Stan Moody

POB 240
Manchester, ME 04351
207/626-0594
www.stanmoody.com

White Christians and Gulag America

Stan Moody of Manchester, ME, former Maine State Representative and most recently a Chaplain at
Maine State Prison in Warren, is advocating for transparency and accountability in Maine’s prison
system…A prolific and published writer, Dr. Moody is pastor of the Meeting House Church in
Manchester and has been a speaker on human rights issues at conferences around the nation…

December 14, 2010

In his 2001 seminal work, The Executed God: the Way of the Cross in Lockdown
America, theologian Mark Lewis Taylor asks the question, “Is it a contradiction that Christians
pray to and adore their imprisoned and executed God while supporting or tolerating the
execution and imprisonment of so many today?” He decries the key role that confessing
Christians have played in creating and sustaining “Lockdown America.”
Taylor could not have known in 2001 the escalating part that white Evangelicals were to
play in shaping and affirming domestic policy under the administration of George W. Bush who,
as governor or Texas, presided over the execution of 156 prisoners. Since 1980, death row
prisoners have followed the trend of the incarcerated, up nearly 500 percent to 3,500. Our shame
as a nation of 5% of the world’s population is that we now incarcerate 25% of its prisoners.
Taylor is easy on Evangelicals by spreading the blame to the worship of several secular
gods that have kept American Christians operating in a theatre of small problems – “clean
churches and safe spaces.” He cites 3 secular deities worshipped by white Christians – political
domination, religious respectability and revolutionary purism.
“Christian acceptance and compliance with this country as unrivaled superpower is a de
facto worship of the god of political domination,” he writes. The very concept of the US as a
superpower subjugates its citizens under the control of state-sanctioned prisons, death penalties
and paramilitary policing. Christians, he insists, have adjusted their spiritual lives to the
landscape shaped by the United States rather than their executed God.
The Christian Right in particular, having vigorously supported the law-and-order
presidency of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the 1994 Contract with America and later the imperial
presidency of George W. Bush, strengthened the hand of tyranny against our citizenry. Policies
were enacted to concentrate wealth in the hands of an ever-small elite and to build up Lockdown
America while rising in concert to “God Bless America.”
In the interest of building wider popular appeal, Evangelicals sacrificed adherence to a
radical faith, tired of waiting for their God and opted to take matters into their own hands. They
created the fickle god of religious respectability responsible for executing the God they banished
to the ether.
Taylor lays the worship of the god of revolutionary purism primarily at the feet of more
liberal American Christians, whose focus on conflagration wherever the press is gathered
overlooks the global condition of love of sin more than God or neighbor. “Jesus, who went the
way of the executed God, articulated and practiced a love ethic that included love of the
enemy…The way of the executed God abandons all (our) purist gods.”
Here in Maine, our index crime rate has declined 40 percent over the past 25 years, while
our incarceration rate has tripled, with the annual cost in excess of $75,000 per prisoner, the
highest in the nation.
Our Governor-elect, shoehorned into office by the Christian Right, is presently in
negotiation with the Town of Milo and the Corrections Corporation of America for a private
prison as Milo’s economic development initiative and the answer to the State’s problem of the
burgeoning cost of corrections.
The Christian Right, being advocates of unbridled capitalist greed as evidence of God’s
blessing on America, have focused on one of our last growth industries in this time of economic
peril. Sit-down strikes against slave labor in Georgia prisons this past week have highlighted the
economic benefits of Gulag America.
The US spends billions a year in prison construction. Private industry stocks these prisons
with stun guns, pepper spray and mace, surveillance equipment, sub-standard food, restraint
chairs, portable overflow cells, plastic handcuffs, not to ignore the escalating demand for social
services and medical care that far exceeds the cost of effective drug rehabilitation. Taylor calls
this a system of “social terror.”
What is a Christian to do? Abandon blind obedience to the American Dream and step into
the “Way of the Cross,” a path that jettisons the Thanksgiving Basket, prayer meeting mindset
and engages the fullness of hands-on rebellion demanded by the Galilean Jesus.