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

Hurrah Words and the Christian Prison Debate

I'm still catching up on grading/administrative duties I missed while away, so I've not yet had a chance to study the "Christian Prison" data more closely.

To refresh, the prison in question is the brainchild of Bill Robinson of Corrections Concepts, Inc. Planned for the small northern Oklahoma town of Wakita, the 600-inmate prison would be run entirely by Christian staff. Inmates, who would volunteer to be transferred there for the final months prior to their release, would have the option of undergoing a number of life skills and faith-building programs.

Certainly faith-based prison ministries are nothing new, and from what I can tell experiments in federally run faith-based prisons and prison units have been tried in Florida and in Texas. These, however, seem to offer faith-based programs staffed by volunteers, and the prison administration and staff themselves are not required to be Christian. Anecdotes from such prisons claim a calmer atmosphere and lower recidivism rates. Scientific data don't yet exist to support those impressions, however. Indeed, research by Florida State University Criminology professor Dan Mears suggests that causal links between religious programs and positive outcomes are often based on shoddy research.

At issue is the vague descriptor "faith-based," which could mean anything from a life skills program run by a religious charity to a Bible study class. The blurry lines here make it impossible to tell if, for instance, convict A owes her benefits to having studied Genesis or to having learned how to manage personal finances. Faith-based programs themselves, however, often claim any and all benefits without bothering to make this distinction.

I think a "Christian prison" built of, by, and for Christians, would run into a similar blurriness problem. Sociologist Anthony Cohen once wrote of "hurrah words"--terms like democracy, freedom, or justice--that summon instant, almost universal support from (at least) people in US culture. They're uniter-words, the vocabulary of common assent that politicians and other leaders can mobilize to encourage people to rally around a cause, putting aside their petty disagreements for a moment.

The problem is, hurrah words only work if they stay safely abstract. Once people start discussing among themselves exactly what democracy means or what justice is, they quickly discover that they hold radically divergent ideas. The uniter word itself becomes then the cause for division.

Christian functions in a similar way for, well, Christians. Just about all Christians can answer yes to the question, "Are you a Christian?" But--as any street evangelist will tell you--once asked "What does it mean to be a Christian?" or "How could I become a Christian?", people give very different answers, answers which most street evangelists are quick to correct according to the dictates of their particular theologies. I joked yesterday about denomination-specific prisons being the next step on the faith-based prison path, but in fact denominations exist due to the fact that "What does it mean to be Christian?" has no single, universally convincing answer--at least, none that mortals can detect as such.

Would the Christian prison affirm the Real Presence in the Eucharist as Roman Catholics do or maintain a symbolic-only understanding of the Lord's Supper as Southern Baptists do? Would it see faith as a matter of a singular conversion event or as a slow process of sanctification and justification? Would it practice the Baptism of the Spirit (glossolalia--speaking in tongues) or ban such a practice as heretical? Would the Bible be approached as the literal, inerrant Word of God or as the inspired-but-human testament to the Living Word that is Christ? Which translation would be used--the New Revised Standard Version? The King James? The Message?

These aren't minor questions; they're the very stuff of schisms, the substance of deeply held denominational boundaries. The theological orientation of Corrections Concepts, Inc., will likely determine how it makes decisions about staffing, inmates, and programs. It's disingenuous, at best, for Corrections Concepts, Inc., to present itself simply as "Christian," as if the term were self-explanatory. Of course, were the organization to specify a faith, to declare itself as, say, Lutheran rather than Christian, it would likely find it even harder to garner popular support (and it's had plenty of difficulty in the numerous other locales it's attempted to convince). Lutheran (or Pentecostal, Baptist, Catholic, or Nazarene) just isn't as powerful a hurrah word as Christian.

I do not mean to infer bad faith (as it were) on the part of Bill Robinson or CCI. The company does not earn my confidence, however, by having its attorney blame past resistance to the project in other towns on Satan. That's the other, propagandist function of hurrah-words; they preempt debate about or criticism of the idea they are called to prop up. Speak out against the invasion of Iraq? You're against national security. Speak out against a public protest? You're against freedom of speech. Speak out against the faith-based prison? You're against Christianity.

It's dirty pool. And it's a flashing red light indicating (perhaps) a weak argument or an agenda with something to hide.

Even aside from the creepy-vague rhetoric used to justify the prison, though, I have other reservations about a Christian prison.

More tomorrow,

JF

Sustaining Complexity Against the Hero High

I'm back from the Puerto Rico conference, where I was able to see my partner, catch up with old friends, hear some fascinating papers, and even (the night before I left) swim in the ocean.

I'm pleased to see the post about the Christian Prison (again--that just seems like a contradiction in terms to me) got some traffic. Clearly this is a matter deserving more attention. I mean, what's next? Denominational prisons? "I've spent 3 years doing hard time at the First Methodist Penitentiary. It's tough, but at least it's not as strict as Immanuel Baptist Prison. I keep hoping for a transfer to that Unitarian facility I hear about..."

I'm grateful to the commenters for their support and additional information. After I catch my breath (i.e., catch up on grading/class planning), I plan to investigate this issue more closely, and the resources suggested seem like excellent places to start. Thanks!

Before I dive into that matter, though--one of the papers I heard at this theatre conference was from my friend Laura Edmondson (I don't usually name names, but her work is fabulous). Laura researches East African theatre, particularly in the Tanzania/Uganda area. Of late, she's focused on performances, both by Africans and by outsiders, that address the multiple, various, and (in some cases) ongoing wars, battles, and genocides plaguing that region.

I've longed to have her perspective on the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda (latest news: this formal letter of protest by Exodus International). Laura has a way of investigating East African issues that combines a clear appraisal of the area's history with a critical awareness of how easy it is for Westerners especially to oversimplify those issues.

Her presentation was on a play by US playwright Lynn Nottage called Ruined. Ruined takes place at a brothel in a disputed region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) run by a savvy, powerful woman named Mama Nadi. As the play begins, Mama reluctantly agrees to take in two girls to work in her establishment. One of these, Salima, had been kidnapped and used as a concubine for a group of rebel soldiers. The other, Sophie, has been "ruined": raped with a bayonet so that she suffers from constant pain and (it is implied) a degree of incontinence. As such Sophie, while physically the more attractive, is useless as a prostitute since cannot herself have sex and, as a "ruined" woman, is considered dishonored. Mama nevertheless takes both girls in, employing Sophie mainly as a singer/eye candy.

As the play progresses, Nottage shows how Mama survives in a world defined by ever-shifting relations of trade, foreign intervention, and violence. Like Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage (a play that serves as a rough model for this one), Mama refuses to declare loyalty to anyone but herself and her establishment, stroking the egos (and other things) of any soldier, commander, rebel, miner, or what have you who enters.

Nottage herself spent several years interviewing women who lived (or had lived) in Congo, many of whom were themselves "ruined" by rape. In Congo especially, rape is a weapon of war. A woman may be gang raped by soldiers in full view of her village and family so as to dishonor them along with her. Often rapist-soldiers will use objects like knives, sticks, or guns, damaging their victims and (when not immediately fatal) causing debilitating, humiliating, and painful conditions such as fistulas. This report by the Newshour on PBS gives a good overview. Men, too, are victims of this kind of war-rape. All of these acts of violence, of course, occur in the larger context of the aftermath of "Africa's World War," in which political power struggles, inter-tribal tensions, and the legacy of multiple exploitative colonial experiences erupted into widespread violence, much of which remains active today.

Confronted with this horrible spectacle, the temptation for theatre artists--particularly Western theatre artists--is to make, well, a spectacle out of all that horror. What's the problem with that? Well, for one thing, the Western dramatic tradition (the last couple of centuries, at least) prefers its dramas simple and its conflicts clear. Good guys versus bad guys, white hats versus black hats--this is the stuff of good theatre. Little in the Congo or other East African contexts, however, lends itself to melodramatic casting. To create a play about Congo in which bad people do terrible things to good people would be to flatten out, to do violence to, a complicated history.

Ruined, however, tries (as Nottage says) "to sustain the complexity" of the DRC's situation. No one in the play comes off as completely innocent, yet neither does Nottage set up a villain capable of absorbing all of the blame for the violence and human want. The play isn't interested in clarifying who's really at fault in this scenario. Indeed, little details in the play--references and bits of imagery sprinkled here and there--fill out the world, make it ever-more complicated.

In sustaining the complexity of the play, in denying the audience anything like a good/evil taxonomy of persons or forces, Nottage quells the Western impulse to "save the day," the impulse to act first--do something, anything--without thinking. As I've written about previously, the West's tendency to cast itself as Heroic Intervener encourages it to imagine and act on scripts in which it "succeeds" as hero insofar as it identifies a Bad Guy and destroys it. More often than not, this kind of action leads to the realization that ham-fisted interventionism does little beyond giving the West a "hero high" (that all-important sense of having done something) and may even make the situation worse. It may be, in many cases, that the best thing the West can do in some cases is to delay doing something huge, to question whether it's really equipped to intervene in a situation effectively, and to reconsider if the love of the hero-high isn't blinding it to other realities.

The potential danger, of course, with sustaining complexity like Nottage does is that spectators have the opposite reaction. Rather than donning a "Super-Savior" costume, Western spectators may just throw up their hands in despair and disengage, deciding that the horrible violence is just the way things are. Or--perhaps this is worse--the complex play may impose an artificially simplistic resolution.

Unlike the Brecht play it's modeled after, Ruined stays generally in the bounds of theatrical realism. As theorist Jill Dolan argues, realism as a style often dictates that plots resolve artificially (similar to how sitcoms typically return things to normal by the end of the episode), and Ruined is no exception. The play ends (spoiler!) with Mama revealing to the man who adores her that she, too, is "ruined"; the man (named Christian) accepts her anyway, giving a brutal play about brutal realities a sweet ending that (to Dolan and other critics) mars the careful treatment of the DNC situation.

My friend Laura, however, noted that East African spectators who have read the play or heard it (it does not yet have an African staging, nor has it yet been translated into Swahili or any other African language) like the ending. They resonate with the affirmation that life does go on and that, as the character Christian says, "we, and I speak as a man, can do better."

I do not do justice to my friend's in-depth analysis of the play, having just heard it once. I was so impressed, however, by just how carefully Laura strives to sustain the complexity of her reaction to Ruined while refusing to disengage. It's her example I've kept in mind as I've reacted to the Ugandan debates. Indeed, I think that example can apply even to the Christian Prison debate. What complexities are there? How do my own feelings, my own need to be Activist-Christian Hero, hinder my ability to see the situation in all its complexity? How, finally, can we as Christians and as activists do better?

More tomorrow,

JF

The Christian Prison

My posts for the next few days may be spotty, as I'm attending a scholarly conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico (I know, I know--poor me!).

I did see an item posted on one of the far-right news sites. It's here, an article about "the nation's first all-Christian prison" to be built in Wakita, OK. A group called "Corrections Concepts, Inc." under the leadership of Bill Robinson is pulling together private funding to design and construct a 600-bed prison facility to be staffed and operated entirely by Christians. Prisoners who are near the end of their sentence and who would have to volunteer to be transferred there would enroll in various prison programs (e.g., GED, life skills classes, work release). Apparently, prisoners would not have to attend chapel or be themselves Christians, but the curriculum they'd be going through would be "Christ-centered."

According to this article from the Tulsa World, Robinson is himself an ex-convict and is interested mainly in helping reduce recidivism rates. From what I can tell, he has been trying to realize his idea of a Christian prison for some time, having been rebuffed in other towns (see here and here).

Now, I'd like to be for a project that supports helping prisoners. Jesus directs Christians to visit prisoners and to reach out to those who are suffering or oppressed. And US currently leads the world in terms of incarceration rates and numbers of prisoners (that's right--we imprison people at a higher rate than China, Russia, Cuba, Rwanda, etc.)--a predictable effect of so many mandatory sentences for drug-related crimes. Indeed, US prisons are overtaxed, creating something of a crisis. Thus there's no shortage of people who need help.

But the line between "visit/help people in prison" and "run a prison yourself" seems fairly bright to me, and this project crosses it. It's one thing to assist prisoners with educational initiatives to help them succeed on the outside, but it's quite another to operate an institution making profit on prisoners, no matter how altruistic the owners' stated intentions might be.

And the "Christians-only" clause--exactly how would this be enforced? Who defines or determines the Christianity of the staff? If a staff converts to another faith or if the staff's Christianity gets deemed too heterodox--what happens? Robinson insists that he has all the Constitutional questions licked, but I'm just not so sure.

And then there's information from this site: www.piecp-violations.com, which monitors implementation of the federal Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP). PIECP in essence allows the industrial products of prison labor to be bought and sold at rates on part with products from non-prison labor, provided that the prison in question follows some basic guidelines. For instance, PIECP-qualified prisons must pay prisoners in the program at prevailing wages rather than at the federal minimum wage. According to this article on the piecp-violations website (which is not run by the government), Corrections Concepts, Inc., has stated that it does not plan to abide by PIECP guidelines.

As a private prison, of course, it does not have to do so. What this means, however, is A) the products of the prison labor at the Wakita prison will be produced more cheaply and therefore sold more cheaply than those of other private-sector companies, and B) the prisoners will be paid less than they would for doing the same work in the private sector and are not guaranteed the same kind of workplace protections PIECP mandates.

This seems suspicious to me. I would like to think that Mr. Robinson has a rock-solid rationale for wishing to bypass a program designed specifically to prepare exiting prisoners for real-world work environments. But the nagging thought in the back of my head is the fact that prisons in the US are to a large extent for-profit industries. The crisis of so many prisoners is, unfortunately, also a market opportunity.

Is it really the church's place to be an entrepreneur in that market?

I keep thinking about the image that Christianity wants to send to the world. We are to be the face of Christ to the people most in need of seeing that face. Somehow I imagine that face, that love, appearing and unfolding to those in need without truncheons, pepper spray, and razor-wire fences.

What was it Christ said in Matthew? "For I was in prison, and you owned the cell."

More tomorrow--well, more when I can get a chance to post, anyway.

JF