When I was invited to immerse myself in Jason Springs’s Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in Chicago, it was for a panel discussion of the book for the Lutheran Scholars Network. So I opened it with an eye to engaging his account of restorative justice as a Lutheran theologian. As I read, I thought also of my experience as a human rights activist that began in 1989–90 when I worked with the Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Central America (now on Latin America) as part of a year in the Lutheran Volunteer Corps. But I most found myself testing out Springs’s account of restorative justice practices—like the peacemaking circle—in light of my observations as someone who grew up in a town surrounded by the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, a largely Ojibwe reservation to which I did not belong, but which was part of the fabric of the rural county in which I was raised. Below I name and explore some open-ended questions about how urban restorative justice efforts might appear differently in communities that are rural and exist at the intersection of tribal and federal government authorities. I also pose a theological question about Springs’s depiction of peacemaking circles as a variegated, ecumenical expression of lived religion—a question that opens the door to wondering about when or how religious differences matter, wherever justice-seeking communities might themselves serve as an adequate and universalizable expression of religion.
Springs writes for a wide audience that includes both activists and scholars. Mindful throughout of readers who view prison abolition as a condition of truly transformative justice, Springs weaves together a thick description of restorative justice communities in Chicago and a multifaceted theoretical analysis that tags conversations in ethics, peace studies, and religious studies. He describes how interpersonal restorative justice practices, such as those that foster truth-telling encounters between perpetrators and those they have harmed, have made a profound difference for participants by building trust, accountability, and a sense of agency among those living in Chicago neighborhoods that have been destabilized by White cultural violence, “stigmatization, fragmentation, and marginalization” (84–85; chap. 6). Empowerment amid relationship-building in turn nourish organized efforts to transform laws regarding incarceration, however incrementally (78, 86, 134, 164–65, 181–82; chaps. 6, 14). Moreover, Springs argues that the pursuit and experience of a more just world is inherently religious in nature: when approached holistically, restorative justice provides a “framework” to both “envision and cultivate” life together “only because it fosters moral and spiritual forms of association between people” (1). Springs here draws upon the “analytical lenses of lived or everyday religion” to intervene in debates among prison abolitionists and restorative justice movements about whether restorative justice is just a “vague ‘spirituality’ that provides moral camouflage for the systemic injustice of mass incarceration” (12). Because it interrupts “a dichotomous framing of ‘the secular’ versus ‘the religious,’” the lens of lived religion reveals how the “sensibilities” animating restorative justice practices can be “modes of critical practice through which resistance to and transformation of social injustices become possible” (12; see also 182–86, 190).
Springs’s account of restorative justice practices is suffused with normative implications for how we ought to live, how we ought to structure society and responses to harm, and even how we ought to think about the sacred.
Springs illustrates his apologetics for restorative justice as lived religion by observing how features of lived religion—such as “collaborative resilience through shared meaning making” (12)—are at play even for non-theists in the central ritual practices of restorative justice, like peacemaking circles among perpetrators and those they harmed (103, 107, 196; Chapters 8, 10, 15). Whether “spiritual” refers to a transcendent reality or simply to nurturing the good of others beyond the self (107, 197), those involved in restorative justice often “use the term ‘spiritual’ to describe a basic reference for the interrelationality and communal bonds that are integral to human personhood” and their communities—and that are precisely what “the prison-industrial complex violates” (200).
How might construing restorative justice practices (like peacemaking circles) as lived religion inform a moral and spiritual account of the broader ways we dwell together in communities? What are possible theological implications with regard to the definition of religious belonging itself? Certainly Springs’s own account of restorative justice practices is suffused with normative implications for how we ought to live, how we ought to structure society and responses to harm, and even how we ought to think about the sacred. With this in mind, I will ponder Springs’s analysis of peace circles in relation to the moral and spiritual dimensions of broader forms of everyday life together when considered beyond the domain of restorative justice work in response to mass incarceration.
Restorative Justice and Communal Bonds at the Intersection of Tribal and Federal Sovereignties
I begin with a hypothesis: peace circles illuminate possibilities of community building and flourishing with justice, but not in a way that is directly replicable in all morally relevant spheres of our daily interactions—be they sacred (ritually set-apart) or profane (too mundane to consciously mark as set apart). However, if peace circles function something like what a Christian theologian like myself might call a sacramental center in a larger theory of lived religion, then we might interpret other domains of shared existence in light of what peace circles make visible, namely what Springs calls (drawing on John Dewey) a “common faith”—a form of religion or spirituality that centers human dignity in “relationships of mutual recognition and empowerment” (243–44).
I want to test this hypothesis with an example of a conflict in a community in which everyone already knows one another, to some degree. As I was reading Springs’s book, I found myself testing out his insights about restorative justice in relation to a conflict in my home county in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that involved abuse of police power, and something akin to reconciliation over time. I do not know if peace circles were employed at any point, but my hunch is that one challenge in using them in a rural community is that a circle would not be bringing together strangers who were enemies from a distance, but persons who already have lifelong bonds. If peace circles were used within the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC)—the locus of the conflict in the place I grew up—then they were not part of the public record as I know it, as someone who is not a tribal member. But thinking about the contours of the public story, I want to ponder both the limits and possible extensions of the moral and spiritual vision of “interrelationality and communal bonds that are integral to human personhood” (200) that Springs presents in his account of lived religion in the restorative justice movement, especially within the intimacy of a peacemaking circle among those estranged from one another.
How might construing restorative justice practices (like peacemaking circles) as lived religion inform a moral and spiritual account of the broader ways we dwell together in communities?
The Keweenaw Bay Indian Community overlaps with my hometown of L’Anse, Michigan, a town of about 2000 people on the shore of Lake Superior, which is part of Baraga County (pop. 8300). The county is named after Bishop Frederic Baraga, a 19th century Slovenian Jesuit priest who formed Catholic missions among Ojibwe or Anishinaabe communities all around Lake Superior. Bishop Baraga translated the Bible into Ojibwe, and is one reason why many members of the KBIC are Catholic in a way that comfortably integrates Indigenous practices. A friend on my high school debate team told me that Father John Hascall OFM Cap, the local Ojibwe Catholic priest at the time, taught that the Deer Spirit and Christ were the same. Even as a teenager, my friend contributed to efforts to canonize the first Native American saint, Kateri Tekakwitha.
In the mid-1980’s, KBIC became the first tribe to work through the legal hurdles in the federal courts to be able to open a casino on tribal grounds. One woman in my neighborhood had written a letter to the local newspaper, predicting that the mafia would come in, and that people would get addicted to gambling—as had happened to her ex-husband elsewhere. Indeed, it didn’t take long to see the effects of gambling addiction. A Lebanese-born couple that had a corner store split up when the husband put up the store one night when gambling, and lost.
Then, when I was living in Chicago in the 1990’s, my eye caught the headline on the front page of a Sunday edition of the Tribune: “Casino Fallout: A Tribe Divided.”[1] I knew the people in the cover photo, and realized the story was about the conflict in the KBIC. There was disagreement on the tribal council, in part about management of the casino and its profits. The tribal chief, Fred Dakota, who had the idea of opening a casino and worked to make it happen, was trying to remove tribal members who disagreed with him from the voting roles. A group called Fight for Justice (FFJ) formed and tried to physically protect the voting rolls in tribal headquarters. Fred Dakota had the tribal police arrest those who participated in even one FFJ meeting. Because Father Hascall had permitted FFJ meetings to take place on church property (next to tribal headquarters), he began receiving death threats. These tensions persisted, with local and state authorities unable to do anything, legally.
But then the other prediction of the woman in my neighborhood came true: Fred Dakota was arrested after evidence emerged that he was in fact working with the mafia. Because this was a federal crime, and because only federal courts had jurisdiction that superseded the tribal courts, Dakota ended up serving time in federal prison. While he was there, the tensions among tribal members began to fade. Last summer, friends said that the tribe is in a more inclusive, democratic space now.
This description of events suggests weight is placed on only the first of two focal points of Springs’s analysis: repair among particular individuals, on one hand; and transformation leading to the abolishment of the prison industrial complex, on the other. KBIC’s community college offers associate degrees in law enforcement to enable tribal members to secure jobs at the Michigan state prison that opened in 1993. A restorative justice lens might ask whether the experience of an abusive use of tribal police authority should instead prompt the kind of soul-searching that leads to dismantling tribal law enforcement, rather than training workers for the state prison. Instead, the tribe has invested in available employment opportunities—the prison and casino alongside forestry, fishing, natural resource maintenance, and cultural investments such as the annual pow wow. Baraga County used to rival Detroit’s Wayne County in having the highest poverty rates in the state. Now it is just below the national average of 12.5%.
Moreover, justice that involves giving one what is one’s due (118) also involves attending to the collective level. Here thinking about a tribal context can extend Springs’s own nuanced approach to debates about the degree to which justice requires fundamental transformation of state institutions (e.g., prison abolition) rather than restorative justice within existing legal systems. Conditioning belonging to tribal lands upon tribal identity means that where a restoration of tribal sovereignty is part of a vision of justice in response to the legacy of European colonization, Native strategies might be used that look unjust in another context. In high school, I learned that my house was on land that a tribal member had sold under the Dawes Act, and that the tribe wanted it back. Today, I’ve heard that if a tribal member buys property that falls within the limits of the reservation boundaries (which also encompass all of Baraga, one of the county’s two largest towns), that tribal member should not resell the property except to another tribal member.[2] Here a restrictive housing covenant has a restorative intent rather than a racist one. Relatedly, I doubt the tribe would cease to arrest non-Native poachers on tribal lands. Abandoning tribal police power would easily erode tribal sovereignty established by treaty. In this context, might regarding prison abolition as what Dewey calls the ideal “ends-in-view” (Springs, 244, n. 10) prevent seeing how the very right to possess the coercive power of a state—in this case, through tribal justice systems—can itself be reparative, not simply retributive? Preserving tribal communal bonds involves relating well to the larger world by maintaining a distinctive community to which most cannot belong, except as friend or neighbor.
Theological and Ethical Musings on Local Depolarizing as a Restorative Justice Practice
Thinking theologically, Christians might here constructively engage what Luther called the first use of the law: finding moral purpose in using tribal police powers to curb sin and foster good order for an Indigenous community marred by European colonization. This principle can be expressed without a theistic framing by any who perceive a place for tribal deployment of authorized force to protect a tribal community from harm.
With regard to misuse of tribal power itself, the moral practices I witnessed at play in the KBIC conflict might offer insights for how restorative justice is sought within tight-knit communities (rural and/or tribal), with or without the utilization of peacemaking circles. One practice was removal of an abusive leader. When the tribal chief was sent to a federal prison, others in the tribe found themselves depolarizing. There can be a time and season for removing a member of one’s own kinship group and re-setting relationships without their authoritative presence. Perhaps that can be done without a prison system. But notice that the moral framing here is not one of dehumanizing punishment, but of forced accountability through temporary removal of a known person who had made destructive decisions, set within the desire to re-humanize relations within the larger community.
A second practice I witnessed in the easing of tensions is one Springs mentions in relation to peacemaking circles and the debates between abolitionist and restorative justice movements: recognizing moral complexity. After Fred Dakota was imprisoned, my father said that in spite of whatever Fred did wrong, he respected Fred for having the foresight and drive to move the tribe beyond what my father perceived to be its demoralized state in the mid-20th century. Whatever one may think of casinos, Dakota was a leader in developing the tribe economically.
A third depolarizing practice is simply tacking in a new direction relationally, without the intense confessional and explicit plan of reparation available through a peace circle. In this case, Dakota’s desire to hold onto power and disempower those who were not his allies was interrupted by his violation of a federal law that was itself only part of his wrongdoing. But the broader tensions in the tribe dissolved in part because, in his absence, new tribal leadership took shape. The democratic processes within the tribe allowed this to occur. But so did the passage of time and the various ways that people in at least smaller communities simply find to live together—sometimes talking about the traumas, and sometimes just doing things differently than before. To take a different example: while there is far more accountability that Christians could and should do in relation to our long history of anti-Judaism, post-Holocaust liturgical changes often do move in another direction from those of past centuries. When asked, Christian students in my college courses in Illinois have rarely heard a sermon that calls for the conversion or persecution of Jews—even as antisemitism persists in other forms. Does this kind of simple shifting of gears—without public repentance or direct resolution of a past conflict—have a name among ethicists?
Springs’s analysis of peace circles as lived religion, buoyed by a vision of restorative justice, prompted me to think about how to analyze the moral and spiritual dimensions of conflict resolution in the more diffuse forms both often take in the historical life of communities. The perhaps instinctive depolarizing practices I’ve described are worth ethical analysis, even if they might not bear the ritual marks of lived religion as peace circles do.
A Concluding Theological Question: Is God-Talk Redundant?
This brings me to a final question: Does Springs’s account of restorative justice as lived religion imply a kind of perennial philosophy of being-in-right-relationship that applies to all—whether they identify as religious or as secular? If so, are more particular religious identities superfluous?
In Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, Christine Helmer and I describe the heart of Christian identity as justification by faith, not as being about picking one side when there is a genuinely contested vision of what constitutes justice. Baptismal belonging enables Christians to see themselves in what Springs calls “relational personhood” (78) with one another within the corporate body of Christ. Instead of having to morally earn the right, they are gifted with belonging to one another in a covenantal way. From there, the Spirit stirs Christians to ask and debate what justice looks like.
Would Springs suggest that centering justice for the Beloved Community as itself the beating heart of a lived religion? Love of neighbor as oneself—with or without love of God?
While Springs’s rendering of restorative justice as an expression of lived religion makes room for a Christian position like ours, I wonder if he might suggest that what really matters is the hunger for justice and flourishing as the sufficient center of any lived religion. He writes that “John Dewey’s account of religious sensibilities best describes the kinds of lived religion and moral and spiritual characteristics of restorative justice practices” (243, n. 10). Dewey defines what’s “religious” as “any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end, against obstacles … because of conviction of its general and enduring value.” Here relational personhood is both a basis for a theory of justice, and its ideal end once it is more fully achieved in actual relationships. Would Springs suggest that centering justice for the Beloved Community as itself the beating heart of a lived religion? Love of neighbor as oneself—with or without love of God?
Readers will answer such questions for themselves in various ways, of course! Springs’s own emphasis was on making a case for perceiving restorative justice practices as moral and spiritual in nature, across all manner of theistic or non-theistic worldviews—not necessarily to promote a normative religious vision that is reducible to a barebones notion of interrelationality. Perhaps he might suggest that this is a necessary and sufficient definition of rightly lived religion. All the same, some of us will hunger to develop Springs’s account of restorative justice by utilizing the vocabulary and fuller frames of reference found in our respective religious or theological understandings. However, all readers will find an array of stories and interpretive lenses to ponder deeply in Springs’s intricate, moving, and accessible portrait of restorative justice practices in Chicago.
[1] Paul Salopek, “Casino Fallout: A Tribe Divided: The Ojibwas of Michigan’s Upper Peninsulaare Reaping Riches from Gambling, but a Fight for Control of the Cash has Sparked a Civil War that is Tearing Apart their Lives and Reservation,” Chicago Tribune (1963-1996), Jul 07, 1996.
[2] Is this a norm or tribal law? It may depend on future interpretations involving the distinction between “allotted lands” (owned by individuals, perhaps dating back to the Dawes Act) and “assigned lands” (owned by the Tribe and assigned to families). See, for example, Article VII, Section 4 of the Constitution and By-Laws of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community of Michigan: “Upon the death of any Indian holding a standard assignment his heirs or other individuals designated by him, by will or written request, shall have a preference in the reassignment of the land, provided such persons are members of the Community who would be eligible to receive a standard assignment.”
