“If Cop City is built, Atlanta will define the American city of the 21st century: over-policed, heavily surveilled, and increasingly unaffordable for the average citizen.”
- Will Bunch, “Cop City in Atlanta is the Future of America”
“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”
- Abraham Kuyper
They evicted my neighbor across the street last month. It was horribly nonchalant. It was so nonchalant, I wasn’t sure what I was watching at first. She was chatting with the cops and seemed cheerful, while a white van full of dudes pulled up and took everything she owned out of her house and onto the curb.
Two days later, another white truck came with some plywood, and they nailed up all the doors and windows. A month later, it’s still sitting empty. The investment company evicted their tenant and left the house sitting empty with boarded up windows, with the porch light on, and her aloe plant left on the porch steps.
Meanwhile, two miles to my east, in one of the last huge green spaces in our city,1 in a neighborhood that is predominantly Black and poor, Atlanta is razing Weelaunee forest and spending 90 million dollars to build a mock city that will become the largest police training facility in the country.2
How we got here is an ugly story that’s worth reading up on. (So many footnotes for folks looking to track down more information!)3
Atlanta is trying to invest ninety million dollars in more militarized policing, while our neighbors are evicted, our kids are hungry, our hospitals are shutting down, our schools are failing, our roads are literally collapsing, and our racial disparities skyrocket. 90 million dollars, y’all, 67 million of which is taxpayer money.
Cop City is a national issue, because ways of funding militarized police won’t stay confined to Atlanta. It is a Christian issue, because how we spend our money is theological, not just for individuals but also for cities; because questions about safety, security, and violence are not incidental to our theology, but are at the core of our worship of a crucified God. These political views not only change how we love our neighbors, and but they change how we imagine and encounter God.
The “Stop Cop City” movement is important to me because I’m a resident of Atlanta, and this is my backyard, but also because I’m a Christian, and this is my theology.
Where Your Treasure Is (there your heart is also)
I’ve been told from a pulpit more times than I can count that “money is tied to our hearts.” Jesus spoke more about how we use our money in the Gospels than on any other topic. The Old Testament overflows with admonitions for the state to use its power to care for the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant.
How we spend our money, as individuals and cities, shows us who we are, and forms us into who we could be.
It’s easier to see how money is tied to our hearts as individuals — but cities have hearts, too. A city that is willing to spend so much money to increase police presence, but won’t spend that money for our failing schools, to reduce our maternal mortality rate, to fund affordable housing, to feed our kids, to expand transportation — what does that say about our city’s heart? What does it say about our hearts, who live and vote in the city, that we’re more willing to invest in violence than to invest in the flourishing of our neighbors?
Our city is being formed by these choices, and so are we.
All of us want safer communities. But our imaginations are God-starved when we narrowly define “safety” as “increasing people with guns in uniforms on our streets.” To feel safe, we need so many other things. Nobody feels safe who is one healthcare bill away from bankruptcy. Nobody feels safe in a mental health crisis they can’t afford to treat. Nobody feels safe when their children are hungry. Nobody feels safe standing on the curb, while the cops watch, and their home is dumped into their front yard.
I grew up hearing that the government cannot help feed, clothe, and generally lead people into flourishing. The government is too inefficient! It cannot be trusted to assist poor people! It cannot be trusted to give money to schools or food banks or housing!
We don’t believe government can be trusted to help people with daily life, but we are so willing to trust government with guns. We trust the government with violence, but not with survival; with weapons, but not hospital bills. We trust that our government will invade the right country and arrest the right person, but don’t trust them to get food to the right household, or get childcare to the right mamas, or organize a proper bus route.
The implication is that the only legitimate role of the state and our tax money is violence. All uses of taxes for creating a society where violence is less likely to occur (by alleviating poverty, improving healthcare, affordable housing, and mental health care, to name a few) are not appropriate uses of the state’s money — our money.
How does this belief not form us theologically? It’s easier for us to imagine a state wielding violence wisely than it is for us to imagine a state wielding compassion wisely. How doesn’t this form how we encounter our neighbor, or encounter our God?
In American Christianity, we are so easily compelled by the stories of people who have power. Power can look sexy, and violence can look redemptive, and the stories of good cops saving innocent people from bad guys are so strong in our culture that it is hard to unlearn them. I know how powerful they are, because they used to really compel me, too.
Unlearning Stories of Good Cops and Bad Guys
I grew up very pro-cop. I was a tiny, intense Enneagram 1 and I loved justice, and institutions, and the idea of an institution like the police force that exists for justice was thrilling! I was so excited when I saw a cop pulling someone over. They got the bad guy! I even briefly wanted to be a cop, probably because of a crush on my 2nd grade Sunday School teacher’s daughter, who had the longest, blackest, straightest hair, and a beautiful white smile, and stood ramrod straight. I saw her in her police uniform and it was so cool, that she was out doing justice. I wanted to be out Doing Justice too!
Tiny Truman was not a prime candidate for a Stop Cop City revolution. It has taken years to unlearn the stories I was taught about policing in America, stories formed by TV shows and films, formed by government-funded images of cops holding kids on their laps, and formed by my own whiteness that has insulated me from true experiences with policing in America. It was a long unlearning, and it was a ton of books,4 and it was a ton of listening to people who were not raised white and middle class, and so did not have cops who existed to protect their interests and the interests of people like them. It was a long unlearning for an insulated white kid, because the people telling the other story about policing in America are not powerful and don’t have (admittedly extremely charming) TV shows starring Andy Samberg.5
In America, we are fish swimming in pro-police waters, at our churches and baseball games and supermarket advertising. We don’t even notice the water, until suddenly we look around in shock and see that pro-police stories have infiltrated every part of our lives.
Some of us got a crash course in unlearning those narratives in 2020 when we watched not just how individual police brutality words but also how the entire institution worked to cover up brutality. Before we all saw that cell phone video, the police department released a note that said George Floyd died because he “appeared to be suffering from medical distress.”
The horror is not just that an evil person killed an unarmed Black man. The horror is that an entire institution covered it up without blinking. The horror is that we don’t know how many times they’ve done this before.
These “bad apples” were protected by the whole power of their departments.6 They were before, they will be again. “Nice cops” are not the solution to corruption so deep it goes to the very beginnings of policing, an institution formed to capture enslaved people running away, and sustained by a Jim Crow-era South that needed enforcement by violence at all costs.7 The institution of policing was created to serve a violent and racist society, and small patches to the exterior of the system cannot fix what was founded and sustained on violence. Yes, “defund the police” is not easy to dream about! It’s a huge imaginative project, because it’s hard to imagine using the resources of our city to fund safety in other and more creative ways. But just because it hasn’t been done in modern America yet, doesn’t mean we can’t imagine a new way.8
Yes, we all want lower crime in our cities. There are other creative, generative ways to lower crime, though.9 Powerful people have a vested interest in convincing us that men with guns is the best way to lower crime, even though in some countries officers of the law do not carry guns, and violence is significantly reduced.10 We want lower crime, but we invest in prisons — even though the threat of prison does not reduce crime and recidivism is high, because punitive punishment does not heal people, make them better citizens, or help them come back into society ready to contribute.11
We are learning, little by little, that hitting children does not make them into healthy adults. It’s time to learn that “hitting adults” (punitive punishment and threats of punitive punishment) does not help heal adults, any more than it helps heal kids.
There is a mighty unraveling to do here. The unraveling isn’t just about Cop City. It’s not just “should we spend $67 million of our taxes on a police training facility” or “was the police training facility approved in a shady manner” or “did the police murder someone and cover it up on the site of the police training facility.” Those questions matter, but this is a deeper wrestling.
This is about an unraveling of our cultural and religious dreams of violence as a solution; our dreams of men with guns coming to make us feel safer; and yes, our dreams of violence as a theological tool, that forms our ideas about our neighbor and our God and our Christ.
Investing in violence because we’ve been told only violence will prevent violence is such an un-Christ-like thing to put our hopes and dreams into.
The Christian Addiction to the Myth of Redemptive Violence
Endless police dramas haven’t just changed our politics. They’ve changed our theologies, too. These stories have formed our vision of the Kingdom of Heaven. These stories from Hollywood and our government don’t just lie about police in America (that they’re good guys doing a hard job, that they keep us safe from criminals, that the institution itself is built on justice and goodness and just needs tweaking to bring it back to its original form). These untrue stories also form our vision of God. We serve a powerful God, a mighty God, a God of war, a God who catches bad guys and protects the good guys with violence and sometimes punishes the good guys, too, to teach us a lesson! We serve a God who looks like a cop.
God who came to us in Christ as a poor man, murdered by police, would ask us to interrogate our beliefs about power, money, punishment, and violence.
Popular theology has bought the myths of “redemptive violence” — the idea that violence is stopped with more violence, or that violence can be healing and even sexy when a “good guy” wields it. We believe we can stop bad people by hurting them - not just in our mass incarceration system, but in how we punish kids, in our image of God, in our theology of hell.12
Christians have become not only so committed to the glorification of violence, but also become so banal about it?13 It’s disorienting to walk into a church with a security guard with a gun, as if Jesus didn’t explicitly tell us, in His stories and His example, to die before we pick up a sword to hurt someone else.
My theology and my politics shift more and more each year into pacifism and non-violence, so maybe this argument doesn’t hold as much water if you don’t find non-violence compelling. I don’t think you need to be a pacifist, though, to think that it’s unbalanced how our military and policing budgets, across the board, are so much higher than our budget for helping people thrive and live and be safe and raise families and become educated.
I don’t think you need to be a pacifist to see Jesus telling a new story about how we can live together; how we can spend our money; how we can love our neighbor; how we can walk away from violence and towards something more generative and whole.
Abolition is Creative
I have a shirt, ratty from wear and ripped from work, that says Abolition is Creative on the back. On the front, it’s got a picture of an old abandoned police car in a field. Flowers are growing up through the car, until it’s a garden bed and not a weapon.
The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, Jesus told us. It starts so small, but it grows to a mighty tree, and birds can nest in its branches.
I love this shirt, because it is telling a new story. It asks us to do a brand new thing in response to the old cycles. It asks us to be creative when we imagine new ways of being safe with our neighbor, of investing in our communities, of taking care of each other. We aren’t just throwing out an old thing. We’re imagining a new one. Our new nonviolent stories and creative visions and cultural imaginings are seeds planted that grow up and around the old myths of redemptive violence, until we see that the God’s redemption is more like a garden than a war.
Maybe this sounds like a 70’s pipe dream. I was told as an evangelical kid, though, that “the Gospel will look like foolishness to the world.” I still believe that. We follow a God who was crucified by the rich and powerful, in solidarity with the poor and disinherited, and this crucifixion of God is triumph over evil.
God’s refusal to fight violence with more violence is our salvation.
Jesus told a new story about a Kingdom that is not created or sustained by violence. Jesus told those stories while He walked and preached and healed, and then He embodied that story when He didn’t fight back against the violence that took His life.
If we don’t take this seriously and let it inform and overthrow all our cultural ideas about the state, and power, and violence, and how to run not just our individual lives but also our country and our cities — what is even the point? What is even the point of our faith if it doesn’t shape us into radical believers in a way that is unlike anything our culture can imagine, a way of being human based on something besides authority enforced by violence?
What’s the point of following Jesus if we don’t follow Him where He actually walked — downward to the edge of society, away from institutions and political deal-making, down to the place where He was such a theological threat to the government that they executed Him.
Dear Jesus, teach us in our stories and in our lives to be theological threats to the powers of this world, too.
The Gospel is a seed sown in good soil that grows up around the violent structures, until violence itself has been consumed, and now is just one more redeemed part of this garden of grace.
This is not just the job for activists and journalists and pastors. Each of us can take part in this work, in our tiny sphere or our large sphere. Each of us grabs one thread, pulling it from our end of the world, and slowly we unravel the biggest lies of a violent culture, and together we tell something new.
We listen to abolitionists, especially Black and Indigenous ones, stories from everyone shut out of the American Dream not by accident but by design, who know that just because Western colonialism did it this way for hundreds of years doesn’t mean we can’t do it a new way. We listen to them, and then let them lead us.
We listen to prophets who know that abolition is creative.
This is Gospel work, this imagining something else when the entire thrust of culture says no no, only this way, only this one way.
We can tell a different story about how we use our money; about how keep ourselves safe without violence; about how we love our neighbor. We can cultivate generosity and justice not as individual actions, but as the way we build the world together. We can cultivate a broader imagination about what we owe to each other. We tell better stories, with our wallets and in how we vote and how we raise our kids and how we imagine a flourishing city.
We let our theology of a crucified Christ shape us more radically, more hopefully, and more creatively.
We tell these true stories so insistently that, like the Christ we follow, the stories we tell become embodied in our living and our dying, until our lives are formed like gardens, not like training centers or prisons or places of punishment.
We tell the true story that Cop City will never be built. We tell that true story, and together we work to make it so.
“The right kind of resistance is peaceful, because that’s where we win,” [Tortuguita] told me. “We’re not going to beat them at violence. They’re very, very good at violence. We’re not. We win through nonviolence. That’s really the only way we can win.”
- Interview with Manuel “Toruguita” Terán,
murdered by police in Weelaunee Forest on January 18, 2023
The Stop Cop City movement is gathering signatures for a ballot referendum, so the citizens of Atlanta can vote directly on whether we’d like this training facility in our city. If you live in the city of Atlanta and are registered to vote, please follow Cop City Vote on Instagram for information about how to sign the petition, or sign up to help canvass to get 70,000 signatures in 60 days!
“Sixteen environmental-justice groups, including the Georgia chapter of the Sierra Club, have signed an open letter arguing that the proposed development would be ‘devastating for the ecological community.’ Shooting ranges are a known cause of heavy-metal pollution, and paving naturally permeable surfaces is likely to make the city more vulnerable to flooding, which the letter describes as ‘Atlanta’s top natural disaster.’ Any loss of forest canopy could make an infamously hot city even hotter.” - “The New Fight Over an Old Forest in Atlanta,” The New Yorker
Micah Herskind’s great work outlining the problem on MSNBC is here - it’s a great primer and heavily linked and cited. Anything on Micah’s website or Twitter feed is also a great way to get up to date. I also just read this surprisingly thorough gem from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which tells the story well from beginning to end (and includes a timeline at the end! I love a timeline!)
An activist was murdered in Weelaunee Forest, and the police tried to cover it up. Bail fund organizers have been arrested under phony “money laundering” charges by a whole SWAT team. Concert attendees have been arrested as “domestic terrorists.” The city lied about how much the project would cost, and the city is not only ignoring public comment, but actively trying to stifle it.
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander; Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas; and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis are three extremely formative books I’ve loved on this. There’s a whole bunch of essays linked below on Micah’s page as well!
For my Patreon people, I wrote a tiny piece about how much I love Brooklyn Nine-Nine even though it is “copaganda” (though the final season wrestles valiantly with issues of race and policing).
The entire saying is “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel,” and the point is that corruption spreads. There’s no such thing as one bad apple, because in protecting and covering up the sins of the one, the many are complicit.
Micah has a great section on his website with essays about imagining a world where we fund programs other than police for public safety and is worth scrolling through!
By reducing childhood poverty, by legalized abortion, for gosh’s sake, ironically by expanding and better tending our cities’ green spaces.
I’ve written a lot about universalism lately, because it feels like everything is connected here - if God is going to hit us until we get better; if God ever does violence in service of grace; if God is a safe God for everyone, even people who are too wounded to see God clearly. My most recent essay is here from my Substack, but my first and most comprehensive essay is over here on my website.
Wow do I ever remember being a youth group and then Intervarsity kid in evangelicalism and the obsession with war movies! We wanted to use war movies to talk about Jesus all the time!