When I began my journey in church ministry, my goal was to plant a church so that I could teach and preach helpful and creative messages about Jesus and faith to as many people as possible. Then I started talking to pastors about how they planted their churches. Some pastors exhibited the kind of ministry I was interested in as they talked about attracting people to their church by preaching a unique message.
Then I started meeting pastors who talked about serving their cities and partnering with organizations that gave their local communities the care and resources they needed. When I first heard this, I naively processed these ideas of serving the community as another cool way to get people to go to your church to hear your message. The particular type of ministry environment I was involved in taught me to process everything that way. It took me a while to realize that these specific pastors really cared about their cities and wanted to dedicate their ministries to caring for their local communities.
They weren’t talking about running a Sunday service while helping in the community every once in a while. They were talking about opening community centers that just happened to also have service on Sundays. When I discovered this way of thinking about church, it changed the way I thought about everything.
Jesus taught about the kingdom of God more than anything, and those verses were more about a unique way of life than a unique message. The English translation of the Greek basileia tou Theou into the “kingdom of God” is too ambiguous, especially considering our common associations with the word kingdom. King is too patriarchal and forces us to imagine a man on a throne, but this isn’t what Jesus was talking about. And -dom sounds like a physical location you could visit. This isn’t what Jesus was talking about either.
The word basileia is better translated “reign,” or “rule,” or “power.” A king has basileia over a physical location, but his basileia isn’t the location itself. You can’t see basileia. You can only experience it.
So the basileia of God, or the reign of God, is referring to what the world would be like with God in charge. Jesus and his fellow Jews believed that the reign of Rome was coming to an end, and a new reign was emerging. This new reign, however, did not just look like the old reign with a new person on the throne. The reign of God describes an alternative use of power. When Jesus described this reign, he described liberation.
Jesus said the reign of God belonged to the poor and the persecuted.1 He said many will come from east and west to be a part of the reign of God.2 He went city to city teaching people to repent, or rather, to transform their lives because the reign of God is at hand.3 Preparing for the reign of God looks like choosing to live differently in the world. It looks like living as if the reign of God is already here.
Many Christians may instinctively assume the reign of God is referring to heaven, but Jesus isn’t talking about the afterlife. For Jesus, the reign of God is an emerging reality right here and right now. Jesus says the reign of God is within you.4 He also compares the reign of God to a tiny mustard seed that grows into a large tree.5 And he compares it to yeast that grows into leavened bread.6 The reign of God is something that starts out small within us and then grows through us and out into the world.
Jesus taught people how to live differently so that others would know through observing their lifestyle that the reign of God is present. Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”7 The mission of Jesus’s followers is not to simply believe in the reign of God, but to participate in the process of materializing the reign of God here on Earth.
The reign of God was not a purely utopian vision of a perfect world, free from any sort of struggle. The early advocates for the reign of God did imagine that kind of utopia sometime in the future, but a utopia is not what motivated their solutions. Their solutions were not motivated by an ideal of perfection. Their solutions were motivated by the actual problems they were experiencing in society.
In Jesus’s first sermon in Luke 4, he quoted the prophet Isaiah and says the spirit of the Lord anointed him “to bring good news to the poor . . . proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”8 When John the Baptist sent messengers to Jesus to confirm if Jesus was the one to come, Jesus responded, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.”9 Jesus knew that John wasn’t checking on his doctrine. John wanted to confirm that Jesus was materializing the reign of God through healing the sick and aiding the oppressed.
The church in Acts continued Jesus’s healing work, but they also developed local communities where they shared all things in common and redistributed money and resources to those who had need. This is what living out the reign of God looks like.
Jesus said the last will be first and the first will be last in the reign of God.10 The reign of God is a direct challenge to the socioeconomic structure of society, promising to radically transform society so much so that the power dynamics would be directly flipped upside down. The French West Indian postcolonial theorist and activist Frantz Fanon quoted Jesus saying the first will be last and the last will be first to describe what decolonization looks like in practice.11
The early Christians lived this alternative lifestyle because they were certain that the current socioeconomic structure of Rome was about to end. They did not believe the reign of God would reform the reign of Rome. The reign of God referred to the way we live after Rome is destroyed. It turned out that Rome lasted a lot longer than they expected. And when Rome finally fell centuries later, more empires took power throughout history and continued oppressing those who Jesus seeks to liberate.
So living out the reign of God today means living alternatively to whatever empire we find ourselves in. We do not seek to reform oppressive institutions. We seek alternative solutions and care for our communities so that we may survive the inevitable abolition of our oppressive institutions.
Christians who want to materialize the reign of God on earth today must reflect on what Jesus meant when he spoke of the last becoming first and the first becoming last. We must determine what that flip in the power dynamic looks like in our current society. What institutions exist to maintain that divide between the first and the last? What institutions would Jesus seek to abolish in order for the reign of God to emerge?
When we understand the ways that white supremacy still functions institutionally, we see how much still needs to be repaired. Monetary reparations to Black Americans for chattel slavery would simply be a good start. Those who seek to truly transform our society to repair all that is broken demand much more than that. We must also recognize other institutions that have maintained racial divisions to this day, such as the prison–industrial complex (PIC).
Critical Resistance, one of many organizations that fight to end the PIC, defines the PIC on their website as “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems.” They go on to define PIC abolition as “a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.”12
Eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance may initially sound like a huge leap in a conversation about reparations for chattel slavery, but this is part of a larger effort to repair what has been broken through centuries of colonialism and white supremacy. As political activist and philosopher Angela Davis explains, it is clear that there is “an unbroken stream of racist violence, both official and extralegal, from slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan to contemporary profiling practices and present-day vigilantes.”13
Angela Davis argues,
There is a direct connection with slavery: when slavery was abolished, black people were set free, but they lacked access to the material resources that would enable them to fashion new, free lives. Prisons have thrived over the last century precisely because of the absence of those resources and the persistence of some of the deep structures of slavery. They cannot, therefore, be eliminated unless new institutions and resources are made available to those communities that provide, in large part, the human beings that make up the prison population.14
The commitment to building new institutions and resources is a commitment to the old and unfinished work of “abolition democracy,” a term Angela Davis uses in her book of the same name, taking after W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois used this term in 1935 when writing about the Black Reconstruction era that began in 1867. This reconstruction effort was aborted in 1877, leaving the reconstruction of Black communities unfinished. Angela Davis explains that “a host of democratic institutions are needed to fully achieve abolition—thus abolition democracy.”15
The absence of chattel slavery was not enough. The failure to create new democratic institutions to provide formerly enslaved people and their descendants with economic subsistence left the work of abolition incomplete. The PIC was invented to maintain the inequality that abolition was attempting to solve, so abolition democracy requires the abolition of the PIC too.
A popular claim is that racism is still alive in the United States primarily because of the people who are still talking about racism. Turn on the news or check social media and you’ll hear people say we are more divided than ever, and that this division is one of the biggest problems we face. They are right when they say that we are greatly divided. However, this division is caused by the alienation that is maintained by unjust institutions, not by us talking about it.
People claim in public discourse on these issues that those who are trying to abolish our divisive institutions are actually causing the division. Their theory is that these divisions will go away if we simply stop thinking and talking about them so much. This is what the justification of white supremacy often looks like today. It is not always through obvious bigoted statements, but also through demands for unity and peace without justice and liberation.
So when a Black person is murdered by the police and people respond with protests in the streets, then we must recognize that these protests are not solely a response to the specific murder, but to the “unbroken stream of racist violence” that the murder represents. The recent increase in protests against police violence is not because of an increase in police violence, but because of an increase in the ease of publicly sharing video footage of police violence on social media.
Alicia Garza, cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, describes the movement as a tactic to rebuild the Black liberation movement. She says,
When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. It is an acknowledgment Black poverty and genocide is state violence. It is an acknowledgment that 1 million Black people are locked in cages in this country–one half of all people in prisons or jails–is an act of state violence.16
When we ask about how we can repair that which was broken through centuries of white supremacy, about how we can bring an end to “the stream of racist violence,” about how we can heal our racial divisions and reconcile as a society, then we must listen to those who are calling for a radical transformation. If we claim that some activists are “going too far” or demanding “too much” or “too fast,” then we must ask ourselves if we truly have the radical imagination we need.
While many activists in the Black Lives Matter movement are fighting for a reformation of the PIC, many activists are also fighting for total abolition. Those fighting for abolition interpret the term “police violence” as redundant, claiming that the purpose of police is inherently violent. Many people become abolitionists after witnessing the failure of police reform again and again. Reformist policies often lead to increased police budgets to fulfill those policies, but increased police budgets often lead to increased police violence, causing an endless cycle.
In the reign of God, the last will be first and the first will be last. Materializing the reign of God looks like flipping the power dynamic, empowering the poor and the oppressed to take back power that was meant to belong to all of us.
The police force was invented two hundred years ago for the purpose of making sure this flip in the power dynamic never takes place.
The first official police department was founded in London in 1829, created and funded by business owners to control the crowds of striking workers with nonlethal violence so as not to create working-class martyrs that could lead to further riots. New York adopted this strategy in 1844 with teams of white citizen volunteers to manage the disorder of the strikes and protect business owners’ property. They also adopted strategies of the slave patrols of the South, which had existed since 1783 and were founded to prevent slave revolts through constant surveillance and harassment. As civil unrest increased, the budget, the power, and therefore the violence of the volunteer watch increased, culminating in the formation of the New York Police Department in 1845.
In the South, slave patrols evolved into police forces. After the abolition of chattel slavery, the South created “Black codes” that criminalized unemployment and turned various misdemeanors into felonies, transforming newly freed Black communities from an enslaved class into a criminalized class, coerced into slave labor once again in prisons.
Slavery was never fully abolished in the United States. It just evolved into the PIC, profiting off the labor of the imprisoned.
While this summary only skims the surface of the history of the evolution of policing and prisons, we can confirm that as wealth inequality has increased, civil unrest has increased, which has led to the state responding as they always have, by increasing policing and prisons. So even though policing has evolved in many ways over the centuries, the purpose of policing remains the same: social control.
The mission of the PIC is antithetical to the mission of the reign of God because the mission of the reign of God is to cultivate a world in which the last become first and the first become last, while historically, the mission of the PIC has been to protect and serve the interests of the first in society so that they remain first while the last remain last.
It is no coincidence that those who have the most motivation to abolish our unjust institutions are the most heavily policed and imprisoned. Sociologist Alex Vitale explains that police spend the vast majority of their time on patrol, which has been known to target mostly poor neighborhoods and people of color, “based on a mindset that people of color commit more crime and therefore must be subjected to harsher police tactics.”
Police argue that residents in high-crime communities often demand police action. What is left out is that these communities also ask for better schools, parks, libraries, and jobs, but these services are rarely provided. They lack the political power to obtain real services and support to make their communities safer and healthier. The reality is that middle-class and wealthy white communities would put a stop to the constant harassment and humiliation meted out by police in communities of color, no matter the crime rate.17
Our historical strategy for solving social problems has been suppression through violent social control. We must create alternatives that actually help us instead of further harming us. The goal of abolition is the development of new institutions that keep our communities safe and healthy so that we no longer need to turn to state violence to solve our problems.
Abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba encourages us to ask new questions. Instead of asking, Does this mean that I can never call the cops if my life is in serious danger? we should ask, Why do we have no other well-resourced options? Instead of asking, What do we have now, and how can we make it better? we should ask, What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?18
Conversations about abolition often lead to someone anxiously asking, “Well what do we do about murders, sexual assaults, and burglaries?” while ignoring the fact that police do not prevent murders, sexual assaults, and burglaries. The police are called after those crimes have been committed. Also, many people I know who are advocates for abolition have called the police after a murder, sexual assault, or burglary, and the police were either unable to do anything about it, or made the situation even more violent and traumatic. A more honest conversation about abolition begins with asking about alternative solutions besides state violence. It’s about collective organizing to create new institutions that adequately resource communities.
The truth is, the element most often linked to changing crime rates is not the rate of punishment by the state, but the rate of poverty. When poverty decreases, crime decreases. Instead of acknowledging this key fact we keep increasing police budgets, expecting it to work with no justifiable reason to.
Many of these conversations are cut short when someone throws their hands up and claims that organizing toward abolition is too extreme and impractical. This reaction is understandable, considering how stifled our imaginations are by pro-PIC propaganda, but frankly, I expect much more imagination from Christians. If you believe we are called to materialize the reign of God here on Earth, then you expose yourself as hypocritical when you dismiss radical alternatives for justice as too impractical. If we’re committed to the radical upside-down vision of the reign of God, then how could any alternatives be too impractical?
Abolitionists are often accused of being too pessimistic, and I may sound pretty pessimistic myself. When an abolitionist rejects ideas for incremental change, it could sound like they aren’t interested in change at all. A pessimistic attitude that discourages us from making any changes should be avoided at all costs. However, there is another kind of pessimism that we desperately need. This pessimism empowers us to do something radically different from what we are familiar with. After all, optimism for a new world begins with pessimism about the world in its current form.
In a surprisingly crucial way, the difficult work of building the world we hope for begins with “embracing hopelessness,” as the theologian Miguel De La Torre speaks of in his book of the same name. He criticizes hope as “a middle-class privilege,” arguing that it
soothes the conscience of those complicit with oppressive structures, lulling them to do nothing except look forward to a salvific future where every wrong will be righted and every tear wiped away, while numbing themselves to the pain of those oppressed, lest that pain motivate them to take radical action.19
This pain that motivates radical action is present in the hopeless pessimism of the Hebrew prophets, who did not call for the empires that oppressed them to reform, but to be destroyed. Jesus and his followers tap into this prophetic pessimism and imagine the emergence of the reign of God as dependent on the destruction of the reign of Rome.
Mary taps into this old prophetic pessimism as well at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. After she discovers she is pregnant with Jesus she praises God in a prayer, later known as the Magnificat. In the middle of this praise she says of God, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”20
These lines are inspired by various Hebrew scriptures that capture a similar theme, such as 1 Samuel 2:7–8: “The Lord makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor”; Sirach 10:14: “The Lord overthrows the thrones of rulers, and enthrones the lowly in their place”; and Job 12:19: “He leads priests away stripped, and overthrows the mighty.”
The vision of change that Mary adopts as she praises God is an uncomfortably violent one. For Mary, the lifting up of the lowly is unavoidably linked to the destruction of the powerful. You can’t have one without the other.
If you were to ask Mary about the kind of change she wanted, she would say that the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the rich are sent away empty. You may discourage her pessimism and encourage her to have more hope, but she would remind you that her hope is in the lowly being lifted and the hungry being fed. And she would remind you that it would only happen by the powerful being brought down. Mary did not hope that Roman society would implement the right reforms to reduce harm. Mary had no hope in the Roman Empire getting better. Mary is an abolitionist, not a reformist. Mary is a revolutionary.
You may struggle to relate to this radical hopelessness, but think about the ways hopelessness has set you free before. You may have thought an abusive relationship could get better, but then one day you realized the only healthy option was to end it. You may have struggled to stay a part of a local church, hoping your leaders would do better, but then one day you lost hope in them changing, and you left. You may have had some sort of worldview you used to force on others, thinking everyone’s lives would be better if they just thought the way you thought, but then one day you realized you were wrong, and let it go. You lose hope in these things because you realize your hope is in something larger. Your hope is no longer in things getting better, but in the creation of something new.
We are often quick to dismiss the pessimism that sees no hope in reform, but if we truly want radical change we must listen to these critiques. We must listen to the desperation for something new.
Rose Braz, cofounder of Critical Resistance, said in an interview, “A prerequisite to seeking any social change is the naming of it. In other words, even though the goal we seek may be far away, unless we name it and fight for it today, it will never come.”21
The reign of God functions in a similar way. You look around at the world in the first century and the twenty-first century, and it’s obvious that the world is not ruled by the liberation of God. The reign of God is a vision of the world to come, but we embody this alternative way of life right here and right now, even while living under a reign that we reject. Keeping that ambitious vision in view on the horizon empowers us to keep working toward it.
This is about a different relationship with time. Sociologist Avery Gordon talks about abolitionists keeping transformative time.
Abolition recognizes that transformative time doesn’t always stop the world, as if in an absolute break between now and then, but is a daily part of it, a way of being in the ongoing work of emancipation, a work which inevitably must take place while you’re still enslaved, imprisoned, indebted, occupied, walled in, commodified, etc.22
As I talk about the similarities between Jesus’s vision of the reign of God and the vision of abolition, I am not trying to force a Christian meaning onto the work of abolition or suggest that the work of abolition is really just the work of the reign of God without abolitionists realizing it. I’m saying that the best way Christians can fulfill the work of the reign of God today is to participate in the work of abolition. And by participating in the ongoing work of abolition, we gain a fresh understanding of the type of liberation Jesus talked about.
Abolitionist organizers Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein describe the daily work of abolition as fighting “to reduce state violence and maximize people’s collective well-being.” They write,
Abolitionists have worked to end solitary confinement and the death penalty, stop the construction of new prisons, eradicate cash bail, organized to free people from prison, opposed the expansion of punishment through hate crime laws and surveillance, pushed for universal health care, and developed alternative modes of conflict resolution that do not rely on the criminal punishment system.23
The only reforms worth supporting are reforms that fund our communities and give more power to the people in them. Supporting reforms that give more funding and power to the PIC keeps the violent cycle going. We need better solutions to social problems, and that requires us being open to solutions that we’ve never considered before.
Jesus encouraged his followers to materialize the reign of God on earth right here and right now. That materialization is dependent on the abolition of the unjust institutions that maintain our divisions. The Christianity of this land preserves these institutions, while the Christianity of Christ demands their abolition. Abolition is just about the most Christian thing we can do.