Published January 5, 2024
Christians should avoid simplistic rhetoric about crime
After several decades of comparative domestic security, more and more Americans are going to bed each night worried about rising crime in their own neighborhoods. In 2022, the national homicide rate stood 34 percent higher than just three years earlier, and 50 percent higher than in 2014. Increasingly, voters are ranking crime high on their list of political priorities, and they are convinced that our criminal justice system is not tough enough on crime. How should we as Christians respond?
For starters, we should resist the temptation to dismiss criminals as the scum of the earth, contemptible people whom we can’t wait to see locked away or worse. “There but for the grace of God go I” may be a cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our hearts should be moved with compassion not only toward petty offenders who are just down on their luck, but even toward the most hardened criminals, whose darkened souls deserve our pity. But compassion doesn’t mean surrendering our moral judgment. It doesn’t mean minimizing the seriousness of crimes either as a moral issue or as a scourge on society. The recent progressive drives to defund police and stop prosecuting many categories of lawlessness have proved to be abysmal failures, ironically proving most harmful to the weakest and poorest in society.
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Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.