Jason Sexton

In the aftermath of World War II, eugenics and the pseudoscientific base used to justify its practices are generally understood to have phased off the scene. If, however, eugenics never actually disappeared but has been persistent, and in turn becomes one of the best explanations for mass incarceration today, what role did Christianity-especially Evangelicalism-play in this unprecedented moment of imprisonment? Building on legal scholarship identifying the significant role of eugenic philosophy that manifests in penal policy and ongoing phenomena into the early twenty-first century, this article examines key figures in the backdrop of eugenics' particular early developments, and leading figures-namely, Billy Graham and Prison Fellowship's Chuck Colson-whose ministries operated in close proximity to the prison during the latter twentieth century and especially over the past fifty years as incarceration rates skyrocketed. After examining several important theological tenets reflected within Evangelicalism that are compatible with eugenic logic, a critical approach is developed drawing from more robust theological considerations that if appropriated earlier might have found evangelicals resisting the mass incarceration building efforts rather than supporting them.

In the aftermath of World War II, eugenics and the pseudoscientific base used to justify its practices are generally understood to have phased off the scene. If, however, eugenics never actually disappeared but has been persistent, and in turn becomes one of the best explanations for mass incarceration today, what role did Christianity—especially Evangelicalism—play in this unprecedented moment of imprisonment? Building on legal scholarship identifying the significant role of eugenic philosophy that manifests in penal policy and an ongoing  into the early twenty-first century, this article examines key figures in the backdrop of eugenics’ particular early developments, as well as leading figures—namely, Billy Graham and Prison Fellowship’s Chuck Colson—whose ministries operated in close proximity to the prison during the latter twentieth century and especially over the past fifty years as incarceration rates skyrocketed. After examining several important theological tenets reflected within Evangelicalism that are compatible with eugenic logic, a critical approach is developed drawing from more robust theological considerations that if appropriated earlier might have found evangelicals resisting the mass incarceration building efforts rather than supporting them.

It had come as a surprise to learn that not much theology – any theology? including political theology – has come into any serious engagement with the work of leading prison abolitionist scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. When I came to her work, I had not realized how much she had given. I read Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press, 2007) when I began studying not just the prison, but also California’s troubling cultural history after the boosterism, progressive politics, and innovative spirit. I’d also known of Gilmore’s activism, and how her disciples’ (often former students’) work mimics hers, often in simpler ways and lacking the rigor, creativity, or punk found in Gilmore’s work uncut.

That’s what is found in this collection, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Its eight articles, nine essays from prior-published work, and three interviews were literary pieces one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. In light of this and her own story of coming into academia (ch. 1) it seems clear to say she wasn’t following the traditional mode of academic career advancement; put another way, she did not really give a damn about peer review, as long as she did good work that really mattered. And the beautiful introductory chapter (pp. 1–22) from the volume’s editors Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano helpfully locates her massive contribution.

As a social theorist, cultural historian, and trained theologian, I take my task in this review of her book to offer a reading as a formerly-incarcerated theological interpreter. Coming from an ecclesial tradition I have described elsewhere as “ecclesia incarcerate,” and having cut my theological teeth on the inside of the California Youth Authority of the 1990s, I welcome every word of Gilmore’s careful analysis of that moment, and the wider situation.

While I agree that she describes the situation with great analytical accuracy, the book also showcases the coherence of Gilmore's thought, where the parts fit together with the whole. With the coherence, this collection highlights her insightful and probing vision, along with its particular forms of development (e.g., the dissatisfaction with the idea and term, “Prison Industrial Complex,” ch. 10). As such, the collection constitutes a vision as well as a journey into what someone might describe as a netherworld created by human hands.

Akin to Dante’s Virgil, then, Gilmore leads her readers on a descent into a kind of hell in the book’s first three parts, and it is difficult to interpret the terrain as much besides. Leading her readers, she recounts the infernal flames as they licked Los Angeles, from Rodney King to Bill Bratton, interpreted whilst on-the-scene as an activist, although not unaware of democracy’s delusional myth that “more local is somehow more participatory” (p. 486). She exemplifies an engaged scholarship and an accountable activism (p. 447) that therein finds yet deeper roots to the problem her work addresses.

Gilmore takes readers into California’s interior, and the particularities don’t skip her analytic survey of the terrain, leading deeper into the abyss – the place where operates “the processes of hierarchy, dispossession, and exclusion that congeal in and as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (p. 475) in this twentieth-century era she calls “the age of human sacrifice” (p. 134). This includes various abstractions of violence and extraction that so many groups knowingly and unknowingly contribute to, as do our academic departments and institutions, nobody unaffected by the current condition. Equally, none are beyond the process of being enclosed where all are expected to be, compelled to remain fixed in our lot and knowing our stations so that a war can be properly waged in this hell.

Gilmore sees what’s happening to bodies-as-capital in ways that Yale theologian Willie James Jennings has also recounted, with racial identity and private property comprising two sides of the same coin. Jennings’ explanation of the rationale behind this describes how a “hermeneutics of possession” marks this era of body removal, relocation/incarceration, and erasure as the mode of modern capitalist state building. For this enterprise, Gilmore underscores what Kathryn Yusoff recounts in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), the geographic and geological extraction of resources that built the modern world – with its comforts and advances for some – as essentially inextricably linked with the extraction of Black and Indigenous bodies, a plight Stephanie Pincetl has argued can never merely be undone or corrected without more radical political visions of time and space that move beyond adaptation/incorporation to more radical embodiments of justice and the virtues. In the same way, Gilmore demonstrates that the racial-carceral-capital juggernaut impacts everyone (p. 469), landing everyone in the inferno, for which all peddled capitalist frameworks, including “the fiction of race projects” (p. 495), provide no ladder of escape.

For Gilmore’s exposition, while leading readers into what I am describing poetically as the abyss, she doesn’t leave them there, but finds hope in collective organizing (Section 4), willing at every point to turn to work with anyone – not just those of good will, but even willing to persuade the demons! – helping folks open to new possibilities with unlikely allies. She acknowledges groups outpacing her own (p. 469), embodying “the spirit of abolition” sans the label – a strange phenomenon amid capitalist structures that everyone has an “ontological priority” to not be harmed by (p. 183). She admits that her vision is “utopian,” not in the sense promised by late capitalism with its violent abstraction of abandonment (p. 174), but in the sense of “looking forward to a world in which prisons are not necessary” (pp. 468–9).

Her prescription remains: critical forms of resistance through what she calls an enmeshed “infrastructure of feeling” (p. 490). Something like compassion, or what James Baldwin and Augustine call “love.” Not merely martyrological, but part of a conversation James Cone argues must be revolutionary throughout: embodied, enfleshed, incarnated. In skin, as Gilmore strikingly reminds us (ch. 20), and with arms stretched wide as the world, with bowels of compassion that give the kind of hope to keep walking through hell, together, until the better day, the better world, comes into being.

The new field of sustainability science that has arisen over the past three decades, largely oriented toward cities, under closer examination may prove to be wholly inadequate to deal with the issues it was initially designed to address. Built largely upon modernist value assumptions, its entire range of outlooks has failed to account for the character virtues needed to realize sustainable approaches for the future, which are better found working within different religious traditions' theologies and ethical outlooks. In light of this, the present article takes up a replicable agenda for analyzing how these particular character virtues-with special focus on parsimony and futuremindedness-work with regard to visions of sustainability that promise to bring about a more just transition in cities.

Written by two religion scholars, Break Every Yoke is a wide-ranging profile of religion's significance to prison abolitionism. Focused on American mass incarceration, and critical of the secular state's options as well as ongoing calls for prison reform, the book argues that religion is not only helpful in the abolitionist effort, but essential-carrying with it more radical visions capable of leveling the current prison system. Beyond a utilitarian vision, Dubler and Lloyd understand that mass incarceration emerged in the same cultural moment as the big box store and megachurch. Thus they seek to present not only how religion can assist abolitionism, but also how religiously-inclined prison reformers ought to embrace abolitionism as the only way to meaningfully address the prison problem. Committed unequivocally to prison abolitionism (emphatically: not reform), the authors illustrate visions of how the modern world might be remade if deeper, more radical religious roots are drawn from and appropriated. These roots hail not from the litany of secular approaches to mass incarceration, they argue, nor from carefully curated and often repressed domesticated forms of religion, but from the fervor of genuine religious faith; or, they curiously suggest: at least 'something closely related to religious faith' (p. 10). The book's passionate argument and plea is that 'without getting religion-and igniting whole religious communities with abolitionist fire-prison abolition will never acquire its necessary force' (p. 11). The first chapter opens with this argument, accepting nothing less than full-blown prison abolitionism as the only possible way to rethink the prison, with the assumed necessity of incarceration being so deeply ingrained into today's understandings of justice. Lest the argument for abolitionism-shutting down every jail and prison-seem superficial or mere posture, the book's core (chs. 2-4) provides historical exposition fleshing-out what the authors call 'the spirit of abolition.' The exposition carries insights into rationale from normative theological views and material expressions of religion, with the authors claiming to be working not as historians proper, but as scholars of culture, of religion, and as genealogists. This shapes the book's argument, charting how the Civil Rights Era's political pressures once required religious fervor supported by theological arguments. But these vanished after the Civil Rights Era, giving rise to the 'political theology' that built mass incarceration.

The Covid-19 pandemic presented enormous challenges for secular and religious institutions as well as religion scholars engaged in the critical study of religion. The unique opportunities for scholars of religion include questions about the very nature of our academic work. Inclusive of scholarly research and dissemination, along with the administrative work and service that facilitates this, is academic work to draw from the rich wellspring of the traditions we study and represent, or does it neglect them in the daily affairs of our work? With a particular regional focus, and despite traditional academic disciplinary conventions within the critical study of religion, this article argues that religious traditions and the critical appropriations of their wisdom and ongoing actions provide an important reckoning with the reality of the ever-changing and often terrible conditions in the contemporary world. They provide a critical feature of what it means to cultivate an ecology of ethical responsibility and care.

Recent suggestions have been made that theology may have more to offer on matters related to the subjects of punishment, corrections, and rehabilitation than has often been acknowledged in the scholarly literature. This essay sets out to explore the merits of such claims with regard to how they might assist ongoing efforts to address mass incarceration, including the theological dimensions of punitive justice along with other potentially redemptive realities that theological reflection may illuminate and make more visible. Consideration will be given to the ongoing role that religion plays in the life of the prison before giving consideration to the ontology of the church as a social actor, especially as locally-constituted within the prison-the ecclesia incarcerate, or the prison church. The theological rationale for the basic existence of such an actor is explored along with the effects of such a vision for this kind of transformation the church may experience along with both promises and potential challenges that come with the church having its own ontology, not as a given, but as a creature of grace.

Veli-Matti Karkkainen's five-volume work offers a literary smorgasbord of the traditional doctrinal loci in over 2,000 pages. It does this in conversation with significant interlocutors while engaging some of the most pressing questions Christian theology must grapple with in the early twenty-first century. Several English-speaking evangelical theologians have set out to complete, and some have even finished, major systematic projects of a multi-volume breadth (the late Tom Oden's three-volume systematic theology and Alister McGrath's A Scientific Theology, for example), and several more have attempted major tasks only to leave them incomplete. The latter include the late John Webster's ambitious multi-volume work, which should see publication of the posthumous second volume in 2019, while perhaps most ambitious was the proposed six-volume series by Stanley Grenz, which only barely completed volume two, also posthumously published. However, Kakkainen has actually completed the longest and most perambulatory treatment of the systematic loci that has ever been produced in English. English is not Karkkainen's first language. He started his career in Finland and spent three years in Bangkok. It is difficult to say just how much the Finnish context, his own evolving Lutheran and Pentecostal ecclesial identities (not to mention Catholic and ecumenical), and his arrival to teach at Fuller Seminary in California shaped his outlook on theology, as well as providing the opportunity and inspiration for such an extensive and masterful project. I would venture that the multicultural context of Los Angeles, and the exploratory openness of Fuller in

Among various carceral governance structures meant to punish, educate, and rehabilitate is the carceral governance structure of the church with its dynamic structure operative in the reconstitution of prisoners' humanity. Presenting an interdisciplinary theological vision of this phenomenon found in the material content of personal faith, this paper presents preliminary results of twenty-four interviews of former prisoners who participated in the incarcerated church, interpreting the ethnographic data in dialogue with the ecumenical creed. Thus, it reinterprets in-depth interview data so as to begin presenting a coherent theological vision of what the members of the prison church both are and could increasingly become within the carceral context.

This article reconsiders and reformulates the nature of public theology by assessing essential features of Western public space and precisely how Evangelical Christian witness takes shape in those contexts. Instead of understanding theology as something done primarily from the church to the world, it argues that theology that is properly public is best understood as done within the setting of common societal structures, in particular locations and in situations where believers are enabled to confess the hope within them. An understanding of this dynamic nature of Christian witness, and the variegated expositions of theological reflection, corresponds to the dynamic expressions of faith, in word and deed, which corresponds to the Christian missionary impulse. As such, there is a more robust understanding of public witness befitting to a properly public theology than has been rendered by Evangelical public theologians heretofore.

Features of the "missional" conversation revolve around discussions of the ecclesial and divine mission. Largely an intra-Evangelical debate, with relevance to other traditions, this conversation has lacked representation from systematic theology. This article argues that the aim for diversity and listening to other voices that missiology excels at often stops short of seeing things as systematic theology might render them. The integrity of systematic theology's voice as an exposition of the church's confession renders structures that mark the manner of how gospel-exposition and mission really
work insofar as the gospel defines things as they really are. As Christian theology claims Jesus' lordship over all created realities, then, it functions to co-labor with the God of the Bible who is missionary and brings his people to participate in his action. Systematic theology then is missional in form, content, and aim, suggesting that mission is entirely what systematic theology is about.

The State of California has been a trendsetter in radical forms of penal policy and mass incarceration in Western societies. As such California’s prison state and its governance structures demand careful scrutiny. These governance structures are both formal and informal, manifesting different power structures at play within the system. Any proper theological account of such phenomena needs to reckon not only with these extant structures but also with the incarcerate ecclesia, the prison church. The present article aims to highlight the reality of this community within the California prison settings (with
relevance to other penal contexts), a community that is locally supernaturally constituted, inter-racial, spatially transcendent and transformational, displaying the
power of the gospel among its participants. In this way, the incarcerated church subversively fulfills the aims of the other formal and informal governance structures, both
sanctioned by the State and manifest in prison gangs.

“Re-focusing the Incarcerated Redeemed within Society’s Prisons” and “Clarifying church life: local and incarcerate,” online symposium reviewing Amy Levad, Redeeming a Prison Society, https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/redeeming-a-prison-society/

In the aftermath of World War II, eugenics and the pseudoscientific base used to justify its practices are generally understood to have phased off the scene. If, however, eugenics never actually disappeared but has been persistent, and in turn becomes one of the best explanations for mass incarceration today, what role did Christianity-especially Evangelicalism-play in this unprecedented moment of imprisonment? Building on legal scholarship identifying the significant role of eugenic philosophy that manifests in penal policy and an ongoing into the early twentyfirst century, this article examines key figures in the backdrop of eugenics' particular early developments, as well as leading figures-namely, Billy Graham and Prison Fellowship's Chuck Colson-whose ministries operated in close proximity to the prison during the latter twentieth century and especially over the past fifty years as incarceration rates skyrocketed. After examining several important theological tenets reflected within Evangelicalism that are compatible with eugenic logic, a critical approach is developed drawing from more robust theological considerations that if appropriated earlier might have found evangelicals resisting the mass incarceration building efforts rather than supporting them.

Recent suggestions have been made that theology may have more to offer on matters related to the subjects of punishment, corrections, and rehabilitation than has often been acknowledged in the scholarly literature. This essay sets out to explore the merits of such claims with regard to how they might assist ongoing efforts to address mass incarceration, including the theological dimensions of punitive justice along with other potentially redemptive realities that theological reflection may illuminate and make more visible. Consideration will be given to the ongoing role that religion plays in the life of the prison before giving consideration to the ontology of the church as a social actor, especially as locally-constituted within the prison—the ecclesia incarcerate, or the prison church. The theological rationale for the basic existence of such an actor is explored along with the effects of such a vision for this kind of transformation the church may experience along with both prom...