A Short Introduction to Abolition Theology

Someone recently asked me what my religious or spiritual orientation is, an appropriate question in context because we were meeting in relation to a divinity school. I started to tell him I was raised conservative/evangelical/charismatic/nondenominational, that I drifted from that interpretation of Christianity in college, floated around a hipster church in grad school (studying theology), but haven’t been to church in ten years. I told him my recovery community is situated in a Buddhist meditation center, and I love studying that tradition, but feel no need to identify as Buddhist. I am a student of religions, I said, but don’t belong to any particular one. I could feel his dissatisfaction with the ambiguity of this response because I shared that sentiment. Then, I grabbed the book by my desk, Mariame Kaba’s latest tome, and thumping it like a Bible, I told him I wish it sufficed to say that I’m an abolitionist. Kaba’s work is deeply spiritual to me. Abolition is my religion.

Abolitionist theologian combines two descriptors that cut to the core of how I move through the world and what I prioritize in my writing. Admittedly, it’s meant to provoke: abolition is profoundly unpopular even among people on the so-called left, and my friends would be surprised by the latter religious term because I don’t go to church and vocally criticize religious institutions. So, why this moniker? The second part first.

The truest reason I call myself a theologian is boring: I feel qualified for almost nothing, but at least I have a graduate degree in theology, so this attribution is me giving myself a little credit for that training. But what matters more, in this case, is what theology means to me.

In one of the Matrix movies, Neo is surprised to hear a personified computer program describe his love for his daughter. “Love is a human emotion” he argues, with which he is answered, “No, love is a word. What matters is the connection the word implies.” So I feel about god.

Etymologically, theology means talking about or studying god. I contend that god is what linguists call a floating signifier: its meaning differs so drastically between everyone who has ever uttered it that it no longer denotes anything in particular (and should probably be retired at this point, as I may argue in a future article). Certainly, for most of human history, god is a person, usually many persons (monotheism is relatively new). But the idea these myths attribute to god has something to do with source, with power, and with the invisible fabric behind and beneath the world. God is a way of talking about that which gives things their thingness, the mystery of how anything exists at all. Theology, then, is the inquiry into being itself, its origins and futures.

It strikes me that we cannot debate whether god exists unless we have a shared understanding of the thing the existence of which we’re disputing. If god is an old man in the sky who tends to punish and bless people indiscriminately, it’s easy to poke holes. But if god is a word for being itself, then your dispute is to do with whether anything is real. Postponing my full exploration of what god means, I am fascinated by the questions behind the word and, more importantly, what those questions say about us. Questions about god are questions about humanity’s relationship to the world.

So, when I say I’m a theologian, I mean I’m obsessed with the myriad questions under the umbrella query: what is this?

Abolition means to destroy, to cease the growth of. Used without context in contemporary parlance, it means to dismantle the prison-industrial complex (PIC), the amalgam of carceral institutions most obviously represented by police and prisons (read more from Critical Resistance). Yes, I consider myself a member of the movement to abolish policing and prisons, in addition to other forms of carcerality and violence like child welfare and the military, or the ways other seemingly benign systems can act just as carceral, like homeless shelters. Kaba refers to such systems as death-making institutions. PIC abolition is the continuation of the historical movement to abolish slavery as the PIC itself is the offspring of enslavement, continuing to oppress Black and Native people for the economic and social benefit of white and affluent elites. Such a system cannot be reformed; it must be dismantled.

While I am a student of the policy components of this stance, however, I’m as interested in the spiritual and moral backdrop. Abolition, you see, is also a set of values, like:

No one should be discarded, not even the worst of us.
Everything is interconnected. What harms one member of our collective corpus harms all of us.
The world is full of suffering and oppression, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to settle for incremental gains.
Imagination is magic; we are dreaming up the world we want to inhabit because if we cannot envision it, we cannot usher it into being.
We must rehearse and experiment toward this dream world.
Crime does not equal harm, and it’s the latter we should be preventing in the first place. Abolition gets to the root of harm rather than mending its leaves.

Abolition is about creating a world characterized by love and mutuality, where we focus our energies on preventing harm in the first place, and when it inevitably occurs anyway, responding with compassion and intention. It’s about healing the wounds of oppression and violence, not perpetuating them with more violence. It’s about constructing the world we want to inhabit, a reality we have never before witnessed. Such a world the Jesus story might term the kingdom of heaven.

Abolition coincides with my personal application of humanism. Not the academic/philosophical vein, but rather the belief in the capacity of humanity to evolve toward greater love and care. There is no such thing as a bad person; only our actions can be described as such. No human, therefore, should be thrown away. Even those of us responsible for the worst of atrocities are products of our own experiences carrying our own wounded inner child. That doesn’t mean there should be no accountability, as other abolitionists have skillfully argued, but that exacting more violence does nothing to move us toward a world of reciprocal care and solidarity nor heal the wounds already inflicted.

Conjoined, then, abolition theology connotes that my politics and my spirituality are not two things. It reflects my posture of curiosity about the mysterious connective tissue holding reality’s skeleton intact. It means activism for the demise of oppressive systems and ideologies while we sow seeds for new and more beautiful ways of being in community. It is practical and utopian. It’s about having the courage to let harmful structures die as we stumble toward a better way to be human together.

A brown circle with a sideways cross of St Brigid

A Short Introduction to Abolition Theology

Recommended reading on PIC abolition:

I Am the River and the Raft