You Say ‘Promised Land,’ I Say ‘Abolition!’

FOR ABOUT TWO decades I was part of a small, unaffiliated fundamentalist religious community in South Carolina. There I learned that Jesus’ condemnation of religious hypocrisy was a warning to adhere tightly to the church’s long list of superficial rules for holy conduct. It was a holiness defined more by rule compliance than goodness of heart.

Later, in college, I learned that Jesus was making an institutional critique more than an individual one in those biblical passages. He was in fact condemning a devotion to rigid rules that emphasized appearance over substance and venerating law while neglecting the soul.

Such beliefs are an apt metaphor for the fundamental defect in a near-century of U.S. police reform efforts. Most have ignored the heart and soul of our policing and carceral institutions; they have instead tinkered with these institutions’ appearances. Many of these reforms likely reduced some harms of U.S. policing. Yet, they have left largely in place the ideas and practices that taint the heart of American policing: Police techniques—even those blessed by law—maintain an anti-Black, gendered, heteronormative, and ableist status quo. As Christian faith teaches, mere adherence to rules is not holiness. As we learn by examining the limitations of police reform, reduction of harm is not justice.

Social movements are now pushing for justice, including divestment from police-led approaches to social inequality. Critically, these calls for reallocation of police funds reject solutions that treat police violence as a problem that can be solved solely by police-focused reforms. Policing cannot be separated from systems of race-and-class marginalization, including residential segregation, education, and economic inequality.

Because the problems of policing are ground into the institution’s soul, some movement actors are calling to abolish police. Though supporting some incremental reforms, abolitionist reformers endorse a long-term ambition to live in a world with no police or prisons.

To many, this last piece of movement advocacy sounds impractical, misguided, even frightening. Yet, Christians are well-suited to seriously engage with these bolder future visions. Evidence of the Christian capacity for visioning in the context of uncertainty can be found in many places. Hebrews 11, for example, requires Christians to be less “mindful of the country from whence they came out” and to instead set out toward a new destination that they would not experience in their lifetimes. In a sense, the abolitionist vision of a world without prisons or police is not so different from the Christian vision of a promised land. Even if some cities today defund their police departments, even substantially, most of the more than 18,000 police departments dotted across the U.S. will probably still exist at the end of our lifetimes. Both Christian faith and abolitionist imagination demand faithful commitment and difficult labor toward goals that, to some, seem implausible.

Perhaps abolition, then, is a distinctly Christian approach to police reform. Christians are well-equipped to interrogate widely held assumptions about reforms that seem possible, institutions that seem necessary, and political calculations that seem inevitable. Christians can support transformative and restorative alternatives to the criminal legal system. Churches can join and, in some places, lead new emergency response systems that react to violence with nonviolent accountability and to poverty with resources and support. More comprehensively, Christians can engage in a joint process of discernment and action, reflecting upon their unquestioning embrace of American policing and working with movements to make amends for this misplaced faith.

As a child, I believed that following the rules could be a vehicle for liberation from sinfulness. As an adult, I know that liberation, both spiritual and political, requires rejecting superficial and simplistic reforms. Neither holiness nor justice is easy. Both demand transformation of the hearts and souls of ourselves and our institutions.