America's justice system is more punitive in large part because voters in church communities like mine (meaning, mostly white, theologically orthodox Protestants) supported policies and politicians who made it so. That relationship should seem strange, because my faith--and the faith of the large majority of evangelical Protestantsm in the United States and elsewhere--emphasizes grace and mercy, not rules and punishments. Christians of my generation and of some past generations embraced punitive policies because those policies did not seem that punitive. We didn't mean to be unfaithful to our faith; nor did it seem that we were at the time. But we might have fought a different kind of culture war, and a different kind of crime war--wars that were less warlike, with many fewer casualties. Surprisingly, that other, less warlike kind of war would have been a lot more successful than the wars we actually fought.
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