When Donald Trump was president of the United States, he brought back federal executions, derided liberal cities as bastions of crime and chaos, and warned against supposedly soft-on-crime policies. On June 1, 2020, in the midst of nationwide protests over police violence and racial discrimination, Trump symbolized law and order culture by tear-gassing protesters and dispersing them with law enforcement in order to facilitate a photo-op with a Bible in front of a church. Trump also signed one of the most monumental pieces of federal criminal reform legislation in more than a decade, the First Step Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to reduce federal prisons times and improve conditions in federal prisons. Evangelical Christians had a hand in all these efforts. The evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Trump's tough-on-crime rhetoric and action, but it was Trump's evangelical advisers who are credited with inspiring the First Step Act and helping to enact it.
Aaron Griffith's new book is essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural context for the War on Crime, because it meticulously documents the similarly confusing relationship between evangelicals more generally and the history of the War on Crime. This timely book documents the paradoxical ways that evangelicalism has helped propagate and justify the punitiveness that fuels mass incarceration, while simultaneously and somewhat more unexpectedly, including pockets of reformers who genuinely sought to improve the lives (and not just the souls) of persons convicted of crimes.
Griffith demonstrates that evangelicalism has readily provided “punishment's underlying logic” (16) and justification in modern America, both through its fetishizing of rugged individuality and its sense that “harsher criminal penalties” came to be equated with the “spiritual redemption of criminals” (101). Consistent with the modern Republican Party (and much of the Democratic Party as well), evangelicals have famously equated crime with sin. Seen through such a lens, the project of law and order is one of godliness. Griffith notes that prominent evangelicals have demonized city living, contending, for example, that urban living was “unnatural” and “a city boy ought to know how to milk a cow” (88).
Griffith writes that “[p]ostwar evangelicals helped make crime something to fear even as fear of crime helped make postwar evangelicalism” (102). In other words, evangelism and fear of crime were in a symbiotic relationship. Carceral logics were deployed by evangelicals to “boost their public presence,” and the support from evangelicals helped fuel the growth of the carceral state (102). But one of the most trenchant insights and recurring themes in the book is the recognition that “it was not always this way, and it was not a foregone conclusion that evangelicals would travel this [tough-on-crime] path” (95). Many famous evangelical leaders, including Billy Graham, preached of spiritual redemption. Incarceration was largely a byproduct of that approach, and perhaps an unnecessary one. However, by the 1970s, evangelicals had turned squarely away from the “gospel of forgiveness” and retained their focus on individual accountability and sin, such that carcerality became inextricably “linked with the evangelical gospel” (106). Since that time, evangelicalism and mass incarceration have both become iconic features of modern America. Griffith shows that the two developments were not merely happening in in tandem but that, in significant ways, the former was shaping and complicit in the latter. Evangelicals emerged as an instrumental force in “cultivating support for politicians and policies that led to prison growth, and they provided energetic new support for law enforcement” (135). Griffith shows that evangelicals marketed the idea of the War on Crime as an essential aspect of “the battle against encroaching secularism” (15). “[A]s an explanatory category,” sin proved to be “a powerful way to universalize wrongdoing” (28).
Many comparisons of relevance to the modern political moment are evident throughout Griffith's gripping account of the history of evangelicalism. For example, the modern reaction to the George Floyd protests makes much more sense when one understands that law and order as a religious mandate frames civil disobedience and protest as ungodly and “unChristian” (155). Civil disobedience or mass protest demonstrates an intolerable lack of “reverence for the laws” (154). Likewise, for scholars seeking to understand how tough-on-crime logics permeate progressive movements like animal rights and feminism, it is useful to remember the ingenious efforts by evangelical politicians like Ronald Reagan who ensured that victims’ rights became the “lingua franca” of the law-and-order constituencies (237). Evangelical leaders are credited with making Ronald Reagan the first governor to frame crime policy in terms of victims’ rights, and this project was done because the “White evangelicals who . . . championed the law-and-order cause” knew that they needed a “powerful rhetorical” response to skeptics of the war-on-crime model of social control (157). Victims’ rights justified, even necessitated, measures like “mandatory minimums,” which appealed to criminal justice “hardliners” and to those who could be convinced that such measures were “color-blind” and thus capable of undoing race and class injustices in the system (156).
Griffith ends the book on an optimistic note, celebrating the role that evangelicals can play in reducing punitiveness. Much of the final chapter (“There are Better Ways”) highlights the work of Chuck Colson, the Nixon lawyer turned white collar (Watergate) criminal, turned prison minister, who became the face of evangelical reformism. Colson and others have urged an understanding that the “bodily suffering” and not just the spiritual state of prisoners’ souls needed to be tended to in prison ministry (219).
A skeptical reader might wonder whether Griffith is overselling the evangelical victories when he claims that the work of people like Colson created a “potent critique of the . . . carceral state” (219–20). Did evangelicals like Colson challenge the system itself, or did they soften some of the roughest edges, and thereby help to ensure its continued existence? Colson himself did not even oppose the death penalty in his later work. That Colson made things such as the problems of “human waste and rotting food” controversial and therefore somewhat less common (231) or his recommending imprisoning children in separate areas rather than “adult facilities,” while laudable, were not enormous victories (249). Evangelicals like Colson certainly did not provide a devastating blow to the carceral state through their consensus approach to the issue and, indeed, one might see their humanizing influence as functioning more like a release valve that diffused some of the pressure for large-scale systemic reform. Are persons like Colson, who prop-up false binaries around violent and non-violent crime (see David Skalansky, A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What it Means for Justice [Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2021]), providing road maps for a less carceral future, or are they the very figures who have made it possible for someone like Trump to simultaneously claim the ground both of law and order and of merciful reformer? As the absurdity of a color-blind justice system becomes more patent, and the lines between violent and non-violent crime more porous, the claims of great promise in the work of those like Colson may attract some debate, but the fact of Griffith's role in illuminating the intersection of evangelicalism and incarceration cannot be gainsaid.
