Faith-Based Rock Pile
This essay was originally published by The Radical Capitalist Inserts on February 17, 2004
The faith-based prison to which Governor Bush refers is not religion itself, but a penal fortress located in that Florence of the Eastern Seaboard, Lawtey, Florida. The prison is now, according to its press agents, home to about 800 pious crooks from twenty-six religions. (Most of these twenty-six "religions" appear to be denominations of the Protestant sect of the Christian religion, in case anyone thinks Yorubaland has been sending Ifa missionaries to Jacksonville.)
The dedication prayer for the new prison was delivered before the new year by a convicted bank robber named Ken Cooper. (Cooper is now an evangelical minister, there being no banks in prison.) An interested journalist asked the Reverend for his insight into the difference faith makes in an inmate's life, beyond the obvious difference of making him easier to trust when he gets out and asks his in-laws for a "loan." Here is the Reverend's reply:
The Reverend isn't quoted on the subject of why it is wrong to rob banks, what effect he thinks robbery has on the robbed, and why it is in his best interest not to rob again. That, apparently, is the sort of trivia occupying the thoughts of secularists. What occupies Reverend Cooper's thoughts is the knowledge that he can be forgiven for sticking that gun in the teller's face and taking those people's money. And for whose forgiveness does he labor? Not for the forgiveness of any mortal, but for the forgiveness of the vaunted Arbiter of reality and human souls Himself, which vaunted Arbiter has never worked in a bank or had so much as His pocket picked. And how does the Reverend know the Almighty will forgive him? By means of the very faith his new home was built to cultivate. By means of holding a wish in common with his colleagues. And a unanimity giving substance to the fabulous is the closest thing to Heaven on Earth that the brethren can expect. Introduce one skeptic, and you exacerbate the ever-present doubt that tests the theist's fidelity to the invisible. (More than one hundred such skeptics were transferred out of the Lawtey citadel in order that the Reverend Cooper's brow might not furrow while pondering his postmortem prospects.)
But removing the skeptics will not remove the doubt, as any ascetic will tell you between lashings. Persistent doubt — the doubt against which the believer struggles his entire life — is not inflicted from the outside by skeptics or the Prince of Darkness. It is an inside job; it is his brain asking him what the hell he thinks he is doing with it, telling it now to look both ways before crossing a busy street, then a moment from now telling it to close its eyes while marching into eternity. —Am I in a reason-using situation now, or a reason-renouncing situation? What is the reason for that again? Is it a sin even to ask? The believer struggles to answer these demands, and as a consequence he is forever on the defensive.
Thus, creating faith-based prisons means promoting a form of rehabilitation based on intellectual suicide. No doubt the aficionados of the conspiracy will assert that this is not an attempt at rehabilitation at all, but at retribution; that the faith-based rock-pile is the smoking gun in a plot to kill the brains of inmates.
In spite of the astute observation informing it, this theory fails on examination of the faith-based advocates themselves, who are victims of the same neuron-pruning they propose for convicts. In so proposing, they only perpetuate the abuse they experienced in the care of their parents and Sunday School teachers, who were no doubt just as abused by theirparents and Sunday School teachers, and so on, ad infinitum, or at least back to the time of Moses.
The conviction lying at the root of the penal monastery movement is the same conviction that has colored the rhetoric of pastors since their evolution from the ape; namely, that if you turn your life over to God you will become decent. For the Catholic, you will become decent in order to earn fewer eons in Purgatory. The logistics of the Catholic's salvation lie in the sacraments, confession, and penance, the latter consisting usually of assigned words uttered over a rosary. For the Protestant, the going is even easier. The advertised charge for ascension is nothing greater than the willingness to receive a "free gift," and Purgatory doesn't even exist. The Protestants make large of the fact that no human can ever achieve salvation by doing good, since he is, by nature, so spiritually fetid that no number of pious acts could ever deodorize him. How, then, does seeing the light make the Protestant a better person in this life? The answer is: by magic. Protestants make the Holy Spirit—the silent partner in the Trinity—a more significant agent than do the Catholics, averring that He—or It—invades the prostrate personality, deprives it of whatever individuality, ego, and art it may once have possessed, and supplies it instead with conformity, humility, and stained glass. No mortal effort required or even appreciated. All the sinner has to do is suffocate his brain and ignore the screams.
What happened to the national choir's conviction that the rehabilitation of crooks is an improper use of prison time? It appears that what they meant all along is that psychological rehabilitation—an invention of certain presumptuous human beings—is improper. The penal monastery is, in this sense, a breakthrough; a victory for moralist who knows that his marching orders are as clear as their source is incomprehensible, and that people get into trouble with the law when they try to live by their own wits.
In fact, the criminal runs afoul of just laws not because he is a son of Adam and thus vulnerable to any succubus in a red leather corset, but because, having free will, he is able to act upon the fallacy that he is owed something for nothing, and upon the fantasy that the free will of the other humans is somehow inferior to his own. This is not to say that distinguishing fantasy from reality is, in every circumstance, an easy matter. It is not even to say that it is equally difficult for everyone. Making it requires cognitive effort, the kind of effort necessary to living in a world where the things that go bump in the night are things that go bump in the night.
Regardless of the liturgical details, a faith-based approach to moral reconstruction assumes that
a) Any moron can see that the ills of the world are caused by its abandonment of morality, and
b) Not even a genius can devise an effective system of ethics by reason alone, ergo
c) Humans must seek a divine, moral authority.
In short, by trusting the evidence rendered by your eyes and processed by your mind you must come to the conclusion that you cannot trust your eyes and mind.
The fundamental purpose of such fractured reasoning is not to induce faith for the purpose of increasing moral awareness, but to use greater awareness of immorality to create more persons of faith. Faith, for the brethren, is the end, not the means. If the devil has fewer agents in the culture, in the classroom, in the government, in the media, the evangelist will, he believes, be free to go about his business with fewer temptations, fewer doubts, and fewer pressures on his already-taxed capacity for rationalizing the unbelievable. And by succumbing to their whims at Lawtey, Americans establish a precedent for more initiatives intended to spare the faithful the sight of pagans unwilling to comport themselves as damned.
Should you object to their plans, you will hear the standard speeches about the laws of the United States and their supposed origins in the Ten Commandments, about how the freedom to practice religion means the freedom to practice it on the dollar pried out of your fist, about how Jefferson's reference to the Creator in the Declaration of Independence means that he and Pat Robertson could have talked, about how Madison's statecraft was fired in the same furnace that tried Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego. The courts will no doubt have an opportunity to hear these arguments, and, in dispensing with them, to remind the world that the greatest nation on the planet was designed neither for nor by adults on their knees.
Moral accountability doesn't begin with the citizen's belief that his crimes against others are washed away by entreating translucent third parties. As a matter of fact, that is one of the places where moral accountability ends. Teach that to prisoners. Tell them that sacrificing their brains to powers they think they cannot control is perhaps the fundamental reason they are in prison to begin with. If they still want Jesus after that, let the Gideons provide the Bibles.
"Florida Gets Nation's First Faith-Based Prison," Beliefnet, December 25, 2003.
Jacqui Goddard,"Florida's New Approach to Inmate Reform: a 'Faith-Based' Prison," The Christian Science Monitor, December 24, 2003.
"I am proud that Florida is the home to the first faith-based prison in the United States."— Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida
The faith-based prison to which Governor Bush refers is not religion itself, but a penal fortress located in that Florence of the Eastern Seaboard, Lawtey, Florida. The prison is now, according to its press agents, home to about 800 pious crooks from twenty-six religions. (Most of these twenty-six "religions" appear to be denominations of the Protestant sect of the Christian religion, in case anyone thinks Yorubaland has been sending Ifa missionaries to Jacksonville.)
The dedication prayer for the new prison was delivered before the new year by a convicted bank robber named Ken Cooper. (Cooper is now an evangelical minister, there being no banks in prison.) An interested journalist asked the Reverend for his insight into the difference faith makes in an inmate's life, beyond the obvious difference of making him easier to trust when he gets out and asks his in-laws for a "loan." Here is the Reverend's reply:
"I'd always understood that I was doomed to a life of misery and hell, but I learned I could be forgiven," Cooper says. "Individuals in prison have always had a chance to learn who they are spiritually, but to dedicate a prison to faith is monumental. It's bold and courageous."
The Reverend isn't quoted on the subject of why it is wrong to rob banks, what effect he thinks robbery has on the robbed, and why it is in his best interest not to rob again. That, apparently, is the sort of trivia occupying the thoughts of secularists. What occupies Reverend Cooper's thoughts is the knowledge that he can be forgiven for sticking that gun in the teller's face and taking those people's money. And for whose forgiveness does he labor? Not for the forgiveness of any mortal, but for the forgiveness of the vaunted Arbiter of reality and human souls Himself, which vaunted Arbiter has never worked in a bank or had so much as His pocket picked. And how does the Reverend know the Almighty will forgive him? By means of the very faith his new home was built to cultivate. By means of holding a wish in common with his colleagues. And a unanimity giving substance to the fabulous is the closest thing to Heaven on Earth that the brethren can expect. Introduce one skeptic, and you exacerbate the ever-present doubt that tests the theist's fidelity to the invisible. (More than one hundred such skeptics were transferred out of the Lawtey citadel in order that the Reverend Cooper's brow might not furrow while pondering his postmortem prospects.)
But removing the skeptics will not remove the doubt, as any ascetic will tell you between lashings. Persistent doubt — the doubt against which the believer struggles his entire life — is not inflicted from the outside by skeptics or the Prince of Darkness. It is an inside job; it is his brain asking him what the hell he thinks he is doing with it, telling it now to look both ways before crossing a busy street, then a moment from now telling it to close its eyes while marching into eternity. —Am I in a reason-using situation now, or a reason-renouncing situation? What is the reason for that again? Is it a sin even to ask? The believer struggles to answer these demands, and as a consequence he is forever on the defensive.
Thus, creating faith-based prisons means promoting a form of rehabilitation based on intellectual suicide. No doubt the aficionados of the conspiracy will assert that this is not an attempt at rehabilitation at all, but at retribution; that the faith-based rock-pile is the smoking gun in a plot to kill the brains of inmates.
In spite of the astute observation informing it, this theory fails on examination of the faith-based advocates themselves, who are victims of the same neuron-pruning they propose for convicts. In so proposing, they only perpetuate the abuse they experienced in the care of their parents and Sunday School teachers, who were no doubt just as abused by theirparents and Sunday School teachers, and so on, ad infinitum, or at least back to the time of Moses.
The conviction lying at the root of the penal monastery movement is the same conviction that has colored the rhetoric of pastors since their evolution from the ape; namely, that if you turn your life over to God you will become decent. For the Catholic, you will become decent in order to earn fewer eons in Purgatory. The logistics of the Catholic's salvation lie in the sacraments, confession, and penance, the latter consisting usually of assigned words uttered over a rosary. For the Protestant, the going is even easier. The advertised charge for ascension is nothing greater than the willingness to receive a "free gift," and Purgatory doesn't even exist. The Protestants make large of the fact that no human can ever achieve salvation by doing good, since he is, by nature, so spiritually fetid that no number of pious acts could ever deodorize him. How, then, does seeing the light make the Protestant a better person in this life? The answer is: by magic. Protestants make the Holy Spirit—the silent partner in the Trinity—a more significant agent than do the Catholics, averring that He—or It—invades the prostrate personality, deprives it of whatever individuality, ego, and art it may once have possessed, and supplies it instead with conformity, humility, and stained glass. No mortal effort required or even appreciated. All the sinner has to do is suffocate his brain and ignore the screams.
What happened to the national choir's conviction that the rehabilitation of crooks is an improper use of prison time? It appears that what they meant all along is that psychological rehabilitation—an invention of certain presumptuous human beings—is improper. The penal monastery is, in this sense, a breakthrough; a victory for moralist who knows that his marching orders are as clear as their source is incomprehensible, and that people get into trouble with the law when they try to live by their own wits.
In fact, the criminal runs afoul of just laws not because he is a son of Adam and thus vulnerable to any succubus in a red leather corset, but because, having free will, he is able to act upon the fallacy that he is owed something for nothing, and upon the fantasy that the free will of the other humans is somehow inferior to his own. This is not to say that distinguishing fantasy from reality is, in every circumstance, an easy matter. It is not even to say that it is equally difficult for everyone. Making it requires cognitive effort, the kind of effort necessary to living in a world where the things that go bump in the night are things that go bump in the night.
Regardless of the liturgical details, a faith-based approach to moral reconstruction assumes that
a) Any moron can see that the ills of the world are caused by its abandonment of morality, and
b) Not even a genius can devise an effective system of ethics by reason alone, ergo
c) Humans must seek a divine, moral authority.
In short, by trusting the evidence rendered by your eyes and processed by your mind you must come to the conclusion that you cannot trust your eyes and mind.
The fundamental purpose of such fractured reasoning is not to induce faith for the purpose of increasing moral awareness, but to use greater awareness of immorality to create more persons of faith. Faith, for the brethren, is the end, not the means. If the devil has fewer agents in the culture, in the classroom, in the government, in the media, the evangelist will, he believes, be free to go about his business with fewer temptations, fewer doubts, and fewer pressures on his already-taxed capacity for rationalizing the unbelievable. And by succumbing to their whims at Lawtey, Americans establish a precedent for more initiatives intended to spare the faithful the sight of pagans unwilling to comport themselves as damned.
Should you object to their plans, you will hear the standard speeches about the laws of the United States and their supposed origins in the Ten Commandments, about how the freedom to practice religion means the freedom to practice it on the dollar pried out of your fist, about how Jefferson's reference to the Creator in the Declaration of Independence means that he and Pat Robertson could have talked, about how Madison's statecraft was fired in the same furnace that tried Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego. The courts will no doubt have an opportunity to hear these arguments, and, in dispensing with them, to remind the world that the greatest nation on the planet was designed neither for nor by adults on their knees.
Moral accountability doesn't begin with the citizen's belief that his crimes against others are washed away by entreating translucent third parties. As a matter of fact, that is one of the places where moral accountability ends. Teach that to prisoners. Tell them that sacrificing their brains to powers they think they cannot control is perhaps the fundamental reason they are in prison to begin with. If they still want Jesus after that, let the Gideons provide the Bibles.
—Dan Roentsch
"Florida Gets Nation's First Faith-Based Prison," Beliefnet, December 25, 2003.
Jacqui Goddard,"Florida's New Approach to Inmate Reform: a 'Faith-Based' Prison," The Christian Science Monitor, December 24, 2003.
Labels: bush, church and state, faith, faith-based prsion, lawtey, libertarian, Roentsch, The Radical Capitalist
posted by Dan Roentsch at
2:50 AM
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