Brad speaks with Aaron Griffith, Assistant Professor of History at Whitworth University. They discuss his book, God's Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America. Griffith links the rise of the American carceral state to shifts in evangelical theology and anthropology on the 20th century, showing that the individualistic and punitive ethos of evangelical thinking influenced the rise of mass incarceration in the USA. They discuss figures like Billy Graham who was a conduit of this thinking, and discuss how it remains a factor in our contemporary public square.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty of the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB.
I'm joined today by a great guest, Aaron Griffith, who is an assistant professor of modern American history at Wythe University up in Washington.
Someone who, I'm going to embarrass him, just won a great award, 2021 Emerging Public Intellectual Award, which is pretty cool.
And we're here today to talk about Aaron's book, God's Law and Order, The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America.
So, Aaron, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
Even more glad that you joined me, because I know you did some holiday travel that was a little bit nightmarish, and so you made it.
You're out of the car, out of the plane, in a warm house, and ready to talk about God's Law and Order.
That's right.
Honestly, I would talk about anything from a non-plane situation right now.
So we can talk about whatever you want.
All right, I'm gonna keep that in the back of my head, so we'll see where this conversation goes.
It can only go up for my last 12 hours.
Well, last week we had a great guest, Robert Mason, who talked about Romans 13, and we talked a lot about law and order, and the way Romans 13 has been used and abused throughout Christian history, and so on.
Today we're talking about your book, which is truly a really great piece of scholarship, God's Law and Order, the Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America.
And what I love about this book is you do something that I really love when historians do, which is like in my if you would have asked me before reading your book, hey, evangelicals, law and order, mass incarceration, those all go together.
Right.
And I'd be like, of course.
Yeah, that makes total sense.
And I think I could talk about it.
And I probably actually couldn't like I could probably like gesture toward why I thought that and sort of give some very vague, you know, like thesis statement.
But I would not have like been able to really flesh it out.
And I think what I love about the book is it's something I felt like I knew about going in.
And then as soon as I got into it, I was like, I actually don't know about this at all.
And it's opening up so many like pathways and turning on so many light bulbs that that really made sense and clicked.
But I wouldn't have been able to get there on my own.
So let me just start by asking you this.
Evangelicals, in your historical account, play a kind of pivotal role in the development of the carceral state over the course of the 20th century, and are sort of like key figures in this idea of law and order, and the idea that criminals need to be punished, right?
That if you do something wrong, you need to be punished for that.
So, first question is this, why did crime and punishment matter so much to evangelicals, like, in the mid-20th century, 1940?
1950.
And how did they sort of frame this, theologically and politically?
Yeah, first of all, again, thanks for having me on.
And I think your initial reaction to this topic is also one that I had, like getting started, and it's one that I get when I talk to people about my work or research, is that a lot of what I do in the book
The themes I'm addressing seems intuitive in some ways for people perhaps who are aware of religion and public life in some ways or evangelical influence in politics or just have a sense perhaps they're not interested in evangelicals at all but just have a sense of their own of all right what kinds of ways of thinking are more punitive or what kinds of
People tend to want to have more punitive outcomes and then what should we just simply do in response to crime?
And it was that more intuitive aspect that I really wanted to like play around with in the book and both in the sense of hopefully reframing some things or even just offering historical background to some things that people take for granted.
Pushing back in places where I saw that we could clarify or even change the way we view stuff.
Really trying to contextualize that intuitive sensibility for so many Americans, not simply evangelical Christians, but this notion that I think is shared by a lot of Americans that crime is a problem and needs to be dealt with in certain ways, like punishment.
And it was that assumption that I really wanted to try to wrestle with in the book was like, where do we even get this notion?
When we just, when Americans expect to have police and policing be a major feature of their lives, why is that seemingly normal?
Why do we just look at prisons and expect them to be a part of our social existence?
Where does that come from?
What is the religious history there?
And so that was in some ways like the big or a major reason why I got into the work and something that animates my thinking even to today.
But more specifically to your question, Crime and punishment mattered to evangelicals in two very broad ways.
So first, there's the crime part.
In the 1950s and 60s, issues of crime, issues of delinquency, particularly juvenile delinquency, were at the forefront of a lot of Americans' minds.
And this is a period where worries about rebellion and rebellious teenagers are pretty common.
Think movies like Rebel Without a Cause.
Like, what are we going to do about all these teenagers who are out causing problems?
And this was also a time of worry about social unrest, and I'll talk about that in a minute.
But for evangelicals, rebellion, delinquency, crime, easily became shorthand for sin.
It's It just seemed very natural to them that these things that teenagers or that gangs are doing was sinful.
And this was a very convenient addition to evangelicals' narration of conversion.
That sinners need redemption.
They need the gospel in order to get saved.
And to put it somewhat simply, like criminals had sinned.
It was their own fault.
They had chosen to commit a crime.
They had chosen to be rebellious or to join the gang or whatever and were culpable.
And it wasn't, their crime was not fundamentally because of social conditions or other systemic explanations.
And in the 50s and 60s, this became like a very common trope that lots of evangelicals started putting forth, not in a formal or academic analysis of the crime problem as much as in just their preaching.
So preachers like Billy Graham and David Wilkerson, who are very popular at mid-century, are putting this formula to work to great effect as a metaphor for the plan of salvation,
That here are sins that are being committed by these criminals and they need to receive the gospel, but also in their outreach to populations that they deem as criminal, like gangs, juvenile delinquents, and increasingly prisoners.
So this is the story of the 50s especially, but in the 1960s there's also an increasing concern from many white Americans about unrest and social disorder in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war protests, and in uprisings in American cities, what they would have called riots.
And white evangelicals understand crime into the 1960s as a social problem, a social sin, a sign of growing secularity, of growing decadence in American culture.
And again, there's little attention here from evangelicals to systemic problems that motivate uprisings, for example, or protests.
For evangelicals, it's not about white supremacy.
It's not about racism.
It's not about generations of poverty that affect certain communities.
It's about when people protest or when people are disobedient or have a, you know, when they, Riot, they are breaking the law and therefore are sinful.
And this is where punishment really starts to become an option for evangelicals.
In the 1950s, especially with people like Billy Graham and David Wilkerson, the individualistic frame worked with the possibility of forgiveness.
that criminals might receive the grace of Christ.
In the 60s though, punishment, policing, incarceration becomes idealized.
It becomes labeled as sacred itself and evangelicals see it as, from then on, part of America's duty to constrain evil and therefore it's a cause worth supporting.
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