The summer of 2020 saw massive national protests of the police killings of Black Americans such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. At the protests’ height, a defiant President Donald Trump strode from the White House to nearby St. John’s Church, where he posed for photos on the church steps with a Bible in his hand. The act’s precise meaning was ambiguous: what did a Bible and a photo op outside a church have to do with protests of police brutality? But Trump assumed his supporters understood that there was indeed some sort of connection between law, order, and religion. As Robert Jeffress, a leading evangelical pastor and Trump ally, put it, “by holding up the Bible, he was showing us that it teaches that, yes, God hates racism, it’s despicable—but God also hates lawlessness.”Footnote ¹ At the same time, clergy of various denominational stripes blasted Trump’s photo op and, more generally, participated in demonstrations against police brutality. Still others engaged in “blue lives matter” counter-protests.

Though most journalistic accounts of the summer’s events did not dwell on these religious dimensions, it was clear that religion somehow mattered to the practice and protest of American criminal justice. We might say something similar about the history of crime and punishment in modern America. Religious ideas, symbols, and figures are present throughout and in this history. And yet, like Trump’s Bible, it is hard to know exactly how religion matters and how to interpret its mobilization and effects.

In his 2004 article “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” Jon Butler offered historians of the modern United States a challenge: do not overlook religion. It was a provocation I remember pondering as a graduate student about a decade ago—one I hoped to heed as I began my dissertation on evangelical Christian influence in modern American criminal justice. At least with reference to the history of modern American criminal justice, I think Butler was exactly right in naming historians’ lack of awareness of religion’s significance. Over the past decade, I think this has changed, as important works have appeared that reckon with religion’s place in this history. And yet, I am still struck by how much more work there remains to be done.

This opportunity becomes more apparent when one considers the depth of engagement by scholars with the religious history of punishment before the Civil War (which tracks with Butler’s broader comparison of that period to the modern United States). In Butler’s discussion of historians’ heightened religious sensitivity regarding this period, the Puritans loom large; for historians of crime and punishment, the analogue is the penitentiary. As suggested by their monastic nomenclature, penitentiaries were envisioned by antebellum Protestant reformers as spaces where wayward souls could confront their crimes and be remade into virtuous subjects. The reality, of course, was more complicated. These isolating, underfunded, brutal facilities were far from redemptive for most inside them, and they disproportionately housed the most marginal people in American society. But their penitential logic remained a powerful reference point for historians, an emblem of various religious, racial, gendered, and social features of the early republic and antebellum eras.Footnote ²

Historians of the modern United States have lacked an institutional reference point as commanding as that of the antebellum penitentiary for demonstrating the intertwined histories of religion, crime, and punishment. One possible reason is the nature of carceral institutions within the allegedly secular age of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Antebellum reformers had envisioned the penitentiary as an institution with religious rationale, and later historians analyzed it accordingly. But as penitentiaries eventually failed to achieve their conversionist aims throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, observers seeking to understand how they might still be “religious” meant attending even more carefully to the religious lives and work of people inside them (whether those incarcerated or those ministering to them). This was a much more difficult task, entailing challenging archival work and less theorization of the prison itself.

Historians have found the closest thing to a replacement for the penitentiary’s iconic religious status in histories of modern American execution—whether extrajudicial or state-sanctioned. Studies of the lynching of Black Americans have long foregrounded the importance of religion for lynchers, their sympathizers, and those opposed to white supremacist mob violence. Lynchers saw their actions as a kind of sacred ritual, one that depended upon sacrificial logics and religious fervor. Transgressions of the Jim Crow social order were sins that could only be fully expiated through bloodshed and death. This kind of scapegoating sacrifice, lynchers thought, was pleasing to God, hence the recorded shouts of “Glory!” as they burned Black people alive. At the same time, scholars have explored how anti-lynching campaigns were energized by religious activists, some of whom saw a paradoxical, redemptive resonance between cross and lynching tree.Footnote ³

Similarly, studies of the death penalty have often engaged religious themes and actors as topics of study. America’s ongoing religious zeal is often posited as a major reason why the death penalty has endured (particularly in the South), compared to its eclipse in other western nations (which, the argument goes, have also secularized apace). The simple equation of religion with pro-death penalty views is an oversimplification, especially given the fact that many of the most vocal opponents of modern capital punishment were churches and clergy.Footnote ⁴ Nevertheless, some scholars have offered more depth of analysis in explaining exactly why religious logic has helped bolster the practice. For instance, Daniel LaChance’s “attention to the sacred” in his study of the culture of capital punishment illumines not only the support of religious conservatives for the death penalty. His work also shows how, in the post-Gregg era, Christian beliefs helped “soften the perception of state killing as a violation of a person’s humanity.”Footnote ⁵

For both lynchings and capital punishment, careful attention to religious ideas and actors has helped show how these forms of killing were not simply the product of base superstition or frenzied hysteria. Attention to religion also shows how these acts of violence had their own internal logic and rational appeal to their perpetrators with reference to their own worldviews, an attraction that helps explain the allure and persistence of each. Similarly, as with recent scholarship on religion and the civil rights movement, recognition of the religious commitments of activists resisting these forms of violence showcases the motivating power of their prophetic sensibilities in naming divine solidarity with the crucified and a “just mercy” that acknowledges the dignity of all human beings.Footnote ⁶

Religion’s place in the work of policing and law enforcement in the modern United States has also received some attention by historians. Much of this work has tended to focus on anti-vice enforcement and moral crusades, such as drug and alcohol prohibition.Footnote ⁷ Other works have considered federal law enforcement, most importantly Lerone Martin’s text on religion in J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as works on the ways authorities have defined “religion” to advance various surveillance and enforcement agendas.Footnote ⁸

As with topics like the death penalty, discussion of religion here makes sense; prohibition, vice, and moral crusades depended heavily on the activism of religious leaders, who often brought explicitly theological rationale to bear in framing their causes. Similarly, the FBI’s religious history is intelligible within the larger Cold War context, as Hoover and his allies intended to show a stark contrast between a godly, orderly America and the threats of atheistic communism and subversives who could be defined outside of the religious mainstream.

At the same time, further work can be done on religion and law enforcement beyond the topics of vice and morals enforcement, and on more local levels. One tantalizing potential area of future exploration concerns the ongoing clerical interest in supporting, challenging, and ministering to local police departments in the modern United States. Daniel Czitrom has showcased the activism of Rev. Charles Parkhurst, pastor of Madison Square Presbyterian Church, in exposing corruption in the late-nineteenth-century New York police, leading to the famous Lexow Committee probe of the department from 1894–95. This particular crusade, which Czitrom argues helped launch the Progressive Era, should alone push historians of American religion to reconsider how they narrate the social gospel.Footnote ⁹

Other contexts deserve similar attention. For example, a number of recent studies of mid-twentieth-century police brutality and resultant uprisings and activism contain scattered references to Black Christian clergy, whose neighborhoods were affected by both police misconduct and the destruction of uprisings themselves (the work of Elizabeth Hinton comes to mind).Footnote ¹⁰ One wonders what deeper dives into the religious histories of these moments might showcase. What were pastors preaching before, during, and after the uprisings? Theology clearly mattered for clergy active in other civil rights causes, so how did these ministers’ theologies inform their activism on policing issues? In this regard, the work of Garrett Felber on the Nation of Islam’s resistance to the carceral state is a model that historians might follow and apply to other religious movements.Footnote ¹¹

One final topic concerns religion in prisons. Anthropologists, sociologists, religious studies scholars, and theologians—not historians—have led explorations of the spiritual lives of incarcerated people. For example, Tanya Erzen, Winnifred Sullivan, Brad Stoddard, and Rachel Ellis have each helpfully showcased the influence of Christianity in carceral spaces (including, in an echo of the antebellum penitentiary, the operation of prison facilities by evangelical organizations). Joshua Dubler’s ethnography of a prison chapel highlights the pluralism and attendant complications of the space, “arguably the most religiously eclectic sliver of real estate in the history of the world.”Footnote ¹²

Some historical scholarship on the relationship between religion and mass incarceration has begun to appear in recent years, such as work exploring the operation of halfway houses by religious organizations and the influence of the Nation of Islam in prisoners’ rights movements.Footnote ¹³ My own work details the ways evangelicals influenced (and were influenced by) the expanding criminal justice system in the postwar era. Nevertheless, historians, it would seem, still have much more to contribute, especially concerning religion and incarceration before the 1970s. For example, do Protestant missions to prisoners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resemble those of the post-1970s, or did the changing carceral context shift their approach? On that note, revising or expanding upon Estelle Freedman’s work on women’s prison reform in this period would be particularly helpful. Does the religious history charted in Brad Stoddard’s fascinating work on ministries in convict leasing camps, or Jennifer Graber’s discussion of Native American religion in late-nineteenth-century military prisons, resemble what was going on in prisons elsewhere at the time?Footnote ¹⁴

However, attending to Butler’s exhortations does not simply show us what topics need to be delved into more with an eye toward religious themes, figures, institutions, and ideas (though that is certainly important). What perhaps is easily overlooked about Butler’s essay is the way he encouraged scholars to attend to the study of religion in modern American history. The problem, Butler argues, is not that people do not mention religion at all when talking about modern American historical topics; the problem is that they do not explain where religion comes from, what it does, and why it matters.

It is here that Butler is exceedingly helpful as a way into the challenges and possibilities of studying the history of religion with reference to the topics mentioned above, and the sprawling, complex phenomenon of the carceral state more generally. For Butler, modern American religion often persists in a functionalist key. That is, it was and remains effective because religious leaders have stressed what it could “do—how it could bring men and women together, ground politics, herald moral crusades, motivate voters—[it] allowed twentieth-century religious leaders to slight old religious identities rooted in particular creeds or liturgies and instead to stress broad principles …” (1374) I am struck not only by the insights of this comment for ongoing discussions of religion in modern American life (particularly evangelicalism, which is still too often narrated as an exclusive, anti-modern fundamentalist crusade rather than a quintessentially modern and adaptable identity), but also for its analogues to the study of American criminal justice and, in particular, the emergence of the modern carceral state itself.

The carceral state developed because of a politics that worked in the same key that Butler names regarding religion: anti-crime, pro-law enforcement politics was frequently bipartisan, often directly linked to liberal consensus sentiment. Though avowed white supremacists might have championed punitive politics, the carceral state also functioned in the registers of scientific racism, racial liberalism, and colorblind conservatism. The best works on the history of the modern carceral state have helped us see this, such as Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s work on race and crime statistics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Naomi Murakawa’s discussion of postwar liberal conceptions of public safety, Elizabeth Hinton’s work on Lyndon Johnson’s war on crime, and James Forman Jr.’s discussion of Black support for “tough on crime” politics in the late twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁵

The temptation, it seems, is to see both prisons and religion as “jack-in-the-box” phenomena—perhaps interesting, but largely incidental. However, understanding the importance of both—for modern American history and contemporary American life—is necessary. On that note, future explorations might look beyond the conservative evangelical appeal of Trump’s Bible appearance amid police protests to consider how religious and carceral formations are intertwined in service to other kinds of political projects. In my own present research, for instance, I am interested in how formulations of American religious belonging (such as “tri-faith America” and “ministries of presence”) have intersected with law enforcement organizations and roles, from Catholic and Jewish police guilds to interfaith police chaplaincies.Footnote ¹⁶ While conservative evangelicals and right-wing iconoclasts like Trump play a role in this history, the cast of characters I have had to attend to is far broader.

Another presidential anecdote is illustrative. Two years after Trump’s Bible incident, President Joe Biden gave an address to a large memorial service for police officers. In his speech he noted, in a reference to his own Catholic upbringing, that he “grew up in a neighborhood where you became a cop, a firefighter, or a priest.” Biden joked that he was not qualified for any of these roles, so he became a politician. It was seemingly a throwaway line, but underlying his quip was a common assumption animating twentieth-century religious culture in the Northeast: Catholics make good cops. Biden went on to honor fallen officers and promise that his administration would not defund police departments.Footnote ¹⁷ The former subject drew upon common civil religious sentiments, while the latter was part of Biden’s longstanding support for police and an echo of his own “law and order” politicking from the 1990s. Both worked together.

It is easy to see Trump’s Bible and Biden’s joke as trivia or, well, jokes. But, with Jon Butler as a continuing inspiration, these are the kinds of stories I hope future scholars will attend to, not as jack-in-the-box phenomena, but as invitations to go deeper. In doing so, we might come to understand the power of these symbols and the flexible persistence of the varieties of American religiosity, law, and order.