Ep105. The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America, Aaron Griffith

I interviewed Aaron Griffith about his book God's Law and Order, which argues that we cannot understand the US criminal justice system without accounting for evangelicalism's impact on its historical development. We discuss why crime and punishment 'mattered' for white evangelicals in the post-war period, how they made an expansive mass incarceration system seem neutral and appealing to the broader public, and how the focus on soul saving shaped the current justice system and evangelicals involvement therein.

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Aaron Griffith is Assistant Professor of Modern American History at Whitworth University. He previously taught American history and the history of Christianity as an Assistant Professor at Sattler College. He is a former postdoctoral fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and instructor at Washington University's Prison Education Program, he has written for the Washington Post and Religion News Service.

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