A growing body of literature has linked the ideological roots of mass incarceration to Christian theology, especially its evangelical strains. Following Timothy Gorringe's thesis in God's Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (Cambridge University, 1996), which traced how certain atonement theories contributed to Christian retributivism beginning in early modernity, scholars of religion and criminal justice have documented the intersections of a faith built upon grace with support for strict law and order. Recently, the conversation has focused on contemporary ties, as with Tanya Erzen's God in Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison Ministries in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Beacon, 2017) and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's Prison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton University, 2009). Aaron Griffith makes an important addition to this discussion in God's Law and Order with his examination of the coinciding rise of evangelicalism and “America's carceral state” in the late twentieth century (7).

A related conversation about race and evangelicalism is also relevant to Griffith's work, as many evangelical Christians after Trump, January 6, and George Floyd have increasingly recognized “how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation” (following Kristin Kobes Du Mez's argument, and subtitle, in Jesus and John Wayne [Liveright, 2020]). Griffith adds an exploration of how evangelical support for tough-on-crime approaches depended on an assumption that law is “morally neutral, color blind, and the guarantor of security for all people” (106). This assumption permitted evangelicals to avoid awareness of systemic racism and to place blame for crime solely on the individuals convicted of it, thereby ignoring that a disproportionate number of those individuals were Black and Brown. From evangelical perspectives, the answer to crime was conversion of individual hearts, which was also the answer to racism. Griffith's account adds insight to discussions about race and evangelicalism and about how crime operated as an “icon of sinfulness” (87) that permitted the criminalization and demonization of people of color while providing evangelicals a sense that their cause in fighting crime and evangelizing criminals was righteous.

Griffith's argument charts three points. First, evangelicals cared deeply about crime in the latter half of the twentieth century, and their concern was a main conduit for their engagement in American public life. Second, evangelical concern about crime helped to shape a general consensus that enabled widespread support for law-and-order politics by “providing them a sacred valence that helped broaden and deepen their appeal” (5). Finally, individualistic “conversionism” did not lead evangelicals to avoid efforts at social change, as is often presumed. Instead, a focus on converting people who have committed crime became the center of their politics, shaping the public advocacy of evangelicals in ways that led to one of the most significant social changes of twentieth-century America: the rise of mass incarceration.

To demonstrate these points, Griffith documents the development during the interwar period of a “shared rhetorical culture” across ideological and religious spectra that traced the roots of crime to growing secularism and found solutions in the expansion of disciplinary state power (39). After World War II, “new” evangelicals made law-and-order rhetoric their own based on their commitment to conversionism. Negotiating between fundamentalism and liberalism, evangelicals elided distinctions between sin and crime, holding that the solution to both is conversion. Contrary to arguments that evangelical theologies are inherently retributive, Griffith stresses that through the early 1960s, evangelicals emphasized grace in response to crime. However, with increasing concern in the 1960s about secularism, “urban riots,” and criminality, evangelicals called for state power to restore law and order as the “successful propagation of the gospel could be said to depend on the state's maintenance of the law” (110). This shift contributed to evangelical support for politicians and policies that fed mass incarceration.

Despite their support for punitive politics, evangelicals continued to emphasize the possibilities of grace as well, exemplified by innovation and expansion of prison ministries. While experiences of the humanity of people in prison might have softened their law-and-order politics, the juxtaposition of ministry and politics instead revealed several “unresolved tensions” among evangelicals—especially the sentiment that “forced confinement was not incidental to prison ministry, but welcome” (213). Griffith explores this tension with the development of Chuck Colson's “compassionate conservatism” in Prison Fellowship, which held that punishment of crime is required but that “there are better ways,” such as restorative justice (232). These better ways lost out in the 1990s to the ways of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, which ushered policies such as the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, a lynchpin of mass incarceration.

Griffith concludes with the observation that evangelicals have begun to rethink their support for law-and-order politics and to seek out those better ways, especially after budget crises during the Great Recession exposed the some of the costs of mass incarceration. While the majority of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump as the “law-and-order candidate,” they also helped pass significant (even if ultimately inadequate) criminal justice and prison reform initiatives in the 2016 elections, reflecting an internal contradiction that is yet to be resolved (258–259; God's Law and Order was published before the 2020 elections).

At least three points relevant to the conversations described above warrant more consideration. The first concerns the degree to which evangelical support of punitive politics exhibits a conservative backlash against growing racial equity rather than a broad cultural consensus that supported state power to assert social order. Griffith employs a “consensus history interpretive model” against the backlash thesis of scholars such as Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New, 2012) (51). Second, Griffith complicates the narrative, stemming from Gorringe, that certain strains of Christian theology inevitably lead to retributivism. Griffith's discussion of exceptions to this rule ought to prompt reconsideration of what factors encourage Christians to opt for grace over law. Finally, his argument raises questions about the extent to which evangelicals, especially white evangelicals, are able to contribute to a future without mass incarceration if they do not “[confront] headon the ways race remains determinative in coding perceptions of criminality” (267). If evangelicals will join a new consensus against mass incarceration, they will need to recognize how their previous support for law-and-order was not (and never could be) morally neutral, colorblind, or the guarantor of security for all people in the context of a white supremacist culture and society.