Domenichino, The Rebuke of Adam and Eve, 1626. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Public Domain.
Would Noah have updated his Instagram story while building the ark? On TikTok, millions have watched Artificial Intelligence-generated short videos that imagine just that: Bible characters recast as modern-day influencers in 2025. We see a pregnant Mary posting vlogs from a barn—giving it five stars for privacy and zero for comfort—and Daniel livestreaming from inside the lion’s den. For many viewers, these may be humorous, ephemeral clips to be “liked” and scrolled past. Part of their appeal lies in making ancient stories relatable; imagining Moses checking his phone for a “divine notification” collapses the temporal and cultural gap between the distant past and the familiar present. For all their humor, however, these AI-generated vignettes are more than fleeting memes or “AI slops.” They are also potent artifacts that show how today’s most powerful computational systems can be used to repurpose ancient texts, extending a colonial logic that operates in a datafied world.
While different AI large language models (LLMs) may think differently, they do not imagine in a vacuum; they draw on a vast corpus of digitized information, including biases baked into centuries of texts and images. In one popular TikTok video featuring Eve as an influencer, she is consistently cast as a slender, blonde, White woman, posing in a curated Eden. Whereas the book of Genesis indicates that Eve’s husband was “with her” when she took the fruit (Genesis 3:6), the AI-generated video isolates her in the scene and later has Adam declare, “This is literally your fault, Eve!”—a line entirely absent from the biblical text. This algorithmic canonization of bias, in fact, echoes centuries of patriarchal interpretive patterns of gendered blame placed on Eve in art and commentary. On a textual level, this was done by omitting the phrase “with her” in a number of versions of the English translation of the Bible, including the Revised English Translation (1989), as Julie Faith Parker demonstrates (740). Whether by mistake or on purpose, this lost phrase in translation has now been reproduced by an algorithm, giving an automated imprimatur to centuries of a misogynistic interpretation that has long assigned primary culpability to the woman.
AI-generated vignettes are potent artifacts that show how today’s most powerful computational systems can be used to repurpose ancient texts, extending a colonial logic that operates in a datafied world.
Yet the problem runs deeper than the replication of existing prejudices. The production of AI-generated biblical retelling exposes a discrepancy between what these models actually know and the human perception of their knowledge and credibility. LLMs generalize across assorted data types by processing through the model’s dominant language. This means an English-dominant model processing the Genesis account in different languages, along with medieval Eve paintings and contemporary influencer aesthetics will think about all of them through an English-centric framework, collapsing them into a seemingly coherent but essentially distorted output. Meanwhile, humans also generalize about LLM capabilities, assuming that these models exhibit human-like patterns of expertise and believing that a model’s ability to produce a desired result is a sign of reliable understanding.
More than reviving predispositions and spins, the phenomenon of AI-generated videos based on the Bible exemplifies what Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias define as “data colonialism”—a new and intensifying phase of capitalism that continues the extractive logic of historical colonialism through a new mechanism they identify as the “appropriation of social resources” (85). While historical colonialism involved the seizure of tangible assets like land and natural resources, data colonialism appropriates social resources, including human behaviors, relationships, desires, and expressions, and transforms them into a resource for profit. In her critique of current AI ethics, Rachel Adams also argues that AI’s reliance on Eurocentric modes of thought and racializing logics constitute a universal “colonial rationality” (179, 182–85). Seen through the lens of coloniality, this dynamic not only extends extractive relations but also reveals how the epistemic hierarchies of colonialism persist beyond the formal end of colonial rule, suggesting that AI’s modes of knowledge production may reproduce these enduring asymmetries.
The issue isn’t just in the AI training data or the architecture of the LLMs, but in the collapse of critical distance between user and machine. The algorithms that drive AI do not just illustrate a story; they decide how that story should look, feel, and be received by millions of human users, whose agency in the decision-making process is steadily diminishing. Guided by user prompts, these systems can reinforce the dominant values of the influencer economy—charisma, relatability, and aesthetic polish—and map them onto the ancient text. In this way, these AI-generated videos can do what empires have done for centuries: reshape the Bible to match the logic of cultural power. When the Bible arrived in colonial India, wielded by British missionaries, a group of Hindu intellectuals began to “talk back.” As R. S. Sugirtharajah shows, they did not simply reject the biblical text. Rather, they reinterpreted it as an act of cultural and political resistance. Thinkers like Keshub Chunder Sen, for example, argued for an “Asiatic Christ,” seeking to detach Jesus from his European missionary packaging and reclaim him for an Eastern context (64–65). Through this reshaping, the Bible became a text that could coexist with India’s many divinities, rather than a monolithic text of global dominance (210).
“Eve as a modern-day influencer in Eden, based on the biblical narrative in Genesis 3.” Image generated by the author using Sora (OpenAI, 2025).
To be sure, this is not the first time the Bible has been reimagined. Appropriation and reproductions are at the heart of the history of biblical interpretation. What we see on TikTok today is one of the latest iterations in a long and contested history of humanity’s relationship with scripture across different cultures and eras. The Bible has always been repurposed to reflect cultural priorities that are never socially and politically neutral, and such reinterpretations are often direct responses to the ancient text’s own ambiguities. Consider the passage preceding the flood in Genesis 6, which describes the encounter between the “sons of gods” and the “daughters of humans” and mentions the mysterious Nephilim. Read on its own terms, the text portrays neither the Nephilim nor the event as sinful. In verse 4, their origin is set against the backdrop of unions between divine beings and human women, but the text contains no language of wickedness or corruption that could justify the flood that follows. The passage, however, took a different interpretive trajectory in late antiquity. The book of Enoch recasts the brief, cryptic passage into a full-blown cosmic rebellion. In its version, fallen angels, led by Shemihazah, descend to earth, take human wives—an act described as a “great sin”—which results in the birth of giant offspring, the Nephilim (1 Enoch 6:3–6). This retelling has proven influential for centuries, resurfacing in modern pop culture—most notably in Darren Aronofsky’s film Noah (2014), which visually adapts these fallen angels as colossal, rock-like beings.
The common thread in these examples is that interpretation did not just explain the Bible; it reshaped its meaning. Where ancient readers saw gaps and filled them with giants and fallen angels, modern humanity sees those same spaces and fills them with AI-mediated imaginations, reflecting our own digital selves back at us. The challenge, then, is not whether such reinterpretations should exist—they always have—but how responsibly and consciously we produce and consume them. The Bible’s stories endure precisely because they are retold, yet each retelling, whether inscribed on parchment, rendered in paint, or generated in pixels, carries the political weight of interpretation—the power to reinforce or subvert certain meanings. An Eve with an iPhone might look like a laughable meme, but it is also a mirror—reflecting how today’s most prominent digital technology continues to carry the age-old struggle over who owns the Bible’s meaning.
At this juncture, I argue that a decolonial response should not demand a simple dismissal of AI technology. Instead, it can emerge through the pursuit of a counter-exegesis that engages both ancient scripture and our modern experience of human-computer interaction. In the similar way that Couldry and Mejias’ concept of “counterhistories” challenges dominant historiography’s singular narrative (111), a counter-exegesis can invite us to uncover multiple possibilities in the human interpretation of life, including the afterlives of scripture. The very algorithms designed to capture our attention and appropriate human desires also generate an unprecedented exposure of our collective consciousness—what some find humorous, what others hold sacred, and what we are willing to rationalize as typical. This exposure can become a site for critical intervention toward the decoloniality of the data paradigm. The human task, then, is to move from being the data that AI models read and consolidate to becoming readers and interpreters of the algorithms, so that human meaning remains not a resource to be mined but an unfinished future sustained by the friction of conscious interpretation.
Ki-Eun Jang is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Fordham University, Bronx, NY. Her forthcoming book, Contesting Labeled Identities: The Sociology of Gentilics in Biblical and Northwest Semitic Literatures, examines both the social world of ancient West Asia that produced the Hebrew Bible and the intellectual legacy of modernity that has shaped how the (post-)modern humanities have conceived of materials received from the past.
Edgar, c.943/4-75. Illuminated manuscript. Charter of Edgar to the New Minster, Winchester, 966. MS Cott. Vesp A. VIII, folio 2, verso, British Library. S 745. Edgar is flanked by the Virgin Mary and St Peter, and he is offering the charter to Christ, who sits enthroned above, surrounded by four angels. Sean Miller, Charters of New Minster, Winchester, 2001, pp. 95, 105. Cropped image, via Wikimedia Commons.
Introduction
In seventeenth-century England, incorporation once described a moral act: the joining of persons into a common body under law, bound to shared purpose and enduring beyond individual lives. The language of incorporation, the way in which it was imagined, was theological before it became technical, linking corporate life to divine order and civic obligation.
In July 2025, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz moved its corporate registration from Delaware to Nevada. The decision followed a series of court rulings in Delaware that expanded the personal liability of corporate officers and directors. Nevada instead offered fewer restrictions, weaker fiduciary enforcement, and no obligation to prioritize stakeholder interests. Andreessen Horowitz left Delaware claiming its courts had become unpredictable and biased against founders of companies, while Nevada offered statutory protections and business-friendly reforms that ensured greater certainty for boards and investors.
The move was part of what commentators have begun to call “DExit,” a growing migration of firms out of Delaware in search of looser rules and lighter scrutiny. For much of the twentieth century, Delaware attracted corporations because it provided a reliable court system and laws that favored managerial discretion. That stability once anchored corporate governance, but it now serves as a point of departure for firms seeking greater freedom elsewhere. Either way, the shift away from Delaware reflects a deeper transformation in how corporations understand their legal identity. The modern corporation no longer receives its structural form from the place where it was chartered or created, it instead selects that form according to its advantage. This flexibility is praised as efficiency but functions as a flight from jurisdiction that undermines the public good.
In seventeenth-century England, William Sheppard, author of the first book in English devoted entirely to corporate law, described incorporation in very different terms. In Of Corporations (1659), he defined a corporation as “an Aggregate of many persons” who, “by their common consent,” are able “to grant, give, receive, or take any thing within the compass of their Charter, or to sue, and be sued, as any one man may do.” A corporation, in this formulation, was not an empty legal container that was easily transmutable or transferable based on convenience. It was a public body formed through consent and defined by its myriad obligations, which endowed it with the privileges of legal personhood only within the bounds of its charter. In Sheppard’s early legal theorizing, incorporation was intended to approach a higher calling. The ability to incorporate into one imaginary body gave to man, he wrote, “the nearest resemblance of his Maker, that is, to be in a sort immortal.”
The corporate person has been stripped of its public character and remade into a fugitive form, defined less by fellowship or place than by the pursuit of advantageous exemptions to the detriment of society.
Sheppard’s account reminds us that incorporation was once imagined as a sacred covenantal body, granted authority and bound to obligation. This language belongs to the early modern tradition of political theology, where law and sovereignty were repeatedly framed through theological concepts. As Carl Schmitt later argued, “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (35), a claim especially evident in the way Sheppard grounded incorporation in divine analogy. The move from Delaware to Nevada by Andreessen Horowitz reveals how far that vision has collapsed. This post argues that the corporate person has been stripped of its public character and remade into a fugitive form, defined less by fellowship or place than by the pursuit of advantageous exemptions to the detriment of society.
Sheppard and the Moral Framework of Incorporation
William Sheppard’s short book begins with a spare definition. “A Corporation, or an Incorporation (which is all one) is a Body, in fiction of Law; or, a Body Politick that indureth in perpetuall succession.” He distinguishes between natural and political bodies, noting that abbeys and priories once counted among the latter, while ecclesiastical, civil, and mixed corporations continued to be recognized as distinct legal forms under mid-seventeenth-century English law. This juridical body, unlike a natural one, could endure beyond the lives of its members, own property, and act in law as a single agent.
Sheppard returns repeatedly to the idea that a corporation is both artificial and moral. He describes it as “a body politick, Authorized by the Lord Protector’s Charter, to have a Common Seal, Head-Officer, or Officers and Members; all which together are able by their Common consent… to sue, and be sued, as any one man may do, or be.” Or again, “an Assembly or Cominalty, of many men… joined together in a City, Town, or Burrough, into one fellowship, Brotherhood, or Mind… for their mutuall good, and advantage in a perpetuall succession.” In this respect, the corporate body was a legal fiction with continuity beyond the lives of its members.
Title-page to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’ (London: Andrew Cooke, 1651)
Sheppard pressed the comparison further with his claims about a corporation’s resemblance to humanity’s “Maker,” and that resemblance carried theological and ethical weight: privileges were justified only by common purpose and service to the greater good. Sheppard argued, “other Laws are adapted, but for the benefit of Individuals [but the law of corporations] has a more noble end, and, if it were possible, would preserve the species.” Perry Miller called the biblical idea of covenant “the marrow of Puritan divinity,” a reminder that early New England Puritan communities grounded collective obligation and authority in covenant with God.
Modern corporate law preserves the structure Sheppard described while emptying it of his moral frame. The Delaware General Corporation Law sets out nearly the same list of privileges and capacities, which include perpetual existence, the right to sue and be sued, and the power to hold and transfer property (§122), along with broad authority to exercise all powers “necessary or convenient” to business purposes (§121). These provisions reproduce the same powers Sheppard described. What has changed is the foundation: where he linked incorporation to obligation and higher purpose, the statute presents it only as an instrument of business and profit.
In Sheppard’s framework, the immortality of the corporate body signified far more than continuity of legal rights for this imagined creation. It instead represented a form of ethical durability, a way of binding people into common moral-ethical purpose that outlived any single generation. Sheppard’s account presented incorporation as a covenant that joined members into a lasting civic and economic fellowship. The privileges of perpetual succession and collective authority carried meaning only when they served the wider commonwealth, and the privileges of incorporation were justified precisely because it marked a higher calling rather than a private refuge.
Corporate Personhood as Legal Fiction
Sheppard developed his theory in the service of a political revolution. By 1659, Oliver Cromwell’s revolutionary regime was unraveling, but Sheppard remained committed to the constitutional and religious logic that had underwritten the republic. Sheppard’s corporations were conceived as something more than economic instruments or institutional conveniences. They were mechanisms for sustaining collective identity in a tumultuous interregnum period after the execution of Charles I.
During Cromwell’s Protectorate, Sheppard was appointed to commissions charged with revising borough charters and systematizing legal procedure. Of Corporations reflects that work, since it treats incorporation as a legal device that authorized towns, guilds, and other bodies to act with a single voice and to endure beyond the lives of their members. In his account, the corporate “artificial person” provided a framework for order and continuity at a moment when traditional institutions were unsettled and in search of a stronger legal foundation.
Ernst Kantorowicz showed that the doctrine of corporate and political bodies drew on the Christological model of the king’s “two bodies”—mortal and immortal fused into one enduring persona. Sheppard’s legal fiction of the corporation belonged to this wider tradition, in which the durability of collective life was justified by analogy to divine order.
In Sheppard’s scheme, incorporation created a body that carried defined obligations. Charters were read “with the most favourable interpretation in Law” so as “to advance the Work intended by it,” and increasing revenues “shall be imployed to the publique use of the Corporation.” Ordinances had to be “reasonable” and “not repugnant to the Laws,” and clauses that “restrain the liberty of Trade” were “unlawfull.” A corporation could even be “dissolved by the Lord Protector.” The form bound members into a continuing entity answerable to authority and to the uses for which it was founded.
In Sheppard’s framework, incorporation was a grant that imposed both opportunity and duty. Modern corporate migrations treat incorporation as a matter of jurisdictional choice, a way to secure advantage rather than a framework that binds members to a shared responsibility. By eliding these responsibilities and fleeing a location when it is convenient, the corporation ceases to live up to its foundational function.
From Fellowship to Evasion: The Corporate Form in Transition
Andreessen Horowitz’s move to Nevada shows how incorporation has become a tool of evasion. Nevada law provides a ready refuge: broader protection for directors, narrow grounds for shareholder suits, statutes designed to guarantee continuity with fewer constraints, and a complete imbalance of power between the corporation and the state. The decision illustrates how incorporation now serves those seeking freedom from accountability rather than those seeking a common charge. This trend means the corporation’s function has been dissolved for something different, something less accountable and ultimately detrimental to the health of society. Nevada is inviting these operators in as a means of competition, but who stands to benefit most from these changes?
As noted above, in Sheppard’s time, the durability of the corporate body rested on its service to the commonwealth with a defined purpose. When that purpose failed, the grant could be revoked.
Today this durability is detached from such conditions. Reincorporation lets firms carry their identity freely across borders without hesitation, reshaping their duties while keeping intact the privileges of continuity. Legal theorists call it regulatory arbitrage. It is better seen as the flight of a legal fugitive, a body that survives by outrunning jurisdiction. In this form the corporation survives as a legal body emptied of the responsibilities that originally gave it legitimacy.
Theological and Political Implications
When Sheppard wrote of corporations, he described their formation as a kind of legal act of divine creation. The charter raised a group from the status of individuals into a single body, capable of acting and enduring beyond the span of its members’ lives. This body could speak and bind itself to contracts and causes. The corporation’s survival was not natural, it was granted by law, conditional on the terms of its creation and the moral grounds that justified its existence.
Modern law guarantees that corporations can shift their legal home without interruption. Delaware’s General Corporation Law §259 provides that, after a merger or consolidation, the surviving corporation inherits “all the rights, privileges, powers and franchises” of its predecessors, along with their debts and duties. Nevada’s Revised Statutes §92A.205 sets out a process for conversion in which a company may file articles of conversion and continue its existence in Nevada under a new charter. Together these statutes establish that corporate identity carries forward even when jurisdiction changes, ensuring continuity of privileges while allowing the conditions of accountability to be renegotiated.
Closeup of the Nevada State Seal on the Nevada Historical Marker at Schellbourne, Nevada. Via Wikimedia Commons.
This legal durability is often treated as a neutral feature of business organization. In practice, it allows corporations to preserve authority while escaping obligations. The corporate body persists even as its charter is rewritten, its duties narrowed, and its relationship to the wider community reduced. Sheppard warned against such uses, insisting that incorporation was a covenant formed in public for common purpose. He framed it as a legal exception grounded in moral order. Modern corporations treat it as a default mechanism of enterprise, stripping continuity of the responsibility that once gave it legitimacy. At a time when environmental and political challenges demand greater accountability, the ability of powerful firms to cross jurisdictions without pause represents a collapse of the corporate form’s initial public purpose.
Philip Goodchild observes the same dynamic in contemporary finance, where “all are under an obligation to spend or acquire money and to view the world from the perspective of one who seeks to spend or acquire money. All political demands must be subordinated to the obligation to preserve the stability of a fragile financial system” (214). In this respect, the modern economy reproduces a political theology of obligation, binding collective life to an abstract order while evacuating it of covenantal purpose. The result is a form of incorporation in which obedience to markets dictates the terms of collective life. What endures is a corporate body reduced to compulsion, emptied of a moral covenant and common purpose.
Conclusion: Resurrecting or Refusing the Corporate Body?
Sheppard framed incorporation as a legal elevation: to be made one body with others, endowed with rights and duties, given special privileges, and permitted to act as a single agent in law. That elevation carried moral and civic expectations. The ability to speak, act, and endure as an artificial person was granted for a purpose, and the state retained the right to dissolve it when that purpose failed. The present debate over “DExit” shows how far this logic has collapsed. In Nevada, companies can reincorporate without public scrutiny, benefit from statutes that broadly limit director and officer liability, and adopt indemnification provisions that further protect executives from personal exposure, often shifting their legal presence without altering their practical operations. The law preserves continuity while removing accountability. Some, of course, will argue that corporations exist only to serve their investors and stakeholders.
Yet if corporations claim only fiduciary duties, why are they granted public protections, perpetual life, and the power to rewrite their obligations by moving across jurisdictions? If they are legal persons, why do they inhabit an imaginary legal world without borders while the rest of us remain bound to the one they have so significantly damaged? Sheppard’s framework reminds us that incorporation is not a neutral filing process but a political act that creates power with consequences for the entire community. The question is no longer whether corporations can flee jurisdiction but whether we are willing to authorize forms of corporate personhood that dissolve their public responsibility at the very moment when responsibility is most needed.
Brandon Taylor is an Assistant Professor of English at Mount Marty University, where he specializes in early modern literature and political theology. His research explores how literary and rhetorical forms intersect with institutional and economic structures in the seventeenth century. He is the author of Empire of the Unincorporated (forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press), a study of how corporate discourse shaped political authority and colonial ambition in early modern England. He is also developing a TEI-based digital edition of The Letters of John Chamberlain, building an open-access archive of early modern political correspondence at earlymodernletters.org
Protests at the Supreme Court of the United States on the day Roe vs Wade was overturned. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In Restorative Justice and Lived Religion, Jason Springs is deeply invested in establishing that restorative justice is a strategy that can transform the systemic injustice of America’s carceral system. He builds his case by analyzing a variety of activities that restorative justice advocates pursue in their work in and around Chicago. While all of the strategies that he describes are deeply intentional, they are not always focused directly on facilitating systemic or structural change. This begs the question then of how to define transformation.
Strategies for Change
Working to theorize the dialectical relationship between individual moral and theological formation (virtue ethics) and transformational structural change that leads toward justice (social ethics), I have been challenged to think concretely about the goals and efficacy of different types of strategies that religious social ethicists and activists pursue in our work for social change. I think these categories bear on how Springs thinks about the transformative potential of restorative justice. I have categorized three types of strategies—reform, transform, and revolution—for pursuing social change. The purpose of naming and describing these different categories is not to suggest that they exist in any type of hierarchy of importance (or virtue) but to recognize that they are distinct and that they do different kinds of work.
Reform is the work of procedural change. It engages in incremental change that can be transformational for individuals, but it does not effect systemic change. Examples of reform work or procedural change include the incredible work that members of CRIIC (Communities and Relatives of Illinois’ Incarcerated Children) engaged in to effect the significant reforms that Springs describes in the book:
Changing the number of visits for inmates across Illinois from four to seven a month
Resisting replacing in-person visits with virtual visits
Changing the predatory pricing of vending machines during visits
Fighting the arbitrary exclusion of family visitors on visit days
To be clear, these reforms were enormous wins that changed the quality of life for the CRIIC members and for their incarcerated children and these wins should be celebrated. Reform is an essential element of social change that addresses the immediate injustices that make life challenging on a day-to-day basis. But reform rarely touches the structural injustices that shape our world. They make the systems a little more humane or bearable, but they don’t fundamentally change the systems.
Transformational change, on the other hand, is that work of social change that is targeted directly at changing the very structures that shape our social life: the carceral system, the education system, the funding of elections, etc. “Zero tolerance” and “three strikes” are examples of policies that marked a transformational change (albeit a negative one!) in the carceral system in the US in the 1980s. Such change led to the current punitive, racialized policing that Michelle Alexander has labeled “the New Jim Crow.” Structural change in the carceral system would represent changes that did more than make the lives of inmates more humane, it would change the policies that make it easier for innocent people to plead guilty, or equalize the penalties for crack cocaine and powder cocaine, or eliminate the “Broken Windows” and “Stop and Frisk” policing that dominate the streets of urban America.
At the same time, it will be almost impossible to achieve the kind of transformative structural change that restorative justice seeks without also recognizing the importance of revolutionary change. Revolutionary change is focused on ideological or worldview change and it is virtually impossible to imagine moving beyond the “Broken Window” or “Stop and Frisk” policies until we work to unlearn and defang the deeply violent ideologies of White supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny that are the undercurrent and lifeblood that shape not only our carceral system but also the public who tolerates, supports, and encourages it. This kind of revolutionary ideological change is the kind of change imagined by the most radical branches of the prison abolition movement who imagine a world where incarceration as justice is anathema. Instead, their vision is for a world that sees and values the humanity and human rights of all people and seeks to address problems of crime through rehabilitation, education, restorative justice, and the building of communities of justice and peace. For this kind of deep revolutionary ideological change we would need to move from a retributive justice model to a restorative justice model and this requires nothing less than a complete ideological shift and a concomittant structural reconfiguring of our economic and social relationships to reflect a world in which people have access to the education, jobs, wages, healthcare, housing, and other basic social needs to build lives of meaning and purpose.
Let me shift now to parallels in my own work with reproductive justice to further illustrate the point of why ideological change is necessary and how and why theology and religious communities are essential to long-term successful social change.
Abortion & Reproductive Justice
People concerned with issues of reproductive health, rights, and justice face a hegemonic ideology that functions similarly to the way retributive justice works in relation to the carceral system. Namely, we live in a country where abortion has been demonized, along with the people who have them. It is a country deeply shaped by an ideology of justification that believes abortion is immoral and therefore women must justify their desire to end a pregnancy. This hegemonic worldview of justification shapes how we think and talk about abortion in the US and is reflected in the ubiquitous polls that ask if people think abortion should be legal always, never, or under “certain circumstances”—those circumstances primarily representing what are considered to be the morally acceptable justifications for ending a pregnancy. I call these the PRIM reasons: prenatal health, rape, incest, and mother’s life. PRIM abortions represent roughly one-quarter of abortions, meaning 75% of abortions in the US are culturally condemned by an ideology of justification brought to us by misogynist and patriarchal interpretations of Christianity.
In other words, absent misogynist interpretations of Christianity that teleologically women are to be wives and mothers and the relatively recent invention of fetal personhood—there is no foundation for requiring people to justify their desire to end a pregnancy. This ideology of justification not only undergirds how we think and talk about abortion in the country, it impacts our ability to build a culture rooted in reproductive justice.
Early strategies to decriminalize abortion in the 1960s took two different tacks: repeal or reform.
The reform approach sought to rewrite the statues to decriminalize and open up access to abortion care. And while Roe made abortion legal nationally through the point of viability, the incremental nature of Roe’s impact was evident in its vulnerability to successive waves of anti-abortion reforms that chipped away at people’s access to abortion care. This began almost immediately after Roe was implemented in 1973 when two years later the Hyde amendment was passed. This amendment prohibited government funding for abortion, making abortion access more difficult and even impossible for economically vulnerable women, many of whom were young and/or BIPOC. The precarity of the reform approach became increasingly obvious through the 2010’s as Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Provider (TRAP) laws and abortion bans began to be passed across the country, ultimately laying the groundwork for the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe.
The repeal approach sought to provide longer lasting structural change around the policing of women’s sexuality and women’s reproductive autonomy by taking the issue out of the legal system entirely. The argument of those who took this approach was rooted in an human rights approach, which held that women have basic human rights that must be respected, including the right to bodily autonomy and the right to make decisions about whether and when they will bear children. Taking abortion out of the legislative sphere entirely would have had the transformational structural impact of placing abortion back in the sphere of health care where it belongs.
Ultimately, however, the problem that we face with regards to abortion is not one that can be solved either by procedural changes (reform) or structural changes (transform) because as long as we live in a culture that marks abortion as sin, tragedy, and death, not only will abortion be vulnerable to recriminalization, people having abortions will be subject to shaming, stigma, and the public violence of forced pregnancy and death.
Unless and until we reject the idea that abortion is murder and dismantle the justification framework that supports it, not only will we continue to fight about where to draw the legislative line about abortion, but we will also fail to move beyond the profound stigma associated with abortion. A stigma that not only allows for things like abortion bans to pass but that also fosters the internalized stigma and a culture of silence and shame associated with abortion. Building the kind of deep ideological and revolutionary change needed to move toward reproductive justice requires reimagining our theological understanding of pregnancy, abortion, and parenting. It is only when we replace the justification ideology with a worldview that reflects a commitment to reproductive justice that we will know we live in a society that values people equally and that respects that individuals are capable of managing their reproductive power with dignity and grace.
Conclusion
Similarly, we cannot trust that any progress we make on reforming laws related to inmates or policing or sentencing are secure when we continue to live under an ideology of retributive justice. Similar concerns to the ones I outline about abortion access would apply if we were able to repeal the “Broken Windows” and “Stop and Frisk” approaches to policing. What is revolutionary about restorative justice is that it seeks a complete shift in the ideological foundation of how we think about crime, harm, community, safety, and the common good. So, yes, the work of restorative justice can and does focus on transforming the hearts and lives of individuals and on transforming the material structures of the prison-industrial complex. But the true success of the movement will only come when the principles, values, and practices of restorative justice replace those of retributive justice. That is what revolutionary ethics looks like.
Dr. Rebecca Todd Peters is Professor of Religious Studies and Founding Director of the Poverty and Social Justice Program at Elon University. Her work is focused on globalization, economic, environmental, and reproductive justice and she is author of Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice(Beacon, 2018). Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), she has been active denominationally and ecumenically for more than thirty years and represented the PCUSA as a member of the Faith and Order Standing Commission of the World Council of Churches for eighteen years. She serves on Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Clergy Advocacy Board, is a founding member of SACReD (Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity), and the 2025-26 President of the Society of Christian Ethics.
Statue of Bishop Baraga. Those five pillars represent the five Ojibwe communities around Lake Superior that Bishop Baraga served.
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.”
Amy Carr is a Professor in the Department of Race, Religion, Gender, and Multidisciplinary Studies at Western Illinois University. She is co-author with Christine Helmer of Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice(Baylor, 2023), and at work on Facing Divine Affliction: A Lutheran Theodicy for the Sinned-Against as part of a Cascade series on Lutheran reconstructions of doctrine. She has served in leadership roles with the Midwest American Academy of Religion, and currently serves as a representative on the Faculty Advisory Council to the Illinois Board of Higher Education, where she thinks with colleagues across the state about all manner of higher ed issues.
“Layers,” by Flickr User Steve Crane. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
In Restorative Justice and Lived Religion, Jason Springs argues that mass incarceration in the US is being challenged via restorative justice practices. These practices are being enacted by people living in the communities that have most suffered from mass incarceration and its rippling harmful effects. As Springs documents, mass incarceration has wreaked havoc on the economic, social, political, and spiritual lives of people living in predominantly Black and Brown communities across the US. Springs trains his attention on a few neighborhoods in Chicago where local community members, accompanied by restorative justice practitioners, have instituted alternative practices to redressing harm than that of the retributive model of the state. In response to harm, the state locks people away, often for years. But in some of the communities where restorative justice initiatives have been implemented, people gather in face-to-face meetings where they work to repair the relationships that have been harmed as a result of wrongdoing.
This analysis is at its best in the chapters where Springs recounts his on the ground engagement with practitioners in the Precious Blood Ministry in the Back of the Yards community. Here, sometimes with sanction from the state, an alternative to the retributive model for addressing harm is being practiced. Crucially, for Springs, it is through the enactment of this alternative for repairing harms and achieving justice that a critique and transformation of the wider system of mass incarceration is able to take place. This transformation is not sweeping—it is not a revolution—but occurs rather through piecemeal work, community-by-community, person-by-person. Springs’s ultimate argument is that restorative justice practices and the values they cultivate in practitioners create the virtues necessary to combat mass incarceration at more structural levels. This might occur when members of the community advocate for changing laws around sentencing practices for minors or in working within the system to create more pathways for restorative justice alternatives for those who are caught up in the criminal justice system. As Springs notes, such work is slow and requires constant vigilance to avoid being coopted by the system of retributive justice. But rejecting any involvement with this system, as those who call themselves abolitionists often do, is simply not possible for those seeking to redress the harmful effects of mass incarceration in the present.
I want to focus in this post on what Springs argues is one of the secrets to restorative justices’ success and to its transformational vision for the wider system in which we attempt to repair harm in this country, and that is spirituality. I argue that Springs’s critique of purist accounts of abolition—which advocate for more restrictive understandings of religion to counter the secular state—are on target, but his account of restorative justice might be strengthened by reframing it not only as a set of practices and a theory of justice but as a moral tradition in its own right. The payoff of characterizing restorative justice in this way is that it clarifies its potential as a robust alternative to the dominant form of justice as practiced in our society.
Restorative Justice, Lived Religion, and Spirituality
Let me first unpack the role of lived religion and spirituality within the larger argument of the book. It is most clearly in the final two chapters that Springs clarifies how he understands the role of religion in the practices and values of restorative justice. For him this role is best exemplified by the category of lived religion, which refers to “meaning making that takes place through ad hoc practices of piety, reverence, devotion, and informally (or perhaps formally) ritualized action” (191). In other words, lived religion points to the everyday ways in which people embody their religious identity, rather than to the doctrinal and institutional forms of practice that we might typically associate with religion. Lived religion, for Springs, is no less of a “valid” or “authentic” form of religious practice, and in fact is responsible for the success of ministries like Precious Blood. Even though Precious Blood is associated with the Catholic Church, the restorative justice practices that they engage in at their ministry have been developed over time in what Claude Levi Strauss would have called a “bricolage” manner, drawing on ideas and practices from various religious and Indigenous traditions (see also Jeffrey Stout’s repurposing of this idea in the field of religious ethics). Springs meticulously documents how these practices are carried out at Precious Blood and the profound positive impact that they have had not only on those who have been victims and perpetrators of harm, but also their wider communities. By not being associated with any particular religious tradition, those who might otherwise avoid such practices are made welcome. Indeed, Springs adopts the language of “spirituality,” which is often derided by scholars, to describe how those engaged in restorative justice work understand their purpose. In the “co-creation of community” and in an other-regarding ethics, Springs makes the case for a lived religion and spirituality that enables a transformative vision of criminal justice in this country.
Springs counters those critics who see in this spirituality an unmoored form of religious practice that is all surface and no depth. For such critics, without tethering the practices and values of restorative justice to a particular religious tradition, such practices are unable to have a substantive effect on the problem of mass incarceration. They risk conceptual drift and at best help individuals without addressing systemic problems. For critics of restorative justice, this form of restorative justice does not pose real problems to the power of the state because of its weak spirituality. Where the Christian tradition offers a trenchant and historically and traditionally grounded vision of harm, punishment, and restitution that can counter the state’s power, restorative justice in the form currently practiced merely offers a bland and ultimately unimpactful alternative. For some critics, then, the goal should not be the reform of the current system via restorative justice practices, but instead its abolishment. And because the state operates on a secular logic, it is religion that should lead the abolition movement.
Springs adopts the language of “spirituality,” which is often derided by scholars, to describe how those engaged in restorative justice work understand their purpose.
Springs pushes against this binary choice—both in terms of secular vs. religion and reform vs. abolition—via the categories of lived religion and spirituality. The movement for abolition, as he sees it, is too often the victim of idealist thinking from intellectuals who do not face the grim realities that are the result of the New Jim Crow. But it is nonetheless accurate in its diagnosis of the dire conditions faced by marginalized communities. As such Springs proposes a transformative vision that pushes for dramatic change to the system while focusing on the “ad hoc” practices of restorative justice as the means to achieve such change. By showing how restorative justice not only offers an alternative to individuals within the criminal justice system but also makes possible a transformation of the structures that undergird the system, Springs attempts to thread together individual and structural transformation.
Restorative Justice as a Tradition
Springs’s critique of the secular/religious binary as it operates in these spaces is compelling. His on-the-ground analysis shows the seriousness with which practitioners of restorative justice engage their work and the measurable impacts they are having in their local, state, and national communities. But one area where I would like to do some conceptual unpacking and critique is in his use of lived religion and spirituality. Springs sets these in somewhat of an opposition to “official” or “doctrinal” religion. He does not claim that those who bring their religious beliefs into restorative justice spaces are wrong to do so, but rather that the restorative justice space is one that is characterized by a kind of Rawlsian overlapping consensus. Such consensus makes it possible for a host of people who might or might not hold the same religious beliefs to come into a shared space where they pursue common goals. In this space, they might begin to cultivate a shared spirituality based in the practices that are developed and refined over time. Nonetheless, in this case, for Springs, it seems like the more flexible approach to religious identity is preferable to a stricter understanding. But in order to retain this flexibility, Springs is compelled to use more moderate language in his description of what restorative justice actually is. At times in the book he refers to it as a “framework,” an “ethics,” “a set of practices and values,” perhaps least modestly as a “critical praxis,” and even a “theory of justice.” But he does not, as far as I could find, theorize it robustly as a tradition. In fact, Springs often sets “tradition” in opposition to restorative justice. And this does make some sense since to refer to it as a tradition would perhaps risk seeing it as too restrictive in its practices. Yet, I worry that avoiding such a description diminishes the robustness and compellingness of restorative justice as an alternative to retributive justice. The latter, which is supported by “law and order” politicians—however cynically—is often steeped in the language of tradition and this is in part what gives it its power. For example, Republican Senator Josh Hawley, in his address to the 2024 National Conservatism conference grounds his vision of “law and order,” with its retributive approach to migration and protests against police violence, in his particular reading of the Augustinian Christian tradition. In such a climate why not boldly name restorative justice as a tradition?
I think that Springs has, perhaps inadvertently, already demonstrated that restorative justice is a moral tradition in its own right via the content of the book. If we define a tradition as “a historically extended, socially embodied argument” as Alasdair MacIntyre does, (1981, 222), or as “enduring discursive practices,” as Jeffrey Stout does (136), we might begin to see why this is the case. In the heart of the book, Springs outlines the norms, practices, and history of restorative justice movements. He provides arguments for why practices like sitting in circle are effective for transforming relationships and communities. Given Springs’s engagement with the extensive literature on restorative justice in these sections of the book, it is clear that these practices are themselves contested and argued by those committed to restorative justice. Springs also speaks of restorative justice as aiming at promoting “human flourishing,” a not immodest goal that is often spoken of in scholarly debates around the aims of tradition. This might make Springs a bit nervous. For one of the things that makes restorative justice so powerful, in his view, is its dynamism. A longer quote from Springs on this:
Restorative justice has an array of historical origins and sources, is conceptualized in manifold ways, and is implemented in a variety of configurations. It is constituted by a historically instituted set of practices that are as dynamic as the communities in which they are developed. It is precisely this internal diversity that affords restorative justice ethics and practices hybridity and flexibility that can accommodate numerous specific religions and moral traditions, as well as ethical humanisms and nontheistic philosophies. (192)
The virtue of this rendering of restorative justice is that it is flexible and amenable to different contexts and historical moments. The risk, of course, is that in being so flexible it loses its hold as a coherent philosophy and worldview. This latter risk is not merely semantic, but practical. For part of what makes a tradition successful or not is its ability to create a coherent set of assumptions and practices that are able to be built upon by later generations. Knowledge and experience allow for the critique and improvement of practices and ultimately lead those in the community closer to attaining the ends that they seek. If the community is unable to sustain this dialogue through time, it might prove unable to sustain itself as a tradition, and in this case, as a plausible alternative tradition by which justice is meted out in this country. As noted previously, Springs has already begun to outline the contours of the restorative justice tradition in the bulk of the chapters in the book. By theorizing it explicitly as a tradition—or perhaps part of a tradition, like the democratic one—he would only strengthen the potency of these sections. And we need not adopt the more siloed understanding of tradition that communitarians and now postliberals like Hawley put forward. For as Springs reminds us, concrete reality is messier than we often give it credit for in the academy. People move between and within different traditions on an everyday basis in our democratic society.
As I have suggested, the language of tradition is impactful in the public sphere and can help bolster restorative justice ethics into the public realm more profoundly. The language of tradition continues to be used by the Right in the United States to promote misogynistic, anti-LGBT, and heteronormative views and laws that support those views. By reclaiming this language, the Left might strengthen the case for alternatives to their worldview that include traditions like that of restorative justice. In Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout argued against those who oppose democratic culture with that of a pre-liberal or post-liberal traditionalism. He notes, “Democracy is a culture, a tradition, in its own right. It has an ethical life of its own, which philosophers would do well to articulate” (13). Perhaps the same could be said of restorative justice in the context of Springs’ work.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His forthcoming book with UND press is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Fun Spot America, Orlando Funhouse America. Via Wikimedia Commons.
“White power is the very undeclared, silent, confident domination of the world.
They don’t have to assert continually because we live in their dictionary.”
The flaw in asking how far someone wishes to go down the rabbit hole is the assumption that we are not already trapped in the rabbit’s Hell. This becomes even clearer when a Black scholar is asked how deeply we intend to deconstruct the very disciplines that frame our writing and teaching. It assumes that we somehow landed upon these disciplines, rather than recognizing that the principalities and powers shaping the normative world foisted the terms of disciplinary order upon us. The fallacious notion that scholarly discourse can ever take place outside of this funhouse overlooks the fact that deconstructing these disciplines from a rabbit’s Hell represents, for many of us, a practice of emancipatory possibility. At the very least, it embodies a transgressive determination to keep our Black minds engaged in a profession and a world that functions as a kind of funhouse. This funhouse of academic disciplinarity order features shifting floors, trick mirrors, and other devices designed to scare and deceive those who teach, write, and establish our scholarly becoming within the region and shadow of disciplinarity. The arresting machinations underlying this funhouse ontology lead many to believe that the prize of legitimation is attainable—if only we can discover the door within the funhouse that truly offers something valuable for the Black scholar daring enough to enter while embracing the mantle of Black Theory.
It is within this Rabbit-Funhouse-Hell that I ask the question that will guide my brief contribution to this symposium: What is the relationship between disciplinarity, antiblackness, the demands of justice, the institutional study of lived religious experience, and the academic study of religion writ large in the United States of America in the 21stcentury?
During a panel at the 2024 AAR conference about his book,Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in America, I discussed with Jason how his generous sharing of the book allows us to explore these ideas. I consider any invitation by a colleague to tarry with their research a deep honor and a high privilege I dare not take lightly.
Tarrying with Lived Religion
Central to Springs’s argument is the claim that restorative justice initiatives can challenge and transform the racist system of mass incarceration in the United States. According to Springs, this transformative potential relies on restorative justice’s capacity to foster moral and spiritual associations among people. Springs asserts that a holistic approach to restorative justice can serve as both a theory of justice and a basis for concrete practices. This framework nurtures moral and spiritual connections, allowing individuals to envision integrated approaches to community life and societal structures. By exploring this framework, we can observe restorative justice embodied in practices that reflect the dynamic nature of everyday moral and spiritual sensibilities.
During my brief attempt as a panelist to present my reflection, I shared that, as someone deeply invested in the core themes animating his research, I am particularly intrigued by the conceptual methodologies underpinning the project: transformation, spirituality, structural racism, and mass incarceration. As a discussant, my aim was to invite a deeper consideration of the theoretical implications of Springs’s work for political theory and the Black study of religion. Specifically, I sought to explore how a robust account of Black theorizations of religion and politics—especially those focused on antiblackness as a structural antagonism inherent to modernity and the emergence of nation-states—can expand and challenge the frameworks that shape his argument. While I would love to elaborate on how Springs’s work gestures toward and could benefit from a deeper engagement with Black political and religious theory, I have chosen to devote the rest of this essay to the following line of inquiry I presented before the panel, which elicited the clearest—and most varied—responses: What do we gain by critiquing the systemic evils of mass incarceration if we do not also critique how the principalities and powers that produce mass incarceration shape the academic disciplines that scrutinize and promote our research? What is lost in an account of the relationship between structural racism (i.e., antiblackness) and restorative justice if it does not also explore the connections between antiblackness, governmentality, and the study of lived religion within academia?
What do we gain by critiquing the systemic evils of mass incarceration if we do not also critique how the principalities and powers that produce mass incarceration shape the academic disciplines that scrutinize and promote our research?
Specifically, we must critically tarry with power in all its visceral discursivity as we consider the disciplinary frameworks that dictate who can be recognized as engaging in “legitimate” theoretical discourse worthy of substantive engagement within the academic discipline of religion in the United States. Put another way, those who currently hold the levers of disciplinary power within religious studies departments must summon the requisite boldness to ask aloud who within the discipline possesses the power to center some theorizations at the peripheralizing expense others? Who among us wears the badge that polices and lies? This manner of forensic science is crucial for apprehending the racial logic that determines what is codified within disciplinary curricula and syllabi as “foundational to the study of lived religion” versus what is ghettoized, peripheralized, and ornamentalized as little more than “contextual,” “specialized,” “densely abstract,” and “highly stylized” Black stuff.
As I tarried with Dr. Springs’s crucial intervention, I immediately noticed that, while he specifically charges those committed to practicing, researching, and teaching restorative justice to “relentlessly” focus on the systemic and structural causes of injustice, that same charge does not appear to extend to scholars who view lived religion as the conceptual anchor guiding their research within the discipline. Although Critical Participatory Action Research is his primary methodology, Springs presents lived religion as a conceptual anchor for those seeking to study the practices aimed at transforming structural violence. As I reflected upon Springs’s treatment of lived religion—and the broader power dynamics producing the terms of disciplinary order structuring the study of religion in the United States—I found myself contemplating the degree of separation between the structural causes of injustice underpinning mass incarceration in the United States and the horror-soaked terms of order that continue to structure religious studies within academia today.
Religious Studies, Lived Religion, and the Peripheralization of Black Theory
The most promising quality of Springs’s book also serves as its most pressing growing edge. In the book, Springs offers scholars a form of radical (in the etymological sense of deep-rootedness) witness that, if not also directed back at the antiblack discursive formations shaping the disciplinary terms of order governing the field of lived religion and religious studies writ large, risks denying the full power thereof. Unfortunately for the study of lived religion in the United States, Black theorization and Black lived religious experiences continue to present an aporia within the discipline of religion, characterized by a profound disjunction between the voluminous contributions of Black theorists and their continued peripheralization to the second-order categorizations of “highly stylized,” “sub-fields,” and “contextual studies.” Aporia here refers to a state of perplexity or doubt, encompassing the contradictions and unresolved challenges within the discipline itself that it fails to engage with fully. This aporia illustrates a critical gap, where innovative perspectives that challenge established norms are often overlooked or excluded from codification with normative theoretical discourse. In an era where systemic inequities are under heightened scrutiny, the discipline’s failure to engage meaningfully with Black theorizations—beyond the pervasive trope of the “talented tenth,” sporadic epigraphs, or guest features in chapters reliant on often uncredited influences—reveals a troubling refusal among its gatekeepers to confront uncomfortable truths. This avoidance risks leaving the discipline of religion in a precarious state, teetering on the edge of hospice care, where it may struggle to justify its relevance and vitality in a viscerally disturbed and disturbing world. Religious Studies, from a disciplinary perspective, functions as a funhouse, captivated by its own distorted reflections, yet it neglects to confront the aporia that lingers in relation to Black theorizing. This refusal is rooted in the conceit that the methodologies and theories currently shaping the norms of the discipline meet the demands of a disturbed and disturbing world. As the embryonic study of religion took form in the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Black thinkers were also producing knowledge about and contending with the category of religion. These thinkers were constitutively foreclosed from the universities and lecture halls where the discipline was being codified. So they did what we have always done; they theorized outside. In the work of 19th-century abolitionists like David Walker and organic political theorists like Maria Stewart, we find a counter-approach—an anepistemological rejoinder to the formal study and practice of religion in the United States—not anchored in some Western, Euro-dominant academic delusion of political neutrality or detachment, but in the practice of abolition and the unfinished project of freedom.
If we produce an account of lived religion that conforms to existing disciplinary terms of order and does not constitutively engage Black theorists, restorative justice will merely become another room in Religious Studies’ Funhouse.
As we know, the discipline of religion structurally foreclosed such counter-approaches to study, both from the process of disciplinary canonicity and from the possibility of shaping methodological, pedagogical, theoretical, and publishing approaches. The haunting consequences of this exclusion continue to punctuate the discipline today. Accordingly, despite a genuine and commendable desire to use lived religion as a conceptual methodology to propel the discipline of religion out of its social and political malaise, I am concerned that if we produce an account of lived religion that conforms to existing disciplinary terms of order and does not constitutively engage Black theorists, restorative justice will merely become another room in religious studies’ funhouse.
To be clear, I do not believe that Springs is trying to assert some semblance of academic authority over the communities with which he spent a season building deep relationships. I honor that aspect of his work and commend him for it. My concern with Springs’s work and with lived religion in general is that academic scholarship centering non-White communities often makes the curious claim that theorists emerging from these communities do not need to anchor the theoretical account of their lives, their struggles, their striving. I am reminded of this every time I think about a moment when a White colleague earnestly told me they assign a White scholar of lived religion at the beginning of their course to provide students with the language and skills to engage the case studies that follow. It just so happens that one of the weeks they were covering Black-led protests against state-sanctioned violence. This colleague believed—and probably still remains convinced—that the only way to facilitate a conversation about Black protests in Mississippi is to have a White man provide the necessary terms of engagement.
The problem that I am emphasizing here does not originate at the publishing state but, rather, at graduate formation. Graduate programs are political in the sense that they are the site where individuals enter to engage in the struggle of knowledge production in the hope of generating knowledge that will impact, inform, shape, and challenge society. If grad students are not challenged to confront Euro-dominant epistemic biases or their reflective tendencies to center a White scholar when 15 Black scholars are ready, published, and available, then the discipline of religion will continue producing candidates who will stare at a hiring committee with a straight face and assert that Black students need to learn proper theoretical language from White experts before they can discuss Ferguson or South Central Los Angeles in a manner that is disciplinarily acceptable. The most chilling aspect of this is not the statement itself but the synchronized head-nodding and “mmmhmmm-ing” that are almost certain to follow. In the 21st century, Black lives, deaths, and afterlives are still brought into disciplinary order through white theorists who establish the boundaries and borders of the normative discourse. Of course, Black theorists are invited to join in, provided we understand the proper order of things.
James Howard Hill Jr., Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Religion and Faculty Affiliate in African American & Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University. His scholarship explores the entanglements of race, culture, ecology, political theory, and theorizations of religion and secularism. He is the author of two forthcoming books: The Michael Jackson Cacophony: Antiblackness, Secularism, and Popular Culture (1963–1988) (University of Chicago Press) and The Haunted Fantastic: On Faith, Vocation, and Critical Hope (Fortress Press). Hill’s work engages archives of film, music, performance, social movements, and lived experience to interrogate how governance, imagination, and practices of freedom converge in (post)modern life. Moving across and beyond disciplinary boundaries, he seeks to illuminate how cultural forms and political practices generate possibilities for survival, critique, and transformation. Beyond academic writing, he is developing creative nonfiction, children’s literature, photographic essays, and a multimedia platform on vocation, pedagogy, and critical faith. He lives in Boston with his wife, two children, and dog.
The concept of justice is attracting much theological reflection today. The current interest is in different kinds of justice for specific groups and issues, such as climate justice, civil rights, women’s reproductive justice, and economic justice, which are implicated with the others. This reckoning with justice is not new, of course. The history of Christian theology reveals a longstanding preoccupation with the concept. Justice is one of the preeminent divine attributes, as Paul writes in Romans 1:17. It was on this verse, in turn, that Luther concentrated his exegetical efforts, casting his reformation breakthrough as a new understanding of the iustitia dei: God makes the sinner just in Christ. The doctrine of justification in Luther’s theology thus connects God’s justice to human justice.
I bring a theological perspective that connects justice and justification to my introduction of this book symposium featuring Jason A. Springs’s recently published monograph, Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in Chicago. Springs’s book, as the following responses concur, articulates a vision of justice-seeking that has political and legal dimensions, as the basic concept of justice denotes. But the social, religious, and spiritual forces of the book are its attributes that are most inspiring and generative. In fact, as Springs claims, the type of justice he is interested in, namely restorative justice, has to do with the building of social relationships that have spiritual and religious resonances. Restorative justice attends to the repair, restoration, and reconciliation of persons as they become connected to each other through the building of relationships. Springs studies peace-making circles in a particular community on Chicago’s South Side, namely the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, that was established to do the slow, careful, and delicate work of building relationships among persons who have been harmed by the political, legal, and executive actions producing the mass incarceration of Black persons. Sometimes such a peace-making circle, which usually centers on those harmed by police violence, also involves the perpetrator, such as a police officer, who has done violence to someone in the community. The restorative justice model transforms the perpetrator-victim relationship to one in which the perpetrator acknowledges their agency in harming another, while the victim (re)claims agency by narrating what they have experienced vis-a-vis the other. Repair, restoration, and reconciliation are the aims of the newly framed relationship. This model of justice focuses on cultivating personal relationships through an attentive awareness of the other. By means of such personal transformation, social transformation ensues. Justice is established in and through relationships, just as justification is the creation of reconciled relationships on the basis of the divine justice.
Springs’s book offers us the opportunity to reflect on justice in the polyvalent terms he deploys. The authors contributing to this symposium are cognizant of how the various aspects and areas of human existence in contemporary society—political, legal, cultural, environmental, and religious—contribute to either justice-denying or justice-seeking projects. Each author represents different approaches to theorizing about and advocating for justice. They show that the task of justice is central to our work as citizens, scholars, and practitioners in the arts of becoming persons to and for each other. The symposium attests to the intention of Springs’s book—that we take restorative justice seriously as a viable practice for social transformation. Whether that society is the community of researchers, as James Howard Hill Jr. notes, or a community of learners in prison, as Connie Mick describes, or a gathering of women advocating for the rights of pregnant women to choose to host a fetus for a time, as Rebecca Todd Peters relays, society is better served by intentional relationship-building that honors the agency and contributions of every person in it. Springs’s attention is on the local; yet the promise of restorative justice as he envisions it is global, for persons and for creation. Justice is for, and justice creates, what theologian Thomas Berry referred to as the “communion of subjects” (17). It is a glimpse of the divine justification intended for the entire cosmos—a vision of the reality in which Christ will have reconciled all things to God (2 Corinthians 5:19).
Our symposium begins with a methodological reflection on how scholars might embody the kind of justice they study. James Howard Hill Jr. begins by tracking the self-reflexive question: Do scholars perpetuate injustice, even as they study justice, by denying theoretical agency to the persons they study? Hill probes the genealogical deficit and theoretical limitations of scholarship in his field of religious studies. Black scholars tend to be marginalized from genealogies of the discipline and White scholars tend to restrict their theories to the critical traditions they have inherited. How can the academic community practice restorative justice for both its Black researchers and the Black persons studied? Hill presses us to think past a politics of citational practices or a model of inclusion that can be capriciously revoked under a new political regime. He asks us to imagine and to realize communities of researchers who search for truth about the world with each other. If scholars adopted practices of restoring relationships among themselves, their theories would cohere with their actions, and their quests for knowledge would embody the knowledge they learn from their neighbors.
Josh Lupo, meanwhile, is interested in the question of whether religions are to be regarded as traditions, and if so, how such traditions exist? The question of construing a religion as a tradition has to do with the inheritance of a nineteenth-century approach to religion, specifically Christianity, that privileged historical construction. A religious tradition is founded on an identifiable origin that then sets parameters into historical motion. Subsequent history exhibits traits of these parameters such that the tradition is recognizable as such throughout its different historical expressions. Lupo’s concern is whether the restorative justice model constructs religious sensibilities of a distinctive sort through its cultivation of relationships that might constitute a distinctive religious tradition. Lupo suggests that while this model is not a “tradition” in the above historical sense of the term, it has possibilities for sustaining spirituality through relationships that are both local and flexible. Even if spirituality is not explicit in discussions, it is central to them, in the senses that Springs identifies in his book. Furthermore, Lupo is interested in using this model to expand the restrictive and disciplinary notion of tradition as used by law-and-order politicians to make a case for the concept of tradition implied by restorative justice with its commitments to the human dignity of all participants, even as these practitioners of this model contribute to the tradition(s) of democracy.
The authors of the two subsequent contributions take their local experiences of restorative justice as points of entry. They both consider how Springs’s analysis is helpful in making sense of their respective experiences. Amy Carr is a theologian who, like Springs, uses critical theory, philosophy, and spirituality in her work. Focusing on the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, Carr recounts the challenges this community faced when confronted with the prospect of constructing a casino on tribal grounds. Carr acknowledges that practices aimed at restorative justice are multi-pronged. They can aim at the elimination of polarizing elements, address the specific legal and political issues at play in the community, and frame discussions in ways that allow healthier forms of community to take shape. Carr’s conclusion reveals her theological rationale for addressing the pursuit of justice: restorative justice offers a glimpse of the Spirit’s work in rebuilding and repairing communities in which persons are honored, recognized, and cherished.
Connie Mick draws on Springs’s claim about the humanizing dimensions of restorative justice to reflect on her teaching experiences at Westville Correctional Facility, an Indiana state prison for men. Mick describes some of the conversational practices she has developed to nourish the teaching relationships she has with her students. She insists, for example, that the use of the present tense is important, speech that recognizes the presence of another. The obvious realities—that poverty and race and the prison-industrial complex are systems designed to strip personhood from persons—are mired in the logics of retributive justice. Mick shows how the model of restorative justice can engage in the “critical praxis” of discussing the systems of injustice—poverty and race—with those who have been harmed by these systems. The practice of storytelling serves to dismantle the singular narrative of retributive justice embedded in these systems, while opening the forum to new stories. In telling and listening to stories, the one story is decentered, mutual respect and recognition of each other’s personhood is nourished, and the possibilities of personal and social transformation are set free, at least for a glimpse.
This book symposium concludes with a contribution by Rebecca Todd Peters, who has dedicated much of her scholarly work in the field of Christian social ethics to the topic of reproductive justice. Todd Peters’s book, Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice is one of the most important sources today for thinking about a Christian ethics of abortion (see her website as well), a work that also influenced my own thinking about the topic. Todd Peters shows how the systemic structure underlying the prison-industrial complex in the US is analogous to the interlocking systems at play in diminishing the personhood of women and in compromising their capacities to make decisions about the pregnancies they are sustaining. The retributive justice model currently operates in many US states. Laws are designed to punish women who make decisions to terminate pregnancies; these laws also entail grave consequences for women experiencing complications around pregnancy, such as miscarriage. They were behind the recent efforts in the state of Georgia to keep a brain-dead woman on life support in order to sustain fetal development. Todd Peters advocates for a restorative justice model that informs women about the different factors that converge on their decision-making processes. But she notes that the structural systems in place continuously devaluing women’s capacities to make decisions about their pregnancies need to be entirely dismantled. A social “revolution” guaranteeing full personhood to all pregnant women is required in order for the transformative impact of restorative justice to be actualized.
Restorative justice offers a glimpse of how a community can be transformed by justice. The orientation to restoration challenges the structural social and political regimes that reinforce injustice. It also offers possibilities of imagining transformed social worlds and how this transformation affects the natural worlds in which social worlds are embedded. The discourse of transformation resonates with the theological idea of God’s plan that the divine attributes are revealed in creation (Romans 1:20). The vision of transformative justice coincides with the revelation of the divine justice. Justice as the human work of seeking justice in the world is oriented to God’s work of revealing the divine justice in creation. The doctrine of justification, in other words, is about justice.
Christine Helmer is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, where she is also Professor of German and Religious Studies. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2017 from Helsinki University. Professor Helmer focuses her current research and teaching interests on questions in constructive theology, Schleiermacher, religion and politics, and theology in relation to the study of religion and the humanities. She is on the executive committee of the Internationale Schleiermacher Gesellschaft (based in Halle/Berlin) and facilitates the Lutheran Scholars Network. Her most recent book is co-authored with Professor Amy Carr, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice (Baylor University Press, 2023).
The tomb of Pope Francis in Santa Maria Maggiore. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Pope Francis will undoubtedly be remembered as a reformer of the Catholic Church. He was often perceived as radical, even revolutionary in his approach to changing contemporary Catholicism. Yet it was precisely the meaning of reform from the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that has divided papal commentators, especially Catholics on both sides of the political spectrum. In the global North the political barometer often used for measuring Francis’s reform legacy was how well he adhered to, or deviated from, an ideal of progressive liberalism. This ideological and partisan political standard has confused and obscured much more than it has clarified and explained the reform papacy of Francis. Its continued usage will only perplex commentators trying to understand yet another pope from the Americas, Leo XIV, who is evidently pursuing the reform program of his predecessor, though perhaps in a different style.
The late pontiff had an approval rating in the US that apparently made President Donald Trump envious of the papal office. But he also had vehement critics among conservatives and progressives. Notably, both sides of the “culture wars” were in agreement that Francis had a failed liberal papacy. Francis’s opponents on the Left took his reform efforts to be, at best, ineffectual and half-hearted. The papacy ultimately failed to follow through and implement the doctrinal changes, usually related to sex and gender, demanded of a modern, more liberal Catholicism. On the Right, his papacy was viewed by some in the worst possible terms as disorderly, disastrous, and even diabolical. It was a futile attempt at liberal subterfuge against an unchanging faith and morality that younger traditional followers will find vindicated with a future conservative pope. As a Jesuit trained in the Spiritual Exercises, Francis did not conform to a progressive liberal ideal for Church reform but instead applied the spiritual standard of Jesus’s poverty. Despite the mixed reactions to Francis’s effort to reform the papacy in the example of its divine founder, his theology of poverty opened new pathways for Christian social and political engagement.
Contextualizing Francis’s Theology of Poverty
Pope Francis was not a liberal. Such a claim is a categorical error that ignores his Latin American social and pastoral background. One event that helps situate Francis’s theological inheritance from the global South happened just before his papal election, which he mentioned in his Spanish language memoir of Pope Benedict XVI, El Sucesor (2024). On March 13, 2013 during lunchtime at the Conclave that would elect Francis, a group of European cardinals asked then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio about the politics of liberation theology in Latin America and “the supposed political deviation of that theology” (54). For these European cardinals the political deviation was not progressive liberalism, but revolutionary Marxism. Bergoglio did not relate all he said to the cardinals, but his response would have drawn on his familiarity with Argentina’s distinctive theology committed to the integral liberation of poor communities through an analysis of the cultural history of a people instead of a Marxist social analysis of class.
The liberation of the people (along with their wisdom traditions) from both a domestic and foreign “enlightened” liberal culture, which prizes instrumental rationality and unrestricted wealth accumulation, was a rallying cry across the Patria Grande in the twentieth century. After the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI’s social encyclical, Populorum progressio (1967), many Catholic leaders believed the Church could not remain silent on a continent longing for hope amid drastic social inequality. In this context of widespread poverty, Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez made a novel claim in A Theology of Liberation that “participation in the process of liberation is an obligatory and privileged locus for Christian life and reflection” (46). To a certain extent, liberation theology, like the “new political theology” of Johann Baptist Metz in Europe, was a form of Christian spiritual resistance to modern bourgeois liberalism with its privatization of religion, techno-scientific rationality, and sanctification of private property.
In Argentina, Paul VI’s opposition to the “international imperialism of money” and “private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right” inspired the Movement of Third World Priests, which faced deadly repercussions for its actions under the anticommunist military dictatorship (para. 26). The political assassinations of high-profile clerics associated with the nonviolent revolutionary movement in the 1970s during the “Dirty War” included Fr. Carlos Mugica and Bishop Enrique Angelelli, both of whom shared the cause of the working poor and a commitment to the socialization of property in urban and rural settings. Two Argentine priests who also belonged to the movement yet outlived it, Lucio Gera and Rafael Tello, were the architects of the pastoral ministry on the streets of Buenos Aires that became the basis of a people’s theology (teología del pueblo). Gera and Gutiérrez had a theological friendship that focused on prioritizing the poor. Their friendship lasted nearly a half century. It began at a small gathering of theologians at Petrópolis in 1964 and crystalized at the Latin American meeting of Catholic Bishops at Medellín in 1968, where poverty as institutionalized violence was explicitly addressed. Their great friendship even endured the official exclusion of Gutiérrez by conservative churchmen from the Puebla meeting in 1979, though that did not stop the new language of the preferential option for the poor from being included in the final document.
Cardinal-Archbishop Bergoglio’s leadership in Buenos Aires during the 2000s imbibed the teología populary pastoral of Gera and Tello. It amplified the lived faith of the poor on the social peripheries and their struggle to flourish with dignity. Numerous priests under Bergoglio’s care had been taught by them, especially Gera who served as Dean of Faculty of Theology at the city’s Pontifical University. Bergoglio frequently turned to the more affective sensus fidei (an instinctual sense of faith through love) known among God’s beloved poor, themselves agents of history, to evangelize and bring the hope of Jesus Christ to broader secular society. When he oversaw the drafting of the Latin American Bishop’s final document at the Aparecida meeting in 2007, the term “people’s mysticism” (mística popular) was used to convey the inseparability of traditional popular piety and progressive social justice, thus unsettling conventional political categorizations (no. 262). A main target of the Aparecida document was a neocolonial culture of liberal individualism, which detaches persons from communities and traditions of meaning in the quest for personal self-advancement and is indifferent to the common good (no. 46). This self-serving uniformity flattens cultural diversity, especially among poorer and historically dispossessed communities, such as Afro-Americans and Indigenous peoples in Latin America. For this reason, the document stated the need for the “decolonizing of minds and knowledge, to recover historical memory” of cultures systematically repressed and excluded (no. 96).
Remembering the Poor as Pope
Whatever transpired at the 2013 conclave over lunch must have assuaged any lingering political concerns about Bergoglio and liberation theology since he was elected pope later that evening after only five votes. Once he had more than the required two-thirds votes, his longtime friend from Brazil, the late Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, embraced him, saying, “Do not forget the poor” (No te olvides de los pobres). Francis’s papacy immediately began with a spiritual decision to choose the mendicant lover of poverty, peace, and creation from medieval Assisi as his namesake. He dropped the fancier papal attire and lived at the humble guesthouse of Casa Santa Marta instead of the Apostolic Palace. His papacy ended in a simple wooden casket at Santa Maria Maggiore, a Roman papal basilica outside the Vatican, after a corporal work of mercy donating €200K of his personal money to a juvenile prison. Francis was by all means a pastor to the world’s poor and excluded, not a sovereign prince for a new gilded age.
Although there has been some attention to the question of whether Pope Francis was a proponent of liberation theology, it is clear that he was an unqualified advocate for a theology of poverty, itself based on St. Paul’s teaching about “the mystery of Christ who lowered himself, impoverished himself, to enrich us” (2 Corinthians 8:9). Liberal cultures indeed contain good and humane values that seek to minimize material poverty, lift up the poor, and aid the needy with charitable giving and philanthropy. However, Francis’s theological meditations go much further than bourgeois moral ideals: Christian poverty, a spiritual and voluntary act, is about giving what is one’s own and not merely from one’s excess. To choose poverty for the sake of enrichment because Jesus himself was poor exposes what no liberal ideology based on luxury or middle-class comforts would ever endorse. Pope Francis’s entire pastoral ministry and teachings make this preferential option for the poor the spiritual nucleus for converting the Church. The kind of reform Francis had in mind was formulated by ressourcement theologians of Vatican II, like Yves Congar, OP, and Henri de Lubac, SJ, whom Francis occasionally cited in his speeches and writings.
Francis was by all means a pastor to the world’s poor and excluded, not a sovereign prince for a new gilded age.
Francis’s first trip outside Rome was to the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where he brought to the world’s attention the poverty of stateless migrants and refugees from North Africa. In the twentieth century, the Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to such persons as “superfluous” in her monumental work that deserves urgent re-reading today, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s exhilarating diagnosis of the bourgeois origins of modern tribal and racial ideology challenged her readers to recognize “the existence of a right to have rights” despite the liquidating effects of imperialism and later Nazism and Stalinism (296). Francis often called contemporary migrants “throwaways” (descartados) of a globalized economy of exclusion and indifference, or displaced victims of a piecemeal Third World War. Neoliberalism, the technocratic paradigm, and the idolatry of money were, for Francis, twenty-first century threats not only to social well-being, but also to political stability and ecological sustainability.
The Annual World Day of the Poor created by Francis during the 2016 Jubilee Year of Mercy was a deliberate effort to recognize the dignity and worth of “socially excluded people.” It was one among numerous examples from his pastoral leadership going back to his Anti-Human Trafficking Masses in Buenos Aires. God chooses the poor by giving them a name. For example, the angel of the Lord told Joseph that Mary, his betrothed, would give birth to “God with us” (Emmanuel) in the flesh of an infant, named Jesus, born naked and poor. Pope Francis reminded listeners that the homeless man Lazarus, from Jesus’s Gospel parable, had a name at the divine judgment, whereas the rich miser begging Abraham for mercy after death did not (Lk 16:19–31). There is no greater recognition of social and political belonging, no greater dignity, than receiving a name directly from the Creator who loves and wills our existence. On the Fifth Annual World Day of the Poor, Francis declared that poor persons are icons of the flesh, “a sacrament of Christ” who “represent his person and point to him” (para. 3).
The concrete faces of the poor and excluded, not unlike Emmanuel Levinas’s biblically and Talmudically inflected phenomenology, communicate divine transcendence. Riffing on Arendt, I would often hear Gutiérrez say later in his career that “the poor are those who do not have the right to have rights.” In Francis’s final autobiography, Hope, coinciding with the Jubilee Year and his death, Francis returned to the characteristic theme of his reform papacy: “The Church’s preferential option toward the poor must also bring us to know and appreciate their cultural way of living the Gospel… When, as members of the Church, we get close to the poor, we discover—beyond the enormous difficulties of life—a transcendent sense of life” (174).
Against both political liberalism and economic neoliberalism, Francis identified popular piety in the streets and the social function of property as antidotes to the privatization of religion and the new tyranny of money.
The way of poverty, as lived by the earliest followers of Jesus, was the stubborn anchor and controversial standard of Francis’s reform papacy devoted to changing the worldly culture of modern Catholicism in the West, from the Vatican to the parish. Francis sought to clean house, so to speak, by introducing a new culture of apostolic poverty at the Roman Curia, which is the administrative center of the Holy See at the Vatican. This alternative logic (or way of thinking) had greater and lesser successes, though it was largely misunderstood by political commentators. Whether reducing the annual salaries of the cardinals, or making “simplicity of life and love for the poor” a necessary job requirement for working in the Curia, Francis was determined to institutionalize proximity to the poor as the authentic criterion of Christian discipleship and unity. In his first address to the media after the 2013 conclave, he told the audience, “How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!” If this spiritual standard of apostolic poverty did not afford the late pontiff a ready-made solution for rectifying the worldwide clergy sex abuse crisis, straightening out Vatican finance, or strengthening women’s participation in the Curia and across the life of the Catholic Church, at least it broke open the possibility for sincere structural reforms centered on love for the poor and listening to the excluded without the traps of worldliness and clericalism.
Francis’s blueprint for radical Church reform under an “apostolic” framework was his first letter, The Joy of the Gospel (2013), which expressed his desire for a Church of and for the poor (para. 198). He also exhorted “each individual Christian and every community… to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor, and for enabling them to be fully part of society” (para. 187). This apostolic exhortation, which Pope Leo XIV resolutely reaffirmed in his first speech to the cardinals, shows just how mistaken the label of liberalism is for understanding Francis. Against both political liberalism and economic neoliberalism, Francis identified popular piety in the streets and the social function of property as antidotes to the privatization of religion and the new tyranny of money. Francis even referred to popular piety as a locus theologicus (or source) for gaining wisdom about God (para. 126). He stressed the image of the polyhedron to reflect a unity in diversity instead of a neocolonial culture of liberal individualism. All these themes received more theological explanation in his two social encyclicals on integral ecology (Laudato si’) and social friendship (Fratelli tutti).
Decolonizing Ecology with Indigenous Knowledge
In Francis’s reflection on the Amazon synod, Querida Amazonia (2019), he showed the decolonial aspects of his thinking through his constructive dialogue with Indigenous cultures of the region. On the one hand, he claimed—in an unprecedented way among popes—that the Amazonian bioregion is itself a theological locus where believers can encounter the living God (para. 57). On the other hand, he praised the culture of material simplicity among Indigenous Amazonians who uniquely know how to live well (buen vivir), because “God’s little gifts” matter more than “accumulating great possessions,” and ecological care for creation is privileged over needless destruction of things (para. 71). What may appear as living in poverty to a bourgeois standard is considered great wealth when harmony between family, community, and Pachamama (Mother Earth) are preserved. This alternative way of thinking from Indigenous communities can contribute toward an integral ecology not focused on economic progress, but sustainable living and intergenerational solidarity to better care for our common home. Francis’s letter to the Amazon also showed the influence of the Argentine cultural anthropologist and philosopher Rodolfo Kusch, from whom Francis learned the mythical and organic sense of a people rather than a logically abstract concept. In the Introduction to the English translation Kusch’s Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, Walter Mignolo makes the important point about Kusch’s contribution to decolonial thinking and “awareness of immigrant consciousness.”
Conclusion
With nearly half of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics inhabiting the Americas, it is not surprising to see the first pope from this side of the Atlantic followed by a US-born pope indebted to a Latin American pastoral approach learned in Peru. The observation of Brazilian Jesuit Henrique de Lima Vaz in 1968 that the Latin American church was shifting from a projection of Europe to a source for global Catholicism has now been validated by history and, in the eyes of the faithful, the Holy Spirit. That Pope Francis brought a theology of poverty from his home continent to reform the Church, beginning with the Curia, and to address the new challenges to today, is a legacy sure to endure in the twenty-first century with Leo XIV.
Pope Francis touches the wall that divides Israel from the West Bank, on his way to celebrate a mass in Manger Square next to the Church of the Nativity, believed by many to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Sunday, May 25, 2014. /GALAZKA_1405.01/Credit:Osservatore Romano-Pool/SIPA/1405251417 (Sipa via AP Images).
In 2014, Pope Francis’s unscheduled stop at the Israeli apartheid wall in Bethlehem, adjacent to “Free Palestine” graffiti, marked a pivotal moment in his papacy. This act came to symbolize his profound engagement with the plight of the Palestinian people, an engagement that gained renewed urgency with the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people.
With his passing, and in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, many Palestinians as well as marginalized communities globally mourn the loss of a crucial spiritual advocate and ally. Pope Francis’s legacy extends beyond Palestine; it embodies compassion to all, resistance to Eurocentric power structures, and unwavering solidarity with the oppressed. As global upheavals, particularly in Palestine, persist, it is imperative to reflect on and perpetuate his legacy to foster a more just and decolonized future. This reflection on Pope Francis’s legacy remains critical even as the bombs fall and starvation continues, and there is no accountability for those who have committed and continue to commit these crimes.
The Visibility of Palestinians
Despite the live-streamed genocide in Gaza and the intensification of the occupation and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Palestinian suffering has been normalized. Following decades of settler colonialism and constant dehumanization, Palestinians have been left invisible, their pain muted, and their lives disregarded. Decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon observed how the colonized are reduced to an “animal existence,” stripped of dignity in ways that make their suffering not only bearable to the oppressor but structurally permissible. In this sense, Israel’s siege on Gaza and erection of the apartheid wall are not just physical barriers, but instruments designed to erase Palestinian humanity.
The erasure of Palestinians thus does not occur only through their physical annihilation by bombs and starvation tactics. It also happens through the complicity of individuals and institutions that maintain or accommodate the colonial status quo, a complicity that fits the definition of what Hannah Arendt termed the “banality of evil.” Yet in this context of systemic invisibility, Pope Francis emerged as a rare global voice who, to a meaningful degree, resisted this erasure and affirmed Palestinian humanity on the world stage.
Israel’s siege on Gaza and erection of the Apartheid Wall are not just physical barriers, but instruments designed to erase Palestinian humanity.
His 2014 pilgrimage to the Holy Land was not a routine diplomatic visit. It was a journey marked by empathy and moral clarity, where he was attentive to the literal and symbolic walls that structure Palestinian life—walls that define political, social, economic, and ethnic boundaries. Pope Francis did not repeat sanitized, Eurocentric platitudes; instead, he aligned himself with the marginalized. His intentional stop at the Apartheid Wall created a crack in the dominant narrative that Palestinians are a violent mass that are to be feared and therefore need to be controlled. Instead, it reflected the reality that they are a people yearning to live with dignity in their homeland despite the brutal grip of occupation.
For many Palestinians, this unscheduled and spontaneous stop followed by prayer was an unfamiliar but deeply affirming experience: the feeling of being seen. It was reminiscent of Christ’s healing of the haemorrhaging woman (Mark 9:25–34). In this story, Jesus defies social taboos when he stops and restores humanity to a woman cast aside by the world.
In his final years, even as illness overtook him, Pope Francis continued to offer radical visibility to Palestinian suffering. His statement—echoing the conclusions of legal and human rights experts—that the atrocities in Gaza bear the hallmarks of genocide was a powerful and necessary intervention. Pope Francis’s call for a thorough investigation shattered the dangerous complicity of silence among world leaders, including within the Vatican itself. Beyond statements, he conducted daily phone calls with members of the Holy Family Church in Gaza, embodying a form of solidarity that was not abstract but grounded in direct pastoral solicitude.
Through both his public declarations and private acts, Pope Francis offered a holistic witness to Palestinian humanity. He may not have had the power to halt the genocide, but through his papacy—from the 2014 stopping at the Apartheid Wall to his final sermon in 2025 calling for a ceasefire—he made the suffering of Palestinians visible in a world led by those who are determined to look away.
Sacredness and Institutional Solidarity
For many of those who stand in solidarity with the Palestinians’ cause, and aim to protect their lives, Pope Francis has been an ally. His role as the spiritual father of the Catholic world, one that includes Palestinian Christians, imbued his stop at the Apartheid Wall in 2014 with profound spiritual significance. That act was not merely symbolic, political, or diplomatic, it was a liturgical gesture of resistance, a sacred disruption of the empire. In placing his head against the wall and praying, Pope Francis enacted a theology of incarnation and solidarity, embodying the Church’s preferential option for the oppressed. His stillness proclaimed loud and clear what the Church must never overlook: that God’s preferential option is always for the oppressed. To truly follow Christ is to draw near to the wounds of those who are overlooked in the world. In this way, the wall becomes a holy altar for lament.
Through that gesture, Pope Francis reorients the spiritual and prophetic imagination of the Church. He names Palestinian suffering as not only a human rights issue but also a reality of people crucified, echoing the suffering Christ. Many Palestinians, confronting the threat of their imminent annihilation, echo Christ’s plea in Gethsemane: “Let this cup pass.” In contrast to the silence preferred by the empires of the world and those who choose to remain asleep, just as the disciples did in the garden, Pope Francis makes visible what power seeks to erase, stirring conscience where indifference prevails. In this way, stopping and praying at the wall, as well as his daily calls to the Holy Family parish community in Gaza became a faithful act of solidarity. Such sacred acts pointed to God’s presence among the poor, dispossessed, and the oppressed. Pope Francis is also demanding a divine act for justice in the face of structural sin.
In placing his head against the wall and praying, Pope Francis enacted a theology of incarnation and solidarity, embodying the Church’s preferential option for the oppressed.
Sacredness and religious expression are often organized and mediated through institutions that can both constrain and amplify spiritual and moral witness. Indeed, many of today’s most potent prophetic voices regarding Palestine have emerged from outside institutional walls, even as powerful institutions have actively attempted to suppress the global solidarity movement for Palestine. Yet Pope Francis, through his pastoral approach, represents a prophetic voice from within an institution often perceived by Palestinians as complicit in their colonization.
The affirmation of Palestinian humanity, enacted both through acknowledging their suffering and validating their political aspirations, powerfully demonstrates that even amidst the historical failures of many Christian institutions concerning Gaza and Palestine, work needs to be done inside and around these spaces. These voices remind us that while institutions may often be slow to act, they remain vital spaces where moral authority is contested and redefined. It is crucial to recognize prophetic allies within institutions. Institutional comrades matter profoundly because they possess the capacity to shape narratives, mobilize resources, and influence global norms, especially when it comes to audiences that the pro-Palestinian camp may not have access to.
Resisting Eurocentricity
Pope Francis’s witness to the humanity of Palestinians and their aspirations for freedom stands as a powerful moral and theological statement. Combined with his broader commitment to the poor and oppressed and his identity as a leader from the Global South, Pope Francis’s witness establishes a legacy that positions Palestinians as a matter of prophetic concern within the Vatican. His stance also challenges the Eurocentric discourses and attitudes that have long shaped Christian engagement with the question of Israel and Palestine. This is especially significant in light of post–Vatican II Jewish-Christian dialogue, which often excludes Palestinian Christians and remains silent in the face of settler colonialism and genocide.
Beyond this exclusion, the crimes of the Holocaust and European antisemitism have rightly produced a deep sense of guilt among western Christians, particularly theologians. However, this guilt has become a theological and moral stumbling block, leading many to idolize Jewish suffering while ignoring or denying the suffering of Palestinians. As a result, Jewish-Christian dialogue has too often become a protected space for Zionist assumptions rather than a forum for honest theological and ethical engagement with colonialism in all its forms.
Institutional comrades matter profoundly because they possess the capacity to shape narratives, mobilize resources, and influence global norms, especially when it comes to audiences that the pro-Palestinian camp may not have access to.
Pope Francis, through his solidarity with Palestinians, confronts the limitations of western Jewish-Christian dialogue and calls the Church to reflect on its moral and theological failures. This challenge is both necessary and urgent, offering a path toward a more holistic commitment to the protection and liberation of Palestinian lives, both Muslim and Christian, alongside Jewish lives, whether Israeli or international, without denying or excluding the suffering of any.
From Intuition to Strategic Action
For Palestinians, especially Palestinian Christians, Pope Francis’s legacy is a call to believe that even within ancient institutions and hegemonies, cracks can form, light can enter, and solidarity can emerge. Undoubtedly, Pope Francis’s legacy suggests a new path that must be taken forward. His intuition to stop at the Apartheid Wall and engage with the Holy Family parish in Gaza needs to evolve into a concrete stance and strategic action that opposes discrimination, occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In other words, it is not enough to simply acknowledge the situation; the available resources must be used to dismantle the wall and stop the atrocities in Gaza. If we do not transform Pope Francis’s legacy into robust change, we risk failing to fully realize the vision it embodies.
John Munayer is a Palestinian theologian from Jerusalem and holds degrees from King’s College London, the University of Edinburgh, and VU University Amsterdam. John is currently involved in interreligious activism and the founder and editor of the Journal of Palestinian Christianityat the Bethlehem Bible College. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, researching the political theology of the Palestinian laity in relation to the Holy Fire ceremony. Together with his brother, Samuel, they co-authored the book: The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology amid Gaza(Orbis, 2025).
Samuel Munayer is a Palestinian theologian from Jerusalem and holds degrees from Durham University and Exeter University. Samuel works as an advocacy and access officer for a humanitarian organization that works in Gaza and the West Bank. He recently co-authored with John the article entitled, “Decolonising Palestinian Liberation Theology: New Methods, Sources, and Voices,” and their new book The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology amid Gaza(Orbis, 2025).
Announcement of Pope Francis’ Election to the Papacy. Image via Flickr user Catholic Church of England and Wales. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
In the first part of this two-part essay, I identified the pockets of resistance to Pope Francis within the U.S. Catholic Church. In what follows—part two—I discuss four areas of particular concern to the neo-traditionalist opponents of Francis. While seldom openly accusing the pope of “sin” or “heresy,” they found his statements and pastoral example in these four crucial areas to be misguided, confusing, and erroneous, to say the least.
(Downplaying) the Sins of the Flesh
According to his detractors, Francis, in addition to “downplaying” the Church’s condemnation of abortion, failed sufficiently to condemn so-called sexual sins. In 2013 he responded to a journalist’s question about gay priests by asking, “Who am I to judge” (celibate) gay priests “who seek God and are of good will.” In a 2023 interview with the Associated Press, he expressed concern about the criminalization of homosexuality in some countries. “We are all children of God, and God loves us as we are and for the strength that each of us fights for our dignity,” Francis emphasized. “Being homosexual is not a crime. It is not a crime.” Subsequently asked to “clarify” the statement, he responded that “Yes, [homosexuality] is a sin. Fine, but first let us distinguish between a sin and a crime.” As a rebuke to his self-appointed watchdogs, he added: “It’s also a sin to lack charity with one another.”
In a handwritten note sent to Father James Martin, S.J., founder of the LGBTQ Catholic Ministry Conference, in advance of the annual assembly of the group in 2024, Francis expressed solidarity with LGBTQ Catholics, their friends, families, and pastors: “I am glad that [Cardinal Wilton D. Gregory, archbishop of Washington] will celebrate the Mass; I will be spiritually with him and with all of you, united in prayer.” Francis had sent similar greetings and blessings to the LGBTQ Outreach conference the three previous years as well. Perhaps most controversially, in 2024 the Holy Father allowed priests to bless same-sex relationships, a decision that concerned or appalled many conservative bishops, clergy, and neo-traditionalist PIO laity in the United States.
The Sin of Pride
Some of the pope’s most brazen detractors claimed that Francis’s supposedly “lax” attitude to official Church teaching about marriage, abortion, and homosexuality was rooted in arrogance and pride. Following his own “whims” more than the traditional teachings of his predecessors, they charged, Francis revealed himself to be the leader of his own cult of personality and a sower of “confusion” among the faithful. As Kevin D. Roberts, the Catholic president of The Heritage Foundation, wrote:
Yet as much as Pope Francis loved the poor, he was not a humble Franciscan friar but a savvy Jesuit political operator whose initial attention to the corporal works of mercy—though never entirely lost—soon gave way to practical considerations about what would secure his power over the Church. And unfortunately, as he aged and became more entangled in the politics of the Vatican, Pope Francis became vulnerable to manipulation by his advisers as well as the media and indeed made many missteps that confused and divided his flock. . . . Examples abound. One week he would promote the blessing of ‘unions of persons of the same sex.’ Next, he would say that marriage will always be the union of one man and one woman. On one occasion, he declared that abortion was akin to ‘hiring a hitman,’ while nevertheless appointing a pro-abortion economist to the Pontifical Academy for Life.
The Sin of (Political) Heresy
Politically right-wing U.S. Catholics resented Pope Francis’s public criticism of the policies of both Trump administrations, especially around the treatment of migrants, refugees, and the poor. A well-known case in point was the pope’s “fraternal correction” of J.D. Vance’s politically self-serving interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s concept of ordo amoris (“the order of love”) as justifying the deportation of “illegal” immigrants.
Nor were the conservative Catholic opponents of Francis fans of his critiques of nationalism and his indictment of growing economic inequality in the United States and beyond. They rightly perceived a coherence to the pope’s teachings on “the planet and the poor,” which Francis cast as the most vulnerable victims of a worldwide system, governed by what he labelled the “technocratic paradigm,” which thrives on the exploitation of nature and the hoarding of wealth by a tiny minority of hyper-capitalists. A culture of consumption, Francis proclaimed, had led to the “globalization of indifference” to “the cry of the poor and the cry of the planet.” The anti-Francis agitators balked at the pope’s demand, articulated most powerfully in Laudato Sí: On Care for Our Common Home, his influential 2015 encyclical, that affluent nations and individuals should take responsibility for the plight of the hundreds of millions of climate refugees caused in part by the developed world’s reckless pollution of the environment.
Robert Mickens, a veteran Catholic journalist and trained theologian, argues that the most vehement enemies of Francis see him as a kind of Catholic terrorist:
No, he is not waging a reign of terror. But he is prophetically disseminating a message that . . . could easily unsettle and change our lives in ways far more radical and destabilizing than anything unleashed by Islamic State militants. He’s doing so on multiple levels and on various fronts. And he is meeting pockets of resistance in every sector of society, even inside the Catholic church. There are Sunday Mass-goers who bristle at his insistent calls for a major reform of the “economy that kills,” including the application of greater regulations on free markets. There are wealthy, generous benefactors of Catholic dioceses, people who try to be as responsible with their resources as they have been hard-working in earning them, who are offended by his anguished cries for a more just distribution of wealth . . . .There are good and decent citizens of all faiths and of no faith at all, compassionate people who are offended by Francis and believe he is plain wrong in demanding that Europe and North America throw open their doors to migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East.
For U.S. Catholics, Pope Francis’s approach to violence of all kinds (from genocide and war to the arms trade and handgun violence), and his support for human life in all its stages, “from conception to natural death,” recalls the “seamless garment of life” ethic articulated in the 1980s by Joseph Bernardin, the cardinal archbishop of Chicago. Neo-traditionalists of the present day, especially those susceptible to right-wing U.S. political discourse, find Francis’s consistent ethic of life too inclusive, much in the same way Cardinal Bernardin’s lay and episcopal critics did in the ‘80s.
Objections from right-wing U.S. Catholics to the Vatican’s “foreign policy” under Pope Francis included his widely reported outreach to the Palestinian victims of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and devastation of Gaza. Trump supporters in particular were appalled when Francis called for an investigation to determine whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza constituted genocide.
The anguished reactions by alt-right social media celebrities to the election, in May 2025, of Francis’s successor, Pope Leo XIV, were based on their dashed hopes that the new pontiff would break decisively with his predecessor: “Sorry, Catholics. This new Pope is an open borders globalist. He will be pushing for abortion soon. This isn’t a guess. You can scroll his X account and see what he’s been up to,” lamented alt-right conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich.
The Sin of Ecclesiological Heresy
Voices from across the spectrum of anti-Francis neo-traditionalists objected, with various degrees of vehemence, to what they judged to be the pope’s doctrinal and theological errors. These they culled from two “sources”—first, his unscripted, often spontaneous and widely reported remarks to reporters or to various gatherings of Catholic schoolchildren, families, pilgrims and the like; and, second, his official proclamations, decision and writings, including not only his apostolic exhortations and encyclicals, but also his talks to various Catholic organizations.
The list of “unofficial” faux pas is long, and includes Francis’s comments berating the Roman curia (the governing and administrative bureaucracy of the Catholic Church) and the tendency of some of its priests and bishops to act not as shepherds but as princes; his denunciations of clericalism as the scourge of the Church and of the papal court as “the leprosy of the papacy”; his warning that spiritual arrogance, combined with an unreformed life, is a temptation of dioceses, parishes, and religious communities alike; and, his assertion that the Church should not be a doctrinal fortress or a policer of orthodoxy, but rather a field hospital expressing God’s mercy to the spiritually, psychologically, and physically wounded, whatever their relationship to the institutional church and its doctrinal and moral imperatives. Such comments, the critics say, are an example of Francis’s flawed ecclesiology (theory of the Church), reflected in his “annoying” suggestion that the Church should be conceived as an inverted pyramid, with the laity above and the pope and bishops below, and that the Church is a synod (a body that governs through deliberation and mutual consultation of laity and clergy). They also object to his radical openness to other world religions, especially Islam, and his comment that all the great religions are “paths to God.” These kinds of statements, the neo-traditionalists contend, carry the taint of indifferentism, the (condemnable) belief that differences of religious belief are of little or no importance.
Objections to the explicitly authoritative or “official” pronouncements of Pope Francis are legion. While more generous critics gave less weight to the unscripted remarks by this “undisciplined” pope, as falling short of any serious, authoritative exercise of the papal magisterium (teaching office), they spared no effort in attacking the official expressions with which they disagreed. These included Francis’s supposedly dangerous positions on God’s mercy, articulated inMisericordiae Vultus (2015), his “philo-communist” tendency in support of the poor and popular movements, and his notion of popular piety as a theological locus of equal standing with the official magisterial teaching which, for centuries, has been promulgated from the top, as it were, from the popes and the bishops down to the faithful, who are to receive and obey rather than help develop and shape the teachings. Francis’s supposed shortfall in moral theology, the dissenters charge, is displayed in his offering the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist to separated Catholics who have remarried (Amoris Laetitia, 2016). Not least, Laudato Si “shows a lack of scientific and ecological competence.”
Some of these criticisms reflect the ecclesial in-fighting that has been waged by U.S. Catholics, among others, since the Second Vatican Council, which (astonishingly) remains controversial among the neo-traditionalists. Unlike both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, they claim, Francis is less a theologian than a (unspoken: mere) pastor. Hence, his doctrinal errors flow from his lack of theological sophistication. “Obviously, the problem is not that he is not a theologian but rather that his theology is pastoral,” writes the Jesuit theologian Victor Codina, a supporter of the late pope. “Francis passes from dogma to kerygma, from theoretical principles to pastoral discernment and mystagogy. And his theology is not colonialist but from the Global South, and this bothers the North.”
Most egregious to some of Francis’s enemies was his “canonical offensive” against Opus Dei, as one detractor described the pope’s calls for reform of the organization, which was founded in Spain in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá and elevated by Pope John Paul II to the status of a “Personal Prelature” of the Church. Why Opus Dei has been the subject of controversy for decades is suggested in the title of journalist Gareth Gore’s recent exposé—the latest in a line of many such take-downs— Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church. To many conservative Catholics, however, Opus Dei is a model of lay piety and service to a world whose political structures and operative atheism or paganism pose a serious threat to Christianity. To these U.S. Catholics, “. . .Pope Francis was especially misguided in his approach to more conservative segments of the Church. He imposed serious restrictions on the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, which is growing rapidly in the United States. And despite Pope Francis’s frequent denunciation of “clericalism,” he upended the constitution of Opus Dei, a prelature distinguished for promoting the role of the laity in the Church’s mission, and did so “for no apparent reason” (say his critics).
Conclusion
While this brisk tour of the anti-Francis horizon has focused largely on the neo-traditionalist opposition to his pontificate, another essay of equal length could be devoted to the disaffected voices on the Catholic left, who felt that Francis did not go far enough in liberalizing the Church. However, it is important to recognize that progressive PIO Catholics enjoy lower levels of funding, institutional support, and political and ecclesial clout than the neo-traditionalists and their clerical and episcopal supporters.
That said, the six American cardinals who participated in the recent conclave to elect a new pope, as well as their fellow American bishops, have welcomed with open arms their fellow American, Robert Prevost, who is now Pope Leo XIV. It may be of no little comfort to progressive Catholics that the Pro-Trump social media personality Joey Mannarino grousedthat “the new Pope…is worse than Francis…“we’re f***ed.”
What progressive Catholic can fail to rejoice at that elegant appraisal?
Declarations of victory from disciples of Pope Francis’s theologically and pastorally coherent, geographically and culturally inclusive vision of the Church may be premature, however. Early signs are that the neo-traditionalist PIOs are not humbled by the election of Pope Leo XIV. Already they are pursuing a two-track tactical response: cast the new pontiff as more “balanced,” “disciplined” and “institutionally responsible” than his immediate predecessor; and simultaneously gear up for a new round of papal policing and divisive polemics. Are these tactics destined to fail, clearing the way for the U.S. bishops and laity to embrace their fellow American with the deference and support accorded Francis’ predecessors? One hopes.
Scott Appleby is the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Global Affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1994. The author or editor of fifteen books on modern religion and conflict, he currently serves as the interim director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion.
Previously Appleby served as the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School (2014-2024), as the John M. Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (2000-2014), and as the director of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism (1994-2002). In 2010 Appleby founded Contending Modernities, a multidisciplinary study of religions and secularisms in interaction. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, he holds the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1985) and is the recipient of five honorary doctorates.
The concept of justice is attracting much theological reflection today. The current interest is in different kinds of justice for specific groups and issues, such as climate justice, civil rights, women’s reproductive justice, and economic justice, which are implicated with the others. This reckoning with justice is not new, of course. The history of Christian theology reveals a longstanding preoccupation with the concept. Justice is one of the preeminent divine attributes, as Paul writes in Romans 1:17. It was on this verse, in turn, that Luther concentrated his exegetical efforts, casting his reformation breakthrough as a new understanding of the iustitia dei: God makes the sinner just in Christ. The doctrine of justification in Luther’s theology thus connects God’s justice to human justice.
