Baptist Roots Against the Christian Prison

Why is a Christian prison (proposed to be built in Wakita, OK) a bad idea? Let me count the ways. It side-steps some important prisoners' rights procedures (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program), it declines to declare exactly which kind of "Christianity" will be the right kind, its claims to efficacy (based on federal faith-based prison programs) are based on questionable statistics, and it communicates an image of penal religiosity that I thought went out of style after the Spanish Inquisition.

Oddly enough, though, I think much of my resistance--aside from those reasons above--stems from my upbringing as a Southern Baptist. On this blog I've sometimes treated my Southern Baptist childhood rather harshly. Certainly, I've left behind many of the theological features of my previous faith. But one Baptist tradition I think of as quite healthy concerns the longstanding Baptist suspicion toward governmental-church relations.

I would guess that most non-Baptists today would find it surprising to discover that the Southern Baptist tradition was for many years defined by its resistance to government involvement in the work of the church. Today, prominent Baptists like Richard Land regularly speak out in favor of religious right/culture war issues that invite government to dictate quite specific moral and even religious standards. Indeed, the very idea of a separation between church and state has become something of a religious-right (a term I generally dislike) bugbear, though Jefferson first spoke of a "wall of separation" between Church and State in a letter to a group of Baptists.

But religious liberty--the individual (or the individual church's) ability to decide for him or herself how to practice faith--has historically been a defining feature for Baptists. That many (perhaps most) Baptists now endorse some version of the "US as a Christian nation" notion represents a position that many historic Baptists would have found incomprehensible. Now, for present-day advocates of the "Christian nation" argument, the separation of church and state (more specifically, the establishment clause of the Constitution's First Amendment) still obtains. They simply interpret that clause as forbidding the state from actively controlling churches.

Perfectly acceptable to those who who endorse this line of thinking are proposals such as prayer in schools (by which they mean Christian-Protestant prayer), Bible-reading in classrooms (by which they mean Christian-devotional Bible reading), federal recognition of religious symbols and holidays (by which they primarily mean Christian--and maybe Jewish--symbols/holidays), teaching creationism in science courses (by which they mean a particular Christian view of creationism), prayers at government functions (by which they mean primarily Christian prayers), insistence on a strict definition of marriage and family (by which they mean a contemporary Judeo-Christian, heterosexual model)--the list goes on.

I find unconvincing the argument that these and other issues do not violate the establishment clause. Were advocates of prayer in schools to be as passionate for, say, Hindu or Wiccan prayers as they are for Judeo-Christian prayers (and what about praying in tongues?), I'd at least find their arguments easier to accept as honest. But the same religious right organizations that clamor for Christian expressions in governmental life tend also to protest vehemently when someone in government makes a non-Christian (especially Islamic) expression of faith.

And there's the problem (well, one problem--there's lots). It's the nature of most faiths to be exclusive. I don't expect Christians to endorse Islamic faith tenets, or vice versa. Sikhs are Sikhs, for example, because they believe that the Sikh understanding of divinity and spirituality is true in a way that the Christian or Baha'i understandings are not. Even universalist faiths believe that their "all-faiths-are-one" take on spirituality more accurately reflects reality than non-universalist interpretations do.

A faith may be tolerant of other believers, but tolerance presupposes an essential disagreement. One tolerates that which one does not agree with. That which you find agreeable by definition doesn't have to be tolerated; you endorse it. A state-funded expression of faith means that the state partakes of that faith's exclusivity. It may tolerate other faiths, but its essential preference for one faith above others will eventually show itself, if only by the absence of this or that symbol. Indeed, even the most general expression of faith by the state excludes those who eschew religious faith. And for a state to endorse a particular faith--formally or tacitly--is for the state to establish it, giving a subtly coercive undertone to that faith's otherwise normal expressions.

It's that sense of coercion ("yes, you can be any faith technically, but you should know that the US is a Christian nation") that Baptists have historically found unpalatable. Baptists themselves had, early on, been on the wrong side of such coercion in England, and the pain of that experience installed itself into the theological DNA of the denomination. They were for many decades after allergic to any perceived scheme to establish a state faith.

Exactly how a state might operate without endorsing a particular faith--or faith in general--is, admittedly, a vexing question. Religious-right critics have a point when they argue that scrupulous secularity on the part of governments is itself a kind of exclusivist expression of (non)faith.

But I can state more firmly my conviction--my historically Baptist conviction, I think--that Christianity has no business trying to take on state functions or trying to make the state into an arm of the Church. Christ repeatedly makes the point that his kingdom is not of this earth. "Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," says Jesus, "and give unto God that which is God's." When people try to make him king, he slips away. When Peter draws a sword to defend Jesus, he gets a rebuke. Nowhere in the New Testament is there anything like a command to wage a political culture war or to try to get the government to adopt Christian statutes. Christian work is for Christians and churches, not governments and governmental institutions.

This includes prisons. Insofar as states are defined by the fact that they hold a monopoly on sanctioned violence (i.e., government alone may exercise legitimate violence against humans within a state), the policing and punishment (and, hopefully rehabilitation) of those who violate state laws is a state function. That states often outsource this function to private facilities--a dubious practice in and of itself, this making prisons a for-profit industry--does not change the fact that prison is a job for the state. Churches--Christian churches least of all--have no business running prisons in the US.

So says this former Baptist. (and this current one)

More tomorrow,

JF