Later this month, our graduating and students will present their , the culmination of their work here at 天美视频. Until then, we鈥檒l be spotlighting a handful of the presenting students as they reflect on their work. Here, Matthew Rock writes about his project, Know Your Enemy: American Incarceration & the Social Imagination of the Deep State.
If I had to point to one moment where my Integrative Project began to plant itself in my brain, I would go back to a single quote from The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. It was the little seed in the soil of my theology and ecclesiology that eventually grew into an idea and then a conviction that consumed the better part of my final year here at school. She writes: “Criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate.鈥� I remember instantly feeling a punch to my gut鈥攆irst asking myself, 鈥淗ow can I reconcile this statement鈥攖his truth鈥攚ith the call of Jesus to love friends, neighbors, strangers, enemies鈥verybody?鈥� And then, 鈥淲ho is giving me this permission, and why the hell am I allowing them to be the moral, ethical, and social authority in my life instead of Jesus, the crucified God?鈥�
As people hear about my project, they have naturally asked why I鈥檓 interested in this. Good question! In the spirit of full disclosure, I have no personal connection to the US criminal justice system. I鈥檝e never been to prison, I have no family or friends in prison, and I am a white man who has little to no chance of being sentenced to prison (or just shot) simply for my skin color or social location. The only answer I can offer is weirdly reminiscent of a bad exorcism: the power of Christ compels me! There is nothing in my life that directly ties me to the prison industrial complex; but if I am to call myself a Christian, if I am to claim to be a disciple of Jesus, then I cannot in good conscience hide myself from the injustice and suffering of the millions under the control of the American punishment regime. And further, I believe my pastoral vocation demands that I think well not only about the current oppressive system but also what a Christian response should be.
I read a lot for this project鈥nd yet there is so much more reading an adequate response really needs鈥攑robably a hundred-fold more. But some key works were The New Jim Crow (of course), Michael Walzer鈥檚 Exodus and Revolution, Daniel Berrigan鈥檚 The Kings and their Gods, Ren茅 Girard鈥檚 work on scapegoats, James Cone鈥檚 The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Brueggemann鈥檚 The Prophetic Imagination, 聽Mike Lofgren鈥檚 article 鈥淎natomy of the Deep State,鈥� and most importantly William Cavanaugh鈥檚 Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ.
Oh and I listened to a whole bunch of Rage Against The Machine.
础濒别虫补苍诲别谤鈥檚 The New Jim Crow is only the most well-known of a growing body of work denouncing the U.S. criminal justice system and its structural racism. There are many writers doing this, and they expose the dehumanizing injustice at the heart of this system, yet in my opinion lasting change remains a slim chance. And so I had to ask鈥� Why? Here is where the big turn in my thinking came, where I really found some energy and hope in what the discipleship of Christ can offer. It has to do with what we can call 鈥渢he social imagination.”
The social imagination is a society鈥檚 sense of what is and is not real, including the memory of how the society got where it is as well as hopes for the future. It is, ultimately, the reality we perceive ourselves living in and the options we believe we have. This project of mine argues that the American Deep State鈥攚hat Lofgren defines as “a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process”鈥攈as manufactured an imagination in which we depend utterly on the State for what it has deemed our primary need: security. One significant node of this security apparatus is the prison industrial complex. The Deep State, I believe, has weaponized the criminal justice system in order to achieve its goal of immortality; as Berrigan writes, “As the pharaoh and other despots are aware, there are three ways of gaining admission to the sun boat and its voyage to immortality: wars won, territory expanded, and grand edifices erected.” Immortality is the primary goal of State power. It is a theological term that I believe helps us understand that we cannot simply conceive of political structures in civic or material terms. The political realm鈥攑articularly the State鈥攊s fundamentally a part of our social imagination, and in the language of Cavanaugh, theology is not just words about God but also “the mobilization of the human social imagination.”
Thus, incarceration functions as a means of the state achieving divinization because it supports the larger imaginative project of national security. State regimes, in order to justify their existence and legitimize their violence, create the very enemies from which they then protect their citizens. Using James Alison鈥檚 understanding of Ren茅 Girard鈥檚 mimetic theory, I argue that the State punishes scapegoats by driving them into penitentiaries where they are stripped of their identities and scripted as enemies in the performance of the state imagination. Upon their return to society, they are dehumanized and renamed Felons, and the cycle continues.
Because the power of the Deep State lies in the power of its imagination, only another imagination can bring about real transformation. Without a transformed or redeemed imagination, all attempts at reform (legislative or otherwise) will fall flat. For the Church, this alternative is the Eucharist, which is itself a recontextualization of the Exodus memory. The Exodus is a paradigmatic narrative upon which a great deal of Jewish and Christian meaning is based, and it offers us a way to imagine our world and power structures that counters Deep State hegemony and immortality. The final section of this project contends that by bearing witness to Exodus and the cross, we live within a Christian imagination formidable enough to disrupt the carceral imagination. It is an imagination, however, that is cruciform; that is, it takes the form of and imitates Jesus’ obedience to God鈥攁n obedience which the powers could not abide. 鈥淭he cross,鈥� Brueggemann notes, 鈥渋s the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.”
The page limitations of this project, as well as the fact that this was a one-year master鈥檚 project and not a multi-year doctoral dissertation, meant that I was unable to spend much time thinking well on how this alternative imagination is lived out in practical, concrete ways. Cavanaugh offers multiple real examples, but they take place in a radically different context. I feel I have merely opened the door; the journey that follows is arguably much more difficult. But鈥� opening the door is a start.
If you鈥檙e intrigued by what you read, we invite you to join us for this year鈥檚 presentations, and .