The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part three.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions.

The second link is that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, prescribes punishment, often death, for a very, very, very long list of offenses.

A Biblical society, such as the one that Christian fundamentalists want to create, is one that punishes every perceived infraction. Sparks claims, with reason, that Christian fundamentalism is largely responsible for the harsh sentences for a long list of crimes—e.g., mandatory jail time for minor marijuana possession. It seems that, to a fundamentalist, the solution to any problem is, throw somebody in jail, unless it is a white supremacist. Any candidate who does not adopt a position of severe punishment will quickly have his or her reputation destroyed by Christian fundamentalists, who will not hesitate to resort to lies to accomplish this.

As a result of our harsh sentences, the United States, with five percent of the world population, has twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners.

Despite our outlandishly huge prison population, our crime rate is not lower than that of most other countries. Our prison as the first and only option approach is expensive and it doesn’t work.

As a matter of fact, so many people are in prison that prison has begun to lose its stigma. Of course, prison does not prevent a criminal from going back to a life of crime, if that criminal has millions of fellow ex-cons who constitute his or her set of peers. Our prisoner and ex-prisoner population is so large that they have their own society.

Another reason that prison does not work to prevent crime is that, if you have a criminal record, you cannot get public housing assistance. If you want to rent an apartment, you have to get the money from somewhere, and often the easiest place to get it is through the prisoner’s old criminal connections.

Today, bloodthirsty fundamentalists cannot force the death penalty for as long a list of crimes as they would like. But they can do the next best thing. They can make it nearly impossible for the criminal to ever change his or her life.

The way to force this interpretation out of the Bible is to studiously ignore all the passages, Old Testament and New, about forgiveness.

I will investigate yet another of Sparks’s links between fundamentalist religion and crime in the next essay.