![\"\"](\"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/ABOLITIONISM.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
We need to abolish the culture of policing on every level, including how it tracks and critiques the behaviors and expressions of others.\u201cWhen we say abolish police. We also mean the cop in your head and in your heart.\u201d \u2014 <\/i>Tourmaline<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n Liberation theology is defined as \u201ca movement in Christian theology that emphasizes liberation from social, political, and economic oppression.\u201d This philosophy has been utilized in freedom struggles from Latin America to Palestine, including the Civil Rights Movement in America. But liberation theology must be taken further to emphasize abolitionist thought and practice.<\/p>\n As young Black people, most of us know someone who has stopped going to church or denounced Christianity as a whole because of the toxicity they experienced in their religious community. I don\u2019t blame them \u2014 the modern Black church is notorious for its homophobia, transphobia, misogynoir, and ableism. For many, the church is a place where bodies and behavior are policed to an extent rarely seen in modern public spaces.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a place where Black women are explicitly told to be \u201cseen and not heard\u201d or are victim-blamed for assault or violence. It\u2019s a place where Black autistic people must repress self-regulatory behaviors like vocalizing or stimming. It\u2019s a place where Black queer people must go back into the closet. It\u2019s a place where Black trans people must answer to their deadname and incorrect pronouns. It\u2019s a place where talking behind someone\u2019s back or telling people how they should dress or act is accepted and encouraged in some cases.<\/p>\n RELATED:\u00a0<\/b>The Black church taught me to be a docile victim, and now I renounce its lessons<\/b><\/a>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n As a queer, gender non-conforming, disabled Black woman, I know the violence of the church from firsthand experience. Some of the earliest panic attacks I can remember having were at church, specifically when I\u2019d have to sit near certain people who were notorious for bad-mouthing their fellow congregants.<\/p>\n As a modern abolitionist, getting rid of prisons and law enforcement agencies isn\u2019t enough.\u00a0We<\/strong>\u00a0need to also abolish the culture of policing on every level, including how it tracks and critiques the behaviors and expressions of others.\u00a0<\/b>The fact of the matter is, Jesus wasn\u2019t a cop \u2014 so why should we act like cops to our community members in Jesus\u2019 name?<\/p>\n Many Black churches and Christians think of themselves as \u201cgood Christians\u201d in a war with \u201cnonbelievers.\u201d Those who do not conform to certain rules of comportment are inherently \u201csinners.\u201d\u00a0 That label is often placed on multiply marginalized Black folks who refuse to be unquestioningly submissive to arbitrary, repressive rules.<\/p>\n Just as Christians from various denominations, including the\u00a0Methodist Church<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Quakers<\/a>, utilized their faith to fight back against pro-slavery arguments, we must tap into that legacy now.<\/p>\n To me, this dichotomy of \u201cgood Christians\u201d versus \u201csinners\u201d is all too reflective of our larger culture of disposability: one that portrays people who believe in the racist police state as \u201cgood citizens\u201d or \u201cgood Americans\u201d and people who defy that system as \u201cthugs\u201d or \u201ccriminals.\u201d There are many religious communities where someone can get shunned and removed from the community for breaking a rule that doesn\u2019t hurt anyone; how dissimilar is that to the way people are removed from society and thrown in prison for committing victimless crimes?<\/p>\n Some Christian sects fixate on the rapture, when they believe \u201cgood Christians\u201d will receive eternal life while \u201csinners\u201d will be sent to suffer forever in hell. The idea of hell is merely an eternal carceral facility; it\u2019s a place where people\u2019s agency is taken away in the name of punishment. Other denominations focus heavily on the Old Testament of the Bible, which is rife with examples of God punishing humans deemed sinful. These fixations are used to police church members and keep them living in perpetual fear that they are not good enough, and therefore will be damned in the afterlife.<\/p>\n RELATED:<\/b>\u00a0Prison abolition is more than a lofty theoretical. It\u2019s also unpretty, everyday practices of resisting state policing<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n What is faith without the idea of hell or the rapture \u2014 the idea of eternal punishment? What is faith without punching down on others for supposedly not being good enough in the eyes of God? What happens when Black churches abolish these carceral ideas and instead recognize that we are\u00a0all<\/i>\u00a0imperfect, mortal, and ultimately, human? What do we really believe in when we take policing out of our faith?<\/p>\n Abolishing police and prisons is an important step of abolitionist praxis. But we also need to abolish our dependence on policing as a mechanism of maintaining order. Policing doesn\u2019t\u00a0actually<\/i>\u00a0maintain order; it merely creates a fearful underclass so that people with privilege can keep their power over others. In our wider society, that fearful underclass is Black people; in Black churches, that underclass is Black women, disabled people, and queer and trans folks.\u00a0Our faith communities, which have long been revolutionary and liberatory spaces at odds with a racist America, should not be reproducing oppression.<\/b><\/p>\n Policing, whether by the state or by a community, is policing \u2014 which means it needs to go. Abolition necessitates transitioning from a society dependent on policing, disposability, and fear to a society with acceptance of all identities, experiences, and expressions at its core. If you advertise your faith community as a loving and accepting space, it must not police its members. Your church should and must be abolitionist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We need to abolish the culture of policing on every level, including how it tracks and critiques the behaviors and expressions of others.\u201cWhen we say abolish police. We also mean the cop in your head and in your heart.\u201d \u2014 Tourmaline Liberation theology is defined as \u201ca movement in Christian theology that emphasizes liberation from Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33749,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[56,133,788,59,1],"tags":[310,1088,1158],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33745"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33745"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33748,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33745\/revisions\/33748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}