, or some key policy instances that I thought were critical in this overall development.

I want you to talk about the link between militarization of law enforcement and to the use of war as a metaphor to describe what is actually a complex social problem. How do you account for that?

I think we have to go back to the 1960s governmental crime reports where you begin to see this language acknowledging “a new explosion of crime.” These reports emerge in the context of the civil rights movement, which itself was the culmination of movements that had gained momentum for almost a decade after the killing of Emmett Till. That was a key moment because the incident was obviously racist in nature but his murderers were exonerated. Blacks became more defiant after that as they began to lose faith in the justice system and the government. So the social protest movements emerged, culminating in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act, followed by the assassination of leaders. I think that’s where you actually see the birth of the national crime strategy in 1967, in which you see the construction of a subject called “The Negro Delinquent” who became a key target of law enforcement.

That’s a very key moment.

Because it creates an “other”—one who is not us or not like us.

That’s right. And once you have the “other,” which is confirmed by experts, then the war metaphor becomes more palatable.

The other is not us, not even a political adversary. This “other” is one whose very existence is a threat to our way of life—indeed, to our very existence. Hence, 10

Interview

The “other” is not us, not even a political adversary. This “other” is one whose very existence is a threat to our way of life—indeed, to our very existence. Hence, there emerged a felt need to rid society of this element if we are to be safe and truly free. Once you have the “other” you legitimate the “war” metaphor, and that becomes operative in political discourse, and then that legitimates militarization.

there emerged a felt need to rid society of this element if we are to be safe and truly free. Once you have the “other,” you legitimate the war metaphor, and that becomes operative in political discourse, and that legitimates militarization.

This can be seen in the fact that in the 1960s, most Americans weren’t even really concerned about crime, per se, even though the policy reports were saying that crime is exploding. The most striking fact is that it became normalized. For the better part of thirty years now it has been taken for granted by most voters that criminalization and militarization was the right approach.

You do a good job of illuminating the slow devolution from a situation where policies were more flexible and human and restorative, to a situation now where parole boards and judges and police seem to have little discretion.

There has been a shift in our cultural outlook about what should happen to someone who has committed a crime, or what kinds of privileges or processes or rights they should or should not be allowed. The way that our procedures are currently set up, we don’t really allow people to prove themselves innocent or for judges to use their wisdom/discretion in cases. In theory you could still go to trial, but there’s so 11

Interview

much pressure now to take a plea bargain. If you take this plea, you’ll get this small sentence, but if you don’t take this plea, you make one mistake, then you get an extended sentence, a “mandatory minimum” that not even a judge can save you from.

And you assert that blacks and Latinos do not receive equal protection under the law. Say more about that.

Yes, what we are seeing with respect to African Americans is the nullification of the Fourteenth Amendment and with it things like equal protection and due process.

White Americans have full protection under the law, but blacks and Latinos now always already stand in danger of being abandoned by the law. The primary reason black and Latinos do not receive equal protection is because we’re seen as inherently delinquent, and that identity does much to remove us beyond constitutional jurisdiction. So if they are “by nature” delinquent or criminal to the degree that they don’t have the ability to change, why bother giving them due process? And even if the system’s a little funny, well who cares? They’re delinquents anyway. Of course, the over-policing serves to overburden the already limited resources of public defenders and the prison system.

In your paper you claim that the drug war has played a role in all of this.

People think that the legal system is overburdened because it’s trying to do good in the face of all this criminality, when in reality the system is overburdened because of the policies. Drug policies have been so excessive that we have overloaded the system, so now the American criminal justice system is fractured, collapsed, or broken. In fact, I don’t use language of justice right now. I think you have to wait to use language of justice until the conditions for the possibility of American justice are restored. I don’t think we have those conditions now.

Earlier in the conversation you talk about the trajectory of racism from the ’40s and ’50s on through the ’60s and ’70s, but according to your paper, there’s something happening that intensifies the problem from the mid ’80s through now, where the numbers begin doubling and tripling. What happens in the ’80s that sets us on this course?

There are probably many causes, but to name one, there is a shift in media which engages in what might be called the symbolic politics of race—that’s where we are so inundated with images over a long period of time that we begin to not even notice them. What we have taken in over the last roughly thirty or forty years in media are still dominant regimes of racist representations that run throughout all different types of media. Blacks have been represented as other, animalistic, criminal, and this image has proven to be a saleable commodity that catches the attention of the channel-surfing public, increasing the market share of multi-national media corporations that are competing fiercely in the emerging cable market of the 1980s.

12

Interview

But it also seems like during the ’80s, “law and order” becomes a tried and true political platform, while by the ’90s, the rise of politicized cable news serves to reify the “law and order” platform in a way that hasn’t happened in quite the same way previously in history. So it’s not just entertainment media, but also the news media that seems to intensify political tribalism by crafting and disseminating these racialized tropes.

That’s right, and I think you said that appropriately—crafting. I’m always reminded that this stuff is not just naturally there. Forces are constantly working on us so that really what we’re doing is a narrowing of our political imaginations with the corporatization of American media.

In your article you invoke Dr. King’s “The Great World House” metaphor.

Why is this an important idea for you?

I want to draw the war metaphor in sharp contrast to King’s World House. I wanted to show that in portraying black youth as other, and evoking the language of war, we have created the context and conditions in which we reside, but these conditions can be creatively changed by employing different metaphors—other than war. The theological image of the World House hearkens back to Jesus’ saying, “In my Father’s house, there are many mansions. I go there to make a place for you.” King is trying to spark our imaginations toward a more just and faithful time beyond this.

And I think the house is very appropriate for today’s context—a house in which a number of people can fit. I think we need to make room for many people—not just regarding policy decisions, but in our thinking. No need to intentionally exclude someone when God has made room enough for all. So for me the World House opens itself up to the other in ways that the war image obviously does not.

Could we say that the war image is funded by a logic of scarcity? I need to protect myself because there’s not enough to go around—I fear the other because they might get my share. The Great World House image functions on a logic of generosity and abundance.

That’s right. And maybe we need to accent that part of America that has been opened to the world as opposed to closed to it. For me, generosity represents more faithful stewardship of the world’s resources, which God has provided graciously.

So last question, and this really is the turn towards the church. What do you envision churches doing with your article and this critical perspective?

I wanted to write it in a such a way that people could see themselves doing something where they were, or, to use a colloquialism, to help them “get in where you fit in.” To find that niche where you feel like, “I can make a contribution this way.”

I wanted to avoid two extremes. I wanted to avoid making people feel like they had to save the world, but at the same time I wanted to make people aware of this crisis so that they could say, “In this role I can contribute in this way.” I wanted to leave it 13

Interview open to creativity, but I can see churches getting involved on a number of different levels.

The main one would obviously be policy. Most rehab/treatment programs don’t work. We need to repeal mandatory sentences, especially for drugs. We need to reduce lengths of stay and sentences. We also need to make sure that our justice reinvestment programs are doing what they were designed to do—build community infrastructure such as schools and healthcare facilities—instead of only doing what they currently do—offer services to people convicted of crimes. When you look in the newspaper, and you see lawmakers removing this one little war on drugs line in the policy, you already know in the back of your mind there are so many other things that could be done. Even if you’re not a policy expert you can be a bit more informed as you watch what’s going on in local politics.

Secondly, I think pastors could be more careful in their language about criminals and criminality—and to even find places where the biblical account seems sympathetic toward criminality. Remember the Revelation text where God is warning a church, and as part of the warning God threatens to come as a thief. Jesus was considered a criminal and sides with them in many respects.

So, this is not to venerate criminality but just to say we need to think more carefully about the way we talk about criminals and to realize some people have made mistakes but other people have been targets of intentional programs to criminalize them. Also, this is a reminder for all of our churches, that they should be places where all, even criminals, actually feel welcome.

I think churches would also do well to continue to do those basic ministries— like, for example, prison ministries or doing what you can to help facilitate transitions of ex-cons from prison to society. There are number a programs like that out there already, but I really wanted to leave it open for people to say, “I know what I can do. It may be even better than what Todd is suggesting.” That would be great. v

Coming in the Spring 2015 issue:

Honoring Dr. John Alsup

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Reflections

The Church as Peacebuilder in the War on Kids Elizabeth Corrie

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ince 1993, the Youth Theological Initiative at Candler (YTI) has gathered youth from around the world to its Summer Academy, an ecumenical program in justice-seeking theological education for juniors and seniors in high school. These young scholars explore theological and social issues, create an intentional community of mutual relationships, and serve others through work at Atlanta-area social agencies. While such language sounds relatively innocuous, the observations and assumptions that inspired this vision comes out of a critical social analysis that seeks to transform a larger dynamic—and I would argue, conflict—taking place in our society.

Based on their observations of the cultural context of youth and the church, the original designers of YTI concluded that North American society marginalizes and oppresses young people as young people—regardless of (or in addition to) race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or other identities that are marginalized across age ranges. They described “contours of oppression” that characterize the experience of contemporary youth, including the “domestication of youth”1 the “lack of meaningful adult sponsorship for youth,” and the “absence of voice and vision among youth.” I see these claims, made more than twenty years ago, as prophetic and more urgent than ever. What my predecessors described as “contours of oppression” that marginalize youth, I now venture to describe as elements of a set of systems that is engaged in nothing short of a “war on kids.”2

As I write, the community of Ferguson, Missouri, is still reeling from the murder of Michael Brown and struggling to make their demands for justice met. The

This essay is excerpted and adapted from a larger article, “Transforming the Conflict of Youth and Adults: Youth Ministry and Peacebuilding,” currently being reviewed for publication.

Elizabeth Corrie is assistant professor in the Practice of Youth Ed-

ucation and Peacebuilding and director of the Youth Theological Initiative at Candler School of Theology, Emery University. She earned the PhD from Emory University. Her research interests include theories and practices of nonviolent strategies for social change, the religious roots of violence and nonviolence, and character education with youth.

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The Crisis of Incarceration video footage taken in this suburb looks more like what I’ve seen in the West Bank in recent years and in Belfast back in the 1980s. While it remains open whether this represents a tipping point in how our society understands policing in relation to poor communities and people of color, it brings to national attention the fact that this war on kids is not merely metaphorical. This war is a conflict between adults and young people, in which adult institutions and their representatives ghettoize, objectify, and abuse—and even kill—young people, and to which young people respond with withdrawal, resistance, or even violence, visited upon each other, adults, or themselves. Possibilities for peacebuilding exist, however, if we dig deeper than the headlines and trace the origins of this conflict in structural forms of oppression that affect all youth.

YTI identifies one contour of oppression as the “domestication of youth.” In his essay, “The Social Construction of Adolescence,” David White argues that our society has developed the category of “adolescence” and “teenager” only within the last 100 years, and that this social construction has now resulted in the creation of an ever-extending liminal space in which young people—neither children nor adults— have significantly fewer meaningful roles to play in society, compared to their predecessors. Because “adolescence begins with an earlier puberty and extends longer than ever before … this prolongation leaves youth in situations in which they have less than full power for longer than any other age cohort in history.” White continues, “Whereas historically youth were at the forefront of those who took responsibility for creating a just social environment in which human life can flourish, today many young people are relegated to marginal social roles that discourage or inhibit such engagement.”3 This dramatic change in the role of young people in society is presented as a necessary process for them to reach the deferred reward of attaining a good job that will enable them to start a family and become a “real adult.” White calls this the “bargain of adolescence—dependence and education now, responsibility and independence later.”4 Neither holding jobs, nor starting families, nor engaging in social movements or civic life, but rather biding time under adult supervision, young people have been excluded from participation in meaningful social action.5 In exchange, they have been given movies, clothing, video games, fashion magazines, and music to occupy the few remaining waking hours left to them after hours of homework, sports practice, and other adult-directed “enrichment” activities.6 This is what we mean at YTI when we talk about the “domestication of youth.”

While the majority of our young people spend a portion of their adolescence “sentenced” to the warehouse of high school,7 an increasing number of poor youth and youth of color are marking their time in our other warehouse for youth: the prison. The phrase “school to prison pipeline” describes how “public schools … put into place a circuit of policies and practices to make it easier for minority youth to move from schools into the juvenile justice system and eventually into prison.”8 As Victor Rios notes, “ultimately, in the era of mass incarceration, a ‘youth control complex’ created by a network of racialized criminalization and punishment deployed from various institutions of control and socialization has formed to manage, control, and incapacitate black and Latino youth.”9 From this perspective, youth are 16

Corrie lucky to be domesticated in a high school that at least doesn’t send them to prison or leave them to be shot unarmed in the middle of the street. This is what we mean when we talk about a “war on kids.”

Another contour of oppression affecting young people is “the lack of meaningful adult sponsorship for youth.” This problem arises out of an increasing gulf between adults and youth—attributable to several economic, social, and cultural forces—that is extending and deepening in every sector of young peoples’ lives.

As high schools became overwhelmed with the numbers of students entering their buildings, the system became increasingly bureaucratized and impersonal,10 limiting students’ access to teachers and the kind of mentoring relationships possible with smaller numbers and flexible schedules.11 The evolution of our economic system has transformed family structures, with adults working longer and longer hours, all adults in most households working, and extended families living further and further apart.12 This separation manifests itself not just in a lack of adult involvement in the lives of youth, but also in a misplaced involvement that objectifies and alienates them, as our focus on activities and achievement primarily serve the agendas of adults rather than the needs of youth. Whether in school, on the field, on the stage, or at home, young people are experiencing adults as present only in the most shallow of forms. In response, young people have created a subterranean space, what Chap Clark calls “the world beneath,” safe from the agendas and betrayals of adults.13

In the wake of this increasing chasm between adults and youth, we have developed “ephibephobia”—extreme fear of youth14 that “exudes both a deep-rooted hostility and chilling indifference toward youth,” and often depicts youth as “criminal, sexually decadent, drug-crazed, and illiterate.”15 At the same time, advertisers play on stereotypes of parents as out-of-touch, easily manipulated, and valuable primarily as purse-holders in their drive to encourage youth and children to use their influence to convince parents to buy them their products. This “pedagogy of commodification” drives a further wedge between youth and adults, because “within this pedagogical template, parents are useful only as a potential source of good for kids and profits for corporations … In fact, ‘adults are never cool—they are boring, often absurd, sometimes stupid—and when they try to be cool they are pathetic.’”16 As adults learn to fear youth and keep their distance, young people learn to mistrust or even disdain adults and insist they want this distance, creating a feedback loop that both fulfills and deepens our stereotypes of each other—driving adults and youth further apart.

Yet another contour of oppression named at YTI is the “absence of voice and vision among youth,” and this follows from the others. The absence of voice and vision among youth can be attributed to both sides—adults who actively silence or passively ignore young people’s voices and youth who have internalized the belief that their position as full contributing members of society is on hold until they pass through the danger zone. How much have we lost—fresh ideas, innovative projects, bold actions, imaginative visions of new futures—as a consequence of buying into the stereotypes?

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The Crisis of Incarceration What the YTI “contours of oppression” point out, and what several cultural critics, economists, sociologists, and educational theorists echo, is that we have ghettoized and silenced young people, separating ourselves (or allowing ourselves to be separated) from them to such a degree that we simply do not know them.

Lacking true connection, we project onto them all of our fears, and we seek to quell those fears by containing and controlling “youth,” rather than taking the time to get to know and appreciate young people on their own terms. This is the conflict— the war on kids—that requires transformation. For Christians, transformation of our relationships with young people is inspired and informed by our understanding of ourselves as already in a transformed and transforming relationship with a loving God that continually seeks us out, broken and lost though we may be, to bring us into healing and wholeness. It is out of this theological orientation that churches can be peacebuilders in the war on kids.

Christian language and imagery stands in powerful counter-distinction to the language and imagery of consumerism and violence that dominates our culture and institutions or that shapes the way youth and adults interact. In the face of images of youth as violent, sex-crazed, or valuable only as tools for adult agendas, and of images of adults as stupid, self-serving, or valuable only as purse-holders, Christian imagery offers the imago Dei, humans “fearfully and wonderfully made” in the image of God, and adopted as beloved children of God through Jesus Christ.17 In the face of images of a “tribe apart” in which youth form a separate community from the adult world in response to systemic abandonment, Christian imagery offers the church as the Body of Christ—diverse and pluralistic, yet interdependent and united in love—and the Lord’s Supper, in which we become one Body through sharing of bread and wine.18 In the face of images of punishment in zero tolerance school policies, armed guards and surveillance cameras in schools, and adult prison sentences for minors, Christian imagery offers grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation, from biblical images like the Prodigal Son, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Sheep, to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and to the cleansing waters of Baptism.19 In the face of images that dismiss the pursuit of social justice as “youthful rebellion,” Christian imagery has a bountiful list of courageous prophets, including Amos, Jeremiah, Jarena Lee, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Shane Claiborne, and Oscar Romero, to name only a few. In short, in the face of pervasive and growing “ephebiphobia,” Christians can stand with youth as Paul did with Timothy and proclaim: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young.”20

For adult Christians to be able to make this proclamation, however, we have to show—not simply say—that we really believe it. If we really believe that youth are intrinsically valuable as children of God, not as projections of our cultural hopes and fears, we have to prove it, by listening to youth, getting to know youth on their terms, taking their concerns and their dreams seriously, and affirming that they are beloved just as they are. If we really believe in grace, forgiveness, love of neighbor, and love of enemy, then we have to stop treating youth as criminals and seek restorative forms of discipline rather than punitive forms of punishment. If we really 18

Corrie believe that the “greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves,”21 then we have to stop standing over young people, lecturing and monitoring them, but instead sit down with them, humbly and respectfully, and embody for them another way of being leaders. v NOTES

1. YTI Handbook, 2012 edition, 4.

2. I derive this phrase from the recent documentary, “The War on Kids” (2009), which does an excellent job of pulling together in a provocative way many of the points I suggest in the discussion that follows. The film focuses on the U.S. context, including federal and state education policies, current trends in adolescent mental healthcare, and the juvenile justice system. I highly recommend this film for those in the U.S. context who work with youth, and for youth themselves, as a starter for discussion.

3. David F. White, “The Social Construction of Adolescence,” in Brian J. Mahan, Michael Warren, and David F. White, Awakening Youth Discipleship: Christian Resistance in a Consumer Culture, (Eugene, OR, Cascade Books, 2008), 14.

4. Ibid. 4.

5. White points to G. Stanley Hall’s seminal 1904 work Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education as the beginning of the invention of adolescence as a distinct phase of psychological development marked by “storm and stress” that must be contained and redirected for the good of youth and society. The high school was thus conceived as a “holding tank” for youth, and as such has developed into a highly regimented, adult-controlled space that often abstracts youth from meaningful work and moral agency. See Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience (New York: Perennial, 1999). Others recently have extended this argument to highlight the breadth and depth of youth domestication to take note of the role of student loan debt, zero tolerance school policies and other school reforms, the overuse of ADHD medications, and the pacifying effect of media and advertising. See Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2005); Henry Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (New York: Palgrave, 2009); and Bruce E. Levine, “8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance,” AlterNet, July 31, 2011, accessed August 20, 2014: http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/8_reasons_ young_americans_don%27t_fight_back%3A_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance

6. The film “Race to Nowhere” (2010) documents the increasing stress young people face trying to stay competitive for college admissions and meeting the myriad and sometimes conflicting expectations adults have for them. For a critical assessment of the value of homework, and whether we may now be assigning too much homework, see Alfie Kohn, The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (Philadelphia, PA: DaCapo Press, 2007).

7. Hine, The Rise and Fall, 162. Hine quotes a Missouri educator using this language publicly as an argument for universal schooling.

8. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 102. This phenomenon has received significant study, much of it cited by Giroux and discussed at length in chapter 2, “Education and the Youth Crime Complex,” in Youth in a Suspect Society, 69-107.

9. Victor M. Rios, “The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration,” in Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives: The Racism, Criminal Justice, and Law Reader, ed. Manning Marable, Ian Steinberg, and Keesha Middlemass (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 17. Giroux cites several statistics including that a black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime; a Latino boy has a one in six chance. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 93.

10. Hine, 254, 269.

11. John Taylor Gatto’s provocative work focuses our attention on the implicit messages that the regimented school day in mass education sends to young people about learning. See, “The Seven Les-

Continued on page 36

19

When Justice Means Challenging the Rules

Bill Carter & Tina Carter “What does the LORD require of you but to seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God?” –Micah 6:8 “Restorative justice emphasizes repairing the harm caused by crime. When victims, offenders and community members meet to decide how to do that, the results can be transformational.”

–RestorativeJustice.org “I don’t have any trust in the Justice System either, it’s a self-righteous Bureaucracy with itself. It isn’t equal, it isn’t fair, and it can be bought. They need to take the blindfold off the statue. But if you notice the scales are uneven already. I guess the blind fold just keeps the blame away from her huh? LOL.” –Personal correspondence from inmate Adam Agudelo (used with permission)

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ustice, as conceived in the Western penal institutional context, demands that those convicted of crimes serve a prison sentence more or less proportionate to the severity of the crime. In this way, citizens are protected from criminal acts; criminals are forced to contemplate their crimes—ostensibly inhibiting criminals from repeating their offense—while society’s sense of fairness is satisfied. Unfortunately, this model of justice, while protecting citizens to some degree and satisfying our vague sense of fairness, seems only to harden their identities as criminals; it does little to repair the breach in society’s wholeness. In recent years, this arrange-

Bill and Tina Carter (MDiv’02) live in the parsonage for Parker Lane United Methodist Church (Austin) where they are both engaged in mercy and justice ministries with their neighbors. Bill also works on water issues at Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Tina has written several books with Dr. Mindy JohnsonHicks, among them, The Wealth of Poverty (Outskirts Press, 2013).

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Carter ment has become unsustainable as the incarceration rate in the United States of America is the highest in the world. As of October 2013, the incarceration rate was 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 5 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Imprisonment of America’s 2.3 million prisoners, costing $24,000 per inmate per year, and $5.1 billion in new prison construction, consumes $60.3 billion in budget expenditures. For some time now, activists and people of faith have struggled to envision alternatives to this system. One model, restorative justice, has gained support and is being explored in many communities across the U.S. and the world.

Restorative justice theory and practice challenges the core “retributive” logic of prevailing systems of justice. Restorative justice questions the primacy of merely enforcing laws over restoring community and rejects reliance on punishment to achieve justice. In Ambassadors of Reconciliation (Orbis, 2009), Elaine Enns and Ched Myers argue that restorative justice is one major portion of a broad spectrum of practices (including civil disobedience) taught and modeled in the Gospels as the way of the Kingdom of God, in nonviolent repudiation of the rule of Rome and all oppressive authorities. Perhaps the most common view of restorative justice is as a kinder, gentler branch of our criminal and civil justice systems. Its most familiar manifestation is court-ordered mediation. On the criminal justice side, it offers some opportunity for restitution to victims and more successful reintegration of repentant offenders into the community. On the civil side, it has had promising results in developing mutually acceptable arrangements to manage disputes with less total expense to the parties involved than mainstream litigation. This all usually occurs within a framework of procedures and outcomes acceptable to the established judicial system.

Enns and Myers mourn the lack of integration among the various faith-rooted practices of restorative justice and peacemaking and the blind spots that often result. For example, they note that mediation and facilitated dialogue often fail to address important disparities of power among the mediating parties and to address root causes of law violations related to the “systemic” violence of poverty and the oppressive aspects of the justice system itself.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, activists may effectively use nonviolent actions to unmask injustices and to coerce an adversary back to the table, but they may then be poorly equipped for the dialogue and negotiation that should follow to build healing relationships and to craft policies that are just for all. The authors call for collaborative “full-spectrum peacemaking,” pragmatic reformers building restorative practices within existing justice systems and institutions, and “social movements of moral imagination,” challenging the retributive systems and supporting one another in building the shared vision of “justpeace.”

In the first volume of Ambassadors of Reconciliation, Enns and Myers focus on four gospel texts as foundations of a theology of “full spectrum peacemaking.” One of the four is the teaching in Matthew 18 on how the church can respond to one member victimizing another. They point out the progression of practices prescribed 21

The Crisis of Incarceration in the case that the offender continues to “refuse to listen,” and relate them to the fundamental practices of full-spectrum peacemaking:

• Confront the offender in private: negotiation (peace-building)

• Take two or three witnesses: mediation (peacemaking)

• Take it to the whole church: community justice conferencing or arbitration (peacekeeping)

• Redefine the offender as outsider: community resistance and re-evangelization (peace-waging)

The questions of justice and incarceration are particularly keen for people of Christian faith who are concerned about redemption for individuals and the social fabric. At Parker Lane United Methodist Church you will find a multi-ethnic, multieconomic congregation with extensive personal experience with incarceration.

Some of us have been incarcerated; some of us have family members who have been incarcerated. We have to struggle with running into the “justice” system over and over, and, for many of us, the truth is not “innocent until proven guilty.” Instead it is innocent until arrested and charged. One of our congregation members has been sitting in the county jail for over six months awaiting trial and has just found out that his trial date has been reset once again. Public defenders (in our experience) are trained well in making a deal but are not as well trained in representing the innocent. And, it seems to us that the poor are assumed guilty by everyone in the system, while the rich have a different experience of our justice system.

We have a case study of two different men. Both were arrested three times for DWI. One was a poor black man who ended up doing several years in prison and now has a felony on his record. Although he absolutely broke the law, no direct damage to property or person resulted from his behavior. The rich white man was also involved in three DWI incidents. In his case no charges were filed although two of his incidents ended up doing damage to property and to a person. He had the ability to pay for the damages and had the ability to hire an attorney who could work out a solution that included no jail time and no felony record.

What does restorative justice look like in a system that is prejudiced against the poor and people of color? We believe that it cannot simply be a matter of getting individual victims and individual perpetrators in a room to talk their way to wholeness. It must systematically acknowledge and address the inequities in our justice system. A typical victim/offender mediation framework presupposes a perpetrator whose offense is the only issue on the table and who is not encumbered by unjust constraints and ill treatment.

Confronting these issues led a group at Parker Lane UMC to study Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012), with study resources recommended by the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society. These resources confirmed widespread racial disparities across all aspects of the criminal justice system, representing an oppressive system of “racialized social control” formed in the wake of the collapse of the Jim Crow system of segregation-based social control.

In the United States, the state and federal prison systems continue to be priva22

Carter tized. More and more of the incarceration experience is driven by profit and not by any context of justice. When calling from prison is a $10 collect call, and that’s the only way you can communicate from jail, there is a problem. Additionally, there is a problem when a significant portion of incarceration is tied to substance abuse, but only a small fraction of our prisons has a treatment option for incarcerated individuals. When states that carry a “three strikes” rule can label a woman in her 20s as a felon after three shoplifting convictions (each of which were for less than $1,000 in merchandise), there is a problem.

When we talk of restorative justice it must mean something in addition to individuals meeting to restore relationship. We believe it must also contain a systematic review of the incarceration system and the way in which it operates in the United States.

In the film, “The Redemption of the Prosecutor,” an assistant attorney general of the State of Tennessee comes to the conclusion that he had been seeing people whose cases he reviewed only on the basis of the worst thing they’d ever done. He also concluded that that’s not what we are called to do as people of faith. In his volunteer work teaching within a prison, he was confronted by a young inmate whose case he had reviewed, and whose very long prison sentence he had defended. As he got to know her over the course of weeks of classes, he was deeply convicted that he had participated in “throwing away” the life of a person with great potential.

When the justice system is so broken that the poor are automatically sentenced because they don’t have the money to hire an attorney while the rich can afford to hire someone with their best interests at heart, it is time to push for change in the system.

As a church interested in restorative justice we are also:

• Participating in programs like the new “Reinvesting Communities” training offered by Texas Interfaith that will train formerly incarcerated persons, families of incarcerated persons, as well as people of faith in leadership and issues surrounding incarceration in order to do advocacy work on incarceration issues.

• Writing grants that will help people of faith connect across economic groups in order to help people understand the issues of poverty in the United States.

• Running camps aimed at helping isolated and insulated (mostly white) people experience and understand God’s good gift of diversity both from a racial and economic standpoint.

For us, all of this is restorative justice because it’s neither just about repairing the damage between a victim and perpetrator nor just touching stories that arise from contact between victims and perpetrators. It also includes acknowledging the injustice of the current justice system and working together to dismantle the injustices that are built into the system itself. v

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Reversing Injustice Combatting the Criminality of an Apartheid State

Salim Faraji “No facility should be afforded to those states which enjoy the ‘benefits’ of slavery, toward enabling them to rid themselves of its evils; as soon as they choose to abandon the system, every philanthropist will lend a helping hand toward relieving them from their superabundant black population, either by colonization or otherwise. But if the legislature of Ohio does not take some measures of precaution and prevention, as to such emigration as that above described, they may set about building a new penitentiary, and making a judicial circuit … in the midst of every Negro settlement.”1 –James Wilson, Abolitionist (1817)

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little over two years ago (2012) on a spring evening in Southern California, I attended a standing-room only lecture delivered by Michelle Alexander, author of the book that is rapidly becoming a classic commentary on contemporary social injustice The New Jim Crow (The New Press, 2012). This event was organized by the California Faith Action under the theme, “Come, Let us Reason Together: California Faith Communities Confronting California’s Criminal In-Justice System.” We all had convened at New Philadelphia African Methodist Episcopal Church in Rancho Dominguez, California, eagerly anticipating the words of a legal scholar whose work in superb, erudite fashion had substantiated what the hundreds in attendance already sensed, that mass incarceration in the United States is a new racialized form of social control designed to perpetuate the existence of an apartheid state. I realize that the designation, “apartheid state” as a description of the United States, especially as it pertains to the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans

Salim Faraji is associate professor of Africana Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is author of The Roots of Nubian Christianity Uncovered: The Triumph of the Last Pharaoh and co-author of The Plan: A Guide for Women Raising African American Boys from Conception to College.

He holds an MA and PhD from Claremont School of Theology and Graduate University and is a licensed minister in the AME tradition.

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Faraji and other historically marginalized people, may be construed as harsh. But the history of criminalizing non-whites in America as a method to prevent their social, political, and economic advancement is part of our constitutional heritage.

At the inception of the United States, the framers of the constitution included a provision for “fugitive” African slaves (Article IV Section 2) to be remanded like criminals to the jurisdiction of their masters. The desire and quest for freedom, along with the pursuit of human dignity, was deemed a criminal act deserving of severe punishment for both slave and accomplice. Such laws, although eventually nullified by the Thirteenth Amendment, established a culture in America that defined the African as inherently criminal and therefore a social pariah that needed to be contained. In conjunction with this constitutional provision was also the “threefifths clause” in the Constitution (Article I Section 2), which declared that Africans were three-fifths of a person in order to appease northern lawmakers’ fears that white southern plantation owners would count their enslaved African population to bolster representation in Congress. By counting enslaved Africans as three-fifths of a person, white southerners were absolved from any taxes owed on their “human property.” The issue at stake is that during this constitutional negotiation and compromise, enslaved Africans were objectified as meaningless, inconsequential pawns that were only significant to the degree that they advanced the economic and political interests of white male property owners in both the south and north.

The foundation of the United States therefore instituted that the African was both a criminal and sub-human deviant that required constant surveillance and social quarantine. In fact, as indicated in the above prefatory quote by James Wilson, an early 19th-century white abolitionist from Ohio, wherever “blacks” settled they would need to be controlled through the judicial system and the building of new prisons.

The process of criminalizing and dehumanizing African people was legalized through a number of laws throughout American history such as the slave codes, black codes, vagrancy laws, Jim Crow apartheid, and more recently mass incarceration through the “War on Drugs.” During the height of the civil rights and Black Power movements, African-American leaders and their white, Asian, and Latino allies came under heavy surveillance (COINTELPRO) and were considered by the executive branch of government, FBI, CIA, and military intelligence as enemies of the state and threats to national security and foreign strategic interests. My recapitulation is admittedly brief and simplistic; this history is very well known and has been documented in extensive scholarly sources. My aim is to demonstrate that America as an apartheid state, and its legacy of criminalizing and dehumanizing people of African descent, provides the backdrop for understanding and ultimately resolving the very serious problem of racial inequality and injustice in the American criminal justice system. For many Americans who are oblivious to or in denial about the underside of Pax Americana, this is a hard pill to swallow, but ultimately it is an elixir that must be consumed and digested if we are to remedy the deep social ills of American culture.

In light of the recent social upheaval and protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 25

The Crisis of Incarceration response to the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African-American male by Darren Wilson, a white male police officer, we see quite clearly how aggressive policing and domestic militarization seemed to echo the long history of “legal” subjugation directed at African Americans. Yet my detractors will argue that Michael Brown was allegedly guilty of committing petty theft at a convenience store, and of course defying and resisting a police officer’s demands. I assume such actions, in the court of public opinion among Wilson’s supporters, warrant death.

Yet in the eyes of many African Americans and sympathizers with Brown’s family, Brown’s alleged indiscretions amount to no more than Emmet Till who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman, or the lynching of three African-American businessmen in 1892 in Memphis, Tennessee, for being “prosperous uppity niggers,” or an enslaved African in 18th-century South Carolina being lashed to death for attempting to escape the plantation to read, no less. Today the slave codes, black codes, and Jim Crow are re-enacted when African Americans and Latinos are targeted for minor drug offenses and when white youth, as Michelle Alexander thoroughly documents, 1) use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students and crack cocaine eight times the rate as black students, 2) are more than a third more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African-American youth, 3) are more likely to be guilty of illegal drug possession, and 4) represent about three times the number of drug-related emergency room visits as their African-American counterparts! So we must ask the question why African American and Latinos represent 75 percent of illegal drug users and dealers imprisoned nationwide. In some states African Americans represent 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.2 This is inexcusable and unjustifiable, and the only explanation is the discriminatory policies implemented by an apartheid state bent on maintaining a permanent, quarantined racial underclass.

Whites are disproportionately given amnesty when dealing with the criminal justice system at every level, from compassionate local policing to more lenient sentences for the same crimes committed by African Americans and Latinos. I have seen this played out in popular films as well as actual lived experiences. For example consider the 2007 American comedy “Superbad,” a film written by Seth Rogen, starring two very funny actors Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. The story is about two white male high school seniors who spend an evening hunting for their first sexual encounter while engaging in a series of rowdy escapades such as acquiring fake IDs for their underage drinking, partying among all-white adult pot smokers and cocaine users, and, the most surprising of all, being escorted by police all night during their reckless adventure. The police do not arrest them nor do they disrupt the party or arrest anyone there; in fact they encourage the boys to indulge and enjoy their lascivious exploits. Of course this is playful fiction, but the message is clear: Hill’s and Cera’s characters are permitted to break laws even in the presence of police because they will be pardoned. They are harmless white male teenagers, one of which, Cera’s character, is on his way to Dartmouth to manifest his “true” identity and purpose. Committing minor crimes is simply an aberration to be ignored and forgiven.

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Faraji

Such scenarios are not merely the result of the contrived imaginations of Hollywood film makers. I have worked with white youth in Ventura County, California, who told me that they smoked weed, got drunk, and partied every weekend, and when confronted by the police, they were simply advised to go home and stay out of trouble. I have also been informed by a white female colleague, who graduated from UC Santa Cruz, that she felt out of place at this institution because the social culture of the university—a sort of unofficial student policy—promoted marijuana smoking. I wondered what percentage of the students had been arrested for marijuana possession at this university. These incidents represent unsupported anecdotal evidence, but the national statistics bear out that African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately arrested for marijuana possession vis-à-vis their white counterparts. The fact of the matter is that Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Ezell Ford, and others were not extended the same benefit of the doubt because the African-American male is inherently and historically a criminal in the eyes of law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

What should be the response of progressive Christians to the stark reality of racial injustice in the American criminal justice system? The first step should be the theological realization that Jesus Christ, as described in the New Testament, was not only crucified, but assassinated for criminal and treasonous behavior. He was executed alongside thieves—bandits, if you will—because he was alleged to be a brigand and ruffian himself. His disciples were also accused of being seditious troublemakers; indeed, Peter denied his association with Jesus and the Jesus movement three times for fear of being arrested as a criminal by association and ultimately suffer the same fate as Jesus. In fact, in the book of Acts, Paul is not only mistaken for being an Egyptian, he is also accused of being a revolutionary who led a band of insurrectionists in revolt against Rome.

While a doctoral student at Claremont Graduate University, one of my favorite courses was the “Social World of Early Christianity” taught by Ronald F. Hock, a visiting New Testament scholar from the University of Southern California who has since retired. It was during this time I focused on the phenomena of banditry, crime, and social movements in early Christianity. I wrote two research papers on Jesus’ connection to Galilean banditry and Paul’s role as a social dissident promulgating a new religious ideology that earned him the reputation as a “pestilent fellow and the leader of the Nazarene sect.” What was Jesus’ crime? In the eyes of the Judean elite and their Roman patrons, he had both pretensions to the kingship of Judea and he had spent his life identifying with and serving the poor, destitute, widows, diseased, working-class fishermen, adulterers, thieves, prisoners, and militant critics of the Jerusalem religious establishment such as John the Baptist.

There is no way to get around the fact that Jesus was not welcomed by the religious or political status quo. In fact he reserved his harshest critique not for the two criminals he was crucified with but for the diabolical alliance between the Judean elite and their imperialist Roman benefactors. In other words Jesus identified with the socially quarantined, the underclass, and the culturally subjugated. He indicted the ruling class and the upholders of an unjust system that exploited the vulnerable 27

The Crisis of Incarceration in his society. The boldness of Jesus was his proclamation that the marginalized could experience the Kingdom of God and by extension the Sovereignty of the Creator as co-heirs. Those who had been maligned as sinners and social deviants could now become, through Christ, victors by the manner in which they extended sacrificial love, compassion, and forgiveness toward their neighbors. The categorization of Jesus as a criminal by Judean and Roman authorities allows us to see that who the state indicts are not necessarily the bad guys, and in fact the reverse is probably more true; that is, it is the state that is criminal because of its ability to camouflage with the cloak of legitimacy its punitive measures against the vulnerable. v Notes

1. George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholder’s Union: Slavery, Politics and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 261-62.

2. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012), 98-99.

Join the Austin Seminary Book Club Austin Seminary has a book club on Goodreads.com and we want you to join us!

In just a few steps, you can join Goodreads.com and the virtual “Austin Seminary Book Club,” open to anyone who wishes to join and participate in monthly discussions. On the third week of each month, an Austin Seminary faculty member or alumni/ae will moderate, asking questions and leading discussions about the book. For October we selected Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark.

Goodreads.com is free and anyone can create an account. Only registered users may participate in discussions, but anyone can follow along.

For more information, visit our web site: www.austinseminary.edu/bookclub

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Pastors’ Panel

We asked religious leaders how their ministries were involved in the issue of incarceration. Here is what they told us.

What events precipitated your congregation’s involvement in criminal justice problems and remedies?

Brittany Isaac, pastor, Urban Village Church, Chicago We began working with a community organizing group called Community Renewal Society. Through a process of one-on-one conversations, our congregation emerged with this desire to do something but they didn’t know what. We came to realize that the criminal justice system disproportionally affects those of us who are black and brown. Since we are also a congregation that is working to become anti-racist and anti-oppressionist, we felt we couldn’t let this continue.

Brian Merritt (MDiv’98), evangelist of Mercy Junction Early in my time with Mercy Junction a group of us took a 7,000-signature petition to a bank president in Dunlap, Tennessee, pleading with him to rethink the eviction of an 88-year-old woman with a broken hip and dementia. This poor woman was oppressed by a system whose local sheriff and judge acted on behalf of this bank president. As we stood there against the principalities and powers I felt compelled to read the words of Micah to this self-proclaimed “Christian” banker.

Tommy Artmann, pastor Heritage UMC, Hattiesburg, Mississippi Multiple people from our congregation participated in a Cursillo retreat. The resulting spiritual awakening, coupled with the Cursillo emphasis on “Christian Action,” gave them a desire to make a difference. Cursillo has a corollary prison ministry program called Kairos. Our people were inspired to take the Gospel message of hope to the prisons. Once they saw the positive impact on the inmates, the word spread throughout our church and others joined them in the program.

What particular criminal justice problems does your congregation have in view and what activities have you engaged toward what ends?

Tommy Artmann The congregation sees these men and women as forgotten people who have been “warehoused” by the criminal justice system. Our people seek to share the Christian message of hope with inmates and offer them dignity as they live their lives in 29

Pastors’ Panel desperate circumstances. The inmates they work with are all serving long sentences, consequently there have been very few opportunities to help them upon release.

However, our people have developed relationships with the inmates through the Kairos follow-up programs.

Brian Merritt At Mercy Junction we ask how our ministry, denomination, and educational practices perpetrate systemic white supremacy and class domination in criminal justice institutions and what will cause sustainable changes. We take our cues from the prophets and Jesus to begin the discussions of a just peace.

Brittany Isaac We are working to decrease the population in Cook County jail by expanding the referral process to diversion programs, specifically restorative justice peace hubs.

We are also working to reduce the amount of time spent in pretrial services. Some people who are arrested can spend up to six months in jail awaiting their trial. We have asked to reinstitute a review of felony drug cases, reinstate presumptive Ibonds, have a second look at those who could not afford their bond.

What benefits, virtues, or capacities have been strengthened as a result of your congregation’s work in the arena of criminal justice?

Brian Merritt During the time with this historically African-American congregation, we have seen revelations of the privilege whites enjoy in our society. Working, walking, praying, and preaching amongst some of the most vulnerable and oppressed in our society turns us back to the necessity of repentance and humbly listening to those Christ found at the center of his ministry: the poor, the prisoner, the blind, and the oppressed. Only then can we turn our listening into action so we might be saved by them.

Tommy Artmann Our people have sought to do what they can to prevent others from entering the system. Many of the people who help with the prison ministry also help with an outreach mentoring program to poverty-level children in our area in hope of helping them avoid a lifestyle that leads to crime.

Brittany Isaac Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the broken system, we are working to fix it. We are doing something to contribute to building up the Kingdom of God. It is exciting work! v 30

Required Reading Books recommended by the Austin Seminary faculty Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, Andrew Louth. Downers

is “Thinking and doing, believing and praying: where do we start?”

After considering various ways of understanding and defining the Orthodox churches, Louth concludes, “I want to suggest that the first step in the pursuit of Orthodox theology, in coming to know God in accordance with the Orthodox tradition, is the rediscovery of this sense of standing before God . . . in church” (loc. 247).

This “in church,” for Louth, certainly involves being in a particular place at a particular time—being in a building which is called “the church.”

But it also involves being a part of a people, a people who engage in certain practices “in church”: above all, prayer and worship. “For Orthodoxy sees its faith as expressed, and tested, in prayer and worship” (loc. 157).

Louth’s exposition includes all the topics one would expect to find in an introductory theology text—Trinity, creation, Incarnation and redemption, eschatology—but throughout, liturgy and prayer are at the forefront. The distinctive aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy are all here, of course: divine energy, the adoration of icons, and the emphasis on the authority of the first seven Ecumenical Councils as theologically normative. His emphasis here is always on the way these aspects are integrated into a comprehensive and coherent faith. Consequently, those who are not Orthodox will probably find a faith closer to their own than they realized.

The primary aim of this book is an overview of Eastern Orthodox theology for both the Orthodox themselves and for all others who might be interested.

Because of Louth’s sympathetic ecumenical breadth, it also serves as a review of the theological teaching of the wider church.

Church leaders will be challenged to think again about the relationship between theology, liturgy, and prayer whether or not they are Orthodox. But finally, Louth is such a congenial and accessible author that it is a pleasure simply to spend time in his company. Whether one seeks a better

Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2013, 172 pages. Available electronically. Reviewed by David Wesley Johnson, assistant professor of church history and Christian spirituality.

T

he Eastern Orthodox Churches form the second largest denominational family in the world, with close to 300 million members and churches in every continent on the globe, including Antarctica. Yet the beliefs and practices of Orthodoxy remain rather mysterious for many Americans, including those who have Orthodox friends and neighbors.

Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, by distinguished historian and theologian Andrew Louth, is a lucid and engaging exposition that can go far in dispelling the mystery surrounding Orthodoxy.

Andrew Louth is Emeritus Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

He is also a Russian Orthodox priest.

Louth is the author of several books and innumerable articles, the majority of which are addressed to specialists in his areas of expertise. By contrast, this work is derived from a series of lectures Louth gave at the Free University of Amsterdam in 2011-12. He called those lectures a “personal introduction,” and the tone of the book is indeed deeply personal. Throughout, Louth’s theological exposition is intertwined with the liturgy and prayer of the Orthodox tradition—it is the exposition of an academic who is also a working priest and who is used to working with people who share a certain faith, and not just a certain expertise.

The order of the book is roughly creedal, but it follows the creed as a liturgical text and not just a sequence of topics. Consequently, the first chapter

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Required Reading (e.g., the Reagan presidency) de-compressed the distribution to its more typical breadth.

Piketty argues that a convergence of economic and demographic forces make it likely that earnings from inherited wealth will outpace income from wages in this century. As a result, the lifestyles of the well-off will diverge further and further from that of the poor.

To tell the story of how wealth from wages (labor) and wealth derived from owning assets like farms, factories, and equities (capital) are distributed in nations and the global economy, Piketty considers the global shift to lower birth rates and the rise of highly paid super managers in America. He demonstrates that the content of capital has changed while the underlying structure of wealth distribution has not. Piketty believes that the growing wealth divide is inconsistent with democratic principles and the idea that hard work should be rewarded. He favors a global tax on capital to buffer the effects of the economic head start that the upper 10 percent of the wealthy have over others.

As a non-economist, Capital was a demanding book to read. Piketty writes with a confident command of the technical discussion about wealth and capital. Thankfully, he clearly explains his definitions and methods in terms that a lay reader can grasp. He gives his readers permission to skip technical discussions and move to sections on results.

Capital, heralded by economists as a tour de force, gives Christian readers much to ponder. Jesus observed that we will always have the poor with us; Piketty documents in stunning detail why we will also have the rich as well. The questions for our public theology are: How much redistribution of wealth is consistent with our beliefs about the dignity of human beings made in God’s image? To what extent can fallen systems like capitalism and democracy be pleasing to God? The question for our politics is: How can we civilly discuss pocketbook issues of the common good, taxes, and the privilege that comes with old money? Piketty’s careful scholarship enriches the quest for answers. v

acquaintance with Eastern Orthodoxy, a review of theological topics and issues, or a deeper understanding of the interaction of theology and worship in the Christian life, one will benefit from this book, and its author will have become a friend.

Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Thomas Piketty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014; 655 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Timothy D. Lincoln, Church’s Ministry Department.

I

n Capital, French economist Thomas Piketty combines a detailed analysis of the largest data set ever gathered about wealth and wages with trenchant comments on the implications of the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

While thinkers like Malthus and Marx made economic dark prophecies based on a paucity of data, Piketty and colleagues spend fifteen years gathering and interpreting global economic data for a 300-year period. According to the historical record, wealthy elites have always owned most of a nation’s wealth, but Piketty concludes that the twentieth century was unusually egalitarian in terms of the differences in wealth between the superrich (the top 1 percent), the well-off (the top 10 percent), the middle class (the next 40 percent) and the poor (the rest of the population).

The key factors that led to this relative compression of the distribution of wealth were the terrible shocks of the 1914-1945 period and progressive tax policies in the period 1900-1980. Two world wars destroyed much of the stock of capital in Europe (e.g., factories). The rise of the social state favored progressive income taxes to finance broader access to education and healthcare. The result: the gap between the richest and the poorest got smaller.

Rebuilding Europe after World War II and the conservative resurgence of the 1980s

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© RFarrarons - Fotolia.com

Christianity & Culture

Leadership in an Age of Anxiety Blair R. Monie

I

t doesn’t take an expert sociologist to observe that we are a polarized society. In 2012, Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, published The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt argued that our divisions are not only caused by our “moral intuition” but our “groupishness.” To put it simply, we tend to group with others whom we perceive to be like-minded. Haidt ends his book with a chapter on civility, arguing that each group has something to offer, as well as something to learn from those with whom it differs.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. Not only are we divided politically, but religiously. The church is no stranger to polarization, for we often “group” ourselves according to theology, biblical interpretation, and moral application. Such polarization leads to stress, both personal and organizational. When the stress becomes too great, people leave churches and churches leave denominations in an effort to “group” with those who are more like-minded. There is, of course, no guarantee that being like-minded on one issue will lead us to be like-minded on the next. One group who left their denomination to form a new grouping, for example, is now em-

Blair Monie is professor in The Louis H. and Katherine S. Zbinden Distinguished Chair of Pastoral Ministry and Leadership at Austin Seminary. He served for nineteen years as senior pastor of Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church in Dallas. Monie earned the MDiv and DMin degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary where is a trustee. He has chaired the Congregational Ministries Division and the Ecclesiology Committee of the PC(USA).

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Christianity and Culture broiled in disagreement over “communion by intinction.” This leads me to wonder, what are the limits of like-mindedness, and is agreement a necessary component of unity?

Having served for forty-one years as a parish pastor, one of the most challenging aspects of my work has been navigating a faithful course among people who disagree on any number of opinions, including ordination standards, human sexuality, the nature of marriage, and understandings of peace, poverty, and economic justice. A friend of mine once quipped that my denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), was “a group of Republicans led by Democrats.” While that may or may not be true, one of the great challenges pastors face is maintaining mutual respect and unity with those who disagree with us on any number of issues, keeping in mind Paul’s admonition to the Ephesians: “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:1-3).

Paul’s operative terms stand out: humility … gentleness … patience. What I notice in these terms is a distinct lack of stress. Given the tenor of our divided times, they are even counter-cultural, and they may be a hint as to ways out of our present morass.

Many of us in ministry have been guided and inspired by Rabbi Edwin Friedman and his seminal book, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue. A family therapist, Rabbi Friedman identifies societal and institutional stress as a powerful factor in the health or dis-ease of religious bodies. Friedman is credited with the helpful term, “non-anxious presence”—the higher the level of anxiety on the part of a leader, the higher the stress will be in the organization. A lower level of a leader’s anxiety can de-escalate the stress experienced by those who are led.

A more recent collection of Friedman’s writing is A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. These articles, published posthumously, are well worth attention by those charged with leadership—especially the second article in the collection, “A Society in Regression.” Friedman’s thesis is that “the climate of contemporary America has become so chronically anxious that our society has gone into an emotional regression that is toxic to well-defined leadership.”

In short, Friedman writes, “The anxiety is so deep within the emotional processes of our nation that it is almost as though a neurosis has become nationalized.”

The result of this shared neurosis is that leaders become timid and risk-averse. To put it another way, we are so anxious that we refuse to let anyone lead.

Friedman then identifies five results of this state: • Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions to each other.

• Herding: similar to Haidt’s “groupism,” in which we group with the like-minded and adapt to the group’s least mature members.

• Blame displacement: blaming others instead of taking responsibility for our own being and destiny.

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Monie • A quick-fix mentality: the desire for short-term answers to symptoms rather than fundamental change, and • Lack of well-differentiated leadership: a “failure of nerve” on the part of leaders, caused by items 1 through 4.

We must remember that Friedman was a family therapist who typically worked with whole family systems. As a student of Murray Bowen, he was familiar with the power of anxiety and its effects on families. When he describes the effect of this chronic anxiety on families, his insights shed a bright light on our “families of faith” as well: [T]he polarizing potential of the chronically anxious family’s all-or-nothing attitudes makes the family more likely to split and increases the possibility that alienated members will cut off from one another. While the latter may seem to go against the desire for togetherness, it has a selective effect that preserves the homogeneity of the herd, for only those who are willing to surrender their self to the family’s self will be comfortable in the homogenized togetherness. And where the family does not break up, the intense locked-in polarization between members can also be understood as another kind of emotional fusion.

To put it simply, when we—or our religious families—live in a highly anxious state, it is difficult, if not impossible, to do the hard work of “humility, gentleness, and patience.” In addition, it is difficult for true, healing leadership to emerge.

I remember a powerful story of such leadership from the early history of the first church I served after graduation from seminary, the Neshaminy of Warwick Presbyterian Church in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1726, their founding pastor was William Tennent, who also established the Log College, the first institution in the colonies for the education of ministers and the root of both Princeton University and Princeton Seminary.

One of Tennent’s early successors was Nathaniel Irwin, who by all accounts was a strong and visionary leader in the latter years of the eighteenth century. Upon his arrival at the banks of the Neshaminy Creek, he noticed something curious about the church’s burial ground, just up the hill from the house of worship. The graves of the church members were surrounded by a neat stone wall; but there were a number of graves outside the wall. Those, he discovered, were the graves of the slaves who had been owned by the members.

Irwin used the opportunity to preach on Christian unity and equality. I am certain that his sermons resulted in some anxiety! Finally, however, he convinced the trustees to move the wall, so that all the graves, slave and free, were included inside. It was a remarkable example of leadership.

That old church continued to be challenged by anxious times and division, including the Old Light/New Light controversies of the Great Awakening. However, I am convinced that Irwin’s non-anxious, steady, and courageous leadership, and his vision of Christian unity, bore a positive witness long past his own time. He did not suffer from a “failure of nerve,” and his ministry was remembered as one of “humil35

Christianity and Culture ity, gentleness, and patience.”

Time will tell what the legacy of our leadership will be, or how successful the church in our day will be in “maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”—but the challenge of faithful leadership is the business of the seminary, as we strive toward a better and more hopeful future. v

The Great World House Continued from page 9

16. Ruiz v. Estelle, 503 F. Supp. 1265 (Dist. Court S.D. Tex. 1980) and Ruiz v. Johnson, 37 F. Supp.

2d 855 (S.D. Tex. 1999). Also see Rick Lyman, “Judge Rules that Despite Improvements, Prisons in Texas Still Need Federal Oversight,” New York Times, March 2, 1999, accessed July 15, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/02/us/judge-rules-that-despite-improvements-prisons-texas-still-need-federaloversight.html. Under Ann Richards’ watch, prison expansion continued, and this even against her own platform. Perkinson reminds us that even as Richards championed feminism and civil rights, and was an advocate of rehabilitation over retribution, two of her defining contributions were a) an increase the amount of time prisoners spend behind bars and b) doubling the prison system. By the end of his time in Austin, Bush eclipsed every punishment champion before him in Texas and did the same in the White House, beating out Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and his own father. President George W. Bush was especially harsh on juveniles, redirecting drug treatment money to juvenile incarceration and approving legislation that both extended sentences generally and allowed fourteen-year-olds to be prosecuted as adults.

17. King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” italics mine.

18. Hak Joon Lee, The Great World House: Martin Luther King Jr. and Global Ethics (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2011), 51.

The Church as Peacebuilding Continued from page 19 son Schoolteacher,” in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Gabiola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2005), 1-19, particularly 5-6.

12. For an extended discussion on the simultaneous lengthening of workdays and falling of wages, see Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1993) and The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999).

13. Chap Clark, Hurt 2.0: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011).

14. Ibid., 25.

15. Giroux, “The Demonization of Youth,” in Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today’s Youth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 37, 40. See also Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 91.

Thomas Hine traces this back to the early 1970s, when films like “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Exorcist” and “The Omen” cast children “as the carriers of evil.” See Hine, 272.

16. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 51. He quotes Madeline Bunting, “In Our Angst over Children We’re Ignoring the Perils of Adulthood,” The Guardian/UK (November 13, 2006).

17. Gen. 1:27; Ps. 139:14; Rom. 8:14-17.

18. 1 Cor. 12; Eph. 2:20-22; 4:1-16.

19. Matt. 5:38-48;18:15-20; 21-35; Luke 15.

20. 1 Tim. 4:12.

21. Luke 22:26.

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AUSTIN PRESBYTERIAN

THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY Theodore J. Wardlaw, President

Board of Trustees Thomas L. Are Jr., Chair Karen C. Anderson Claudia D. Carroll Elizabeth Christian Joseph J. Clifford James G. Cooper Marvin L. Cooper James B. Crawley Katherine Cummings (MDiv’05) Consuelo Donahue (MDiv’96) Jackson Farrow Jr. G. Archer Frierson Richard D. Gillham Walter Harris Jr. John S. Hartman Rhashell Hunter Roy M. Kim

James H. Lee (MDiv’00) Michael L. Lindvall Jennifer L. Lord Lyndon L. Olson Jr. B. W. Payne David Peeples Jeffrey Kyle Richard James C. Shaw Lita Simpson Anne Vickery Stevenson Karl Brian Travis John L. Van Osdall Sallie Sampsell Watson (MDiv’87) Carlton Wilde Jr. Elizabeth Currie Williams Hugh H. Williamson III

Trustees Emeriti Stephen A. Matthews, John McCoy, Max Sherman, Louis H. Zbinden Jr.

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