The Bible and Police Violence in the United States

This book traces the dynamics of biblical influence on police violence in the United States. As new escalations of state violence are inflected by an ascendent Christian nationalism, the Bible has been reasserted as a source of legitimacy and narrative force. Policing in the United States has always been intertwined with the Bible, beginning in the colonial era and transatlantic slave trade, and extending up through Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the rise of the contemporary carceral state. The Bible was used to provide the mythic and moral context in which these histories of domination unfolded, nourishing the growth of globalized racial capitalism, (neo-)colonialism, and imperialism as the zones of war within which policing is practiced. Building upon these histories, this book draws on a range of sources, from Bibles marketed to the police, to Bible studies and devotionals written by and for police, to visual stunts, statements, and social media posts from politicians and government agencies intent on protecting and expanding policing power. This book considers the mechanics of these kinds of deployments of Scripture and unpacks the hermeneutical structure of the reading habits that underpin them. While critically examining the use of the Bible to justify police violence, this volume also presents alternative interpretive possibilities that find reparative, redemptive, and anti-carceral lines of thought in the Bible, offering a liberative and irenic counter-reading of Scripture.