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Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons
Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once, in an era not too long past, Americans, both incarcerated and free, spoke a language of social liberation animated by religion. In the era of mass incarceration, we have largely forgotten how to dream-and organize-this way. To end mass incarceration we must reclaim this lost tradition. Properly conceived, the movement we need must demand not prison reform but prison abolition.
Break Every Yoke weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America's grotesque prison expansion of the last half century, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era's biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth century abolitionism, and by turning to today's grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition "spirit."
Break Every Yoke weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America's grotesque prison expansion of the last half century, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era's biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth century abolitionism, and by turning to today's grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition "spirit."
264 pages, Hardcover
First published November 13, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 26, 2020
Dubler and Lloyd's theo-historical critique of mass incarceration and incarceration as such flows dually from the Schmittian assumption that all modern theories of the state are secularized theological concepts and the Weberian task of identifying the rationalization of culture in the modern West. I found their appropriation of Foucauldian genealogy to describe the religious nature of both the penitentiary logics of incarceration and the activist spirit of abolitionism to be equally persuasive and charitable to the diverse effects of religion on society.
Such a historical account solidified their overarching thesis that the enduring equivocation of justice with extant American law offers a perverse political theodicy in which the problem of evil is resolved by incarcerating or killing the evil-doers. By historically tracing the influence of religion on abolitionists who opposed unjust laws with the God-talk of a higher-order justice, they also solidify their claim that contemporary movements for prison abolition would benefit by transposing their activism into a religious register.
My only critique is that, in the end, there was little said on the role of religion or people of faith in recovering a meta-ethical notion of justice. In the work of prison abolition, an activist movement with a notably religious history, what is the role of the theologian or pastor today? In detailing the contemporary interweaving of religion with abolitionist politics they offer examples of a few pastors who are reconstructing traditional theological concepts (like PSA) to undergird the abolitionist spirit. Yet, they seem to emphasize the pluralistic, grassroots, interfaith (and secular) qualities of the abolition movement as normative and desirable in its ability to foster solidarity, community resistance, and an aversion to crassly pragmatic political programs. This is not entirely the wrong move, since it does privilege the voices of marginalized and incarcerated activists as the necessary starting point in recovering the abolitionist spirit and it expands the definition of religion in meaningful ways. However, if the problem is a truncated notion of justice and the solution is to perceive again the higher-order justice that transcends unjust laws, then the reader is left unsure which avenue to take in facilitating this new perception. Does a perception of true justice come from a gospel as praxis and solidarity with incarcerated or should it come from a theological ressourcement of a tradition that twentieth century American evangelicalism jettisoned for law-and-order politics? I think it is both, but I would like to know what Dubler and Lloyd think.
Such a historical account solidified their overarching thesis that the enduring equivocation of justice with extant American law offers a perverse political theodicy in which the problem of evil is resolved by incarcerating or killing the evil-doers. By historically tracing the influence of religion on abolitionists who opposed unjust laws with the God-talk of a higher-order justice, they also solidify their claim that contemporary movements for prison abolition would benefit by transposing their activism into a religious register.
My only critique is that, in the end, there was little said on the role of religion or people of faith in recovering a meta-ethical notion of justice. In the work of prison abolition, an activist movement with a notably religious history, what is the role of the theologian or pastor today? In detailing the contemporary interweaving of religion with abolitionist politics they offer examples of a few pastors who are reconstructing traditional theological concepts (like PSA) to undergird the abolitionist spirit. Yet, they seem to emphasize the pluralistic, grassroots, interfaith (and secular) qualities of the abolition movement as normative and desirable in its ability to foster solidarity, community resistance, and an aversion to crassly pragmatic political programs. This is not entirely the wrong move, since it does privilege the voices of marginalized and incarcerated activists as the necessary starting point in recovering the abolitionist spirit and it expands the definition of religion in meaningful ways. However, if the problem is a truncated notion of justice and the solution is to perceive again the higher-order justice that transcends unjust laws, then the reader is left unsure which avenue to take in facilitating this new perception. Does a perception of true justice come from a gospel as praxis and solidarity with incarcerated or should it come from a theological ressourcement of a tradition that twentieth century American evangelicalism jettisoned for law-and-order politics? I think it is both, but I would like to know what Dubler and Lloyd think.
May 6, 2022
I started reading this during Lent of 2021, put it aside for many months, and continued reading it again this past Lent and into Holy Week. Abolition is a theme I try to engage in during Holy Week, precisely because Exodus and the Passover narrative is about the liberation of slaves living under a carceral state, and I see a lot of continuity between slavery and the carceral state that persists today, something that both Assata Shakur and Rinaldo Walcott write about quite compellingly. I first heard of Vincent Lloyd on the Magnificast, a great podcast that I feel I bring up all the time on here. I haven’t listened to podcasts as much over the past year, but whenever I do listen to podcasts, I very often enjoy the stuff Dean and Matt prepare.
There are quite a number of abolitionist faith movements that have been emerging over the past number of years, and it was great being able to read something like this, published by OUP no less, that was very explicit about its politics. I found the presidential and evangelical history a bit hard to get through, partly because I don’t get excited about reading that sort of stuff and partly because I found it all rather unsettling having grown up in evangelicalism — just bad flashbacks I guess, haha. But I loved listening to the radical history that’s covered in the second half of this book. There was this fascinating vision Eldridge Cleaver had that I found very interesting:
“...how, during the era of mass incarceration, American prisoners’ aspiration to secular revolution was tamed and domesticated into varieties of individualized religion. In Cleaver’s case, that religion was evangelical Christianity. With tropes that would become only more familiar, Cleaver describes a conversion that involved weeping, falling to his knees, and saying the Lord’s Prayer... Cleaver wrote a new account of conversion, but this time—in Soul on Ice’s sequel, Soul on Fire—Cleaver narrates his turning away from revolutionary organizing and toward his personal savior, Jesus Christ... In telling of his turn to Christ, Cleaver describes how he was exiled in Paris, depressed, when he saw a vision of Castro, then Mao, then Marx. “Finally, at the end of the procession, in dazzling, shimmering light, the image of Jesus Christ appeared.”"
I wish he had that vision while he was still a radical, that would have been a lot cooler. It's too bad it was some reactionary version of Jesus that appeared to him then.
I was especially interested the section on MOVE, a group I heard about a number of years ago when someone was discussing the 1985 police bombing of the MOVE building. I’ll put a few excerpts from that section below:
“In July 1981, Frank Africa, a member of the black naturalist sect MOVE, was transferred from Holmesburg Prison, a Philadelphia county facility, to Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Graterford. MOVE was a self-declared “revolutionary organization,” whose members rejected the modern world’s mores and modes of consumption. Spiritually, MOVE’s members were pantheistic vitalists: the world pulsed with life, and all living beings merited respect and care. Members of MOVE were exceedingly self-conscious about the pollutants in the air and water, and they followed a regime of abstemious naturalism. Central to this was a diet committed to simplicity, which consisted primarily of fresh fruits and vegetables. In county jail, Africa had requested and received a special allotment of raw vegetables and fruits, but at Graterford, no such accommodation was guaranteed. Africa sued in federal court. In October, the court ruled that MOVE’s beliefs and practices did not rise to the level of “religion” and denied First Amendment protection to the group.21 To this day MOVE members remain incarcerated in Pennsylvania prisons, and their practices and beliefs garner from the administration no special accommodation.”
There was a fascinating account in parallel with the book’s account of MOVE, focused on Harry Theriault and the Church of the New Song, which was a radical prisoners’ rights movement that Dubler and Lloyd describes as an abolition religion. Tillich’s theological work ended up being cited in court cases that were trying to evaluate the legitimacy of this religious group:
“To extend the standard in this way, the Court found theological inspiration in the thought of existentialist Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. For Tillich, as quoted by the Court, God is not a projection “out there.” He is rather “the ground of our very being.” Religion becomes a matter of a person’s “ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation.” From the standpoint of Tillich’s normative anthropology, every life is built on such epistemic bedrock—or, at the very least, every life ought to be.
It was a pluralist standard, and in the jurisprudence to come, it would provide protection to a wide range of religious and secular Americans. But even the warmest embrace has its limits, and in establishing limits on religion, the Court established a two-pronged test: the petitioner must possess a “belief that is sincere and meaningful,” and this belief must play a role “in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God.” In the subsequent jurisprudence, perhaps no plaintiffs have run afoul of the sincerity standard more gloriously than the Church of the New Song.”
“For the El Paso court, Theriault failed Seeger’s sincerity test, but he also flunked Seeger’s authenticity test—that is, in the language of Paul Tillich, whether a given belief occupies “a place parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God.” But, if not religion, then what precisely was CONS? Following Tillich, the court provided a short list of ways for conceiving that which wasn’t quite religion. Its “views” were “essentially political.” That is, even if Theriault had been sincere (which, the court decided, he wasn’t), CONS would still have fallen short of a religion. Religious sincerity was one problem; religious authenticity was another. In CONS, the court made clear, the doctrinal core was politics, with religion providing merely a façade: “The claim of Mr. Theriault to be the second Messiah is merely a front for what is essentially a political ‘union’ or organization with primary goals of establishing a unit to bargain with prison officials and ultimately to establish a new social order . . . with Harry W. Theriault as its head.”41 The court’s reasoning here is exceedingly revealing and underscores the way in which “religion” in this carceral jurisprudence is always and essentially religion within the scope “of the secular state. Religion’s “concern” may be ultimate, but religion’s sovereignty is subordinate to that of the state, and as the state would have it, to be political, to posit and actively pursue an alternative social order, is to be essentially not religious.”
“But take a critical step back and it speaks volumes about what, during the era of mass incarceration, prisoners’ “religion” was allowed to be. Inflict Tillich’s exclusions onto religion’s prototypical cases and the same political stuff that sank Harry Theriault would surely have sunk Moses, Jesus, and the Prophet Muhammad. To wield justice onto the world via the realization of a new social order is not, sayeth the court, religious.”
To conclude I’m just going to finish with another excerpt from this same chapter that is elaborating on the judicial appropriation of Tillich (who was a socialist btw) and how it came to be used to discredit the convictions of Black radicals, who by the way the Philadelphia Police Department literally dropped a fucking bomb onto in 1985 that killed six adults and five children — one more reason to abolish the police:
“to qualify as religious before the law, would-be religious practitioners were forced to evince fidelity to something higher and more amorphous than a materially minded politics could accommodate. This, the requirement of religion within the scope of the secular, was a language game that the Black populists in MOVE were ill-equipped to play. For the followers of John Africa, MOVE’s founder, “the principle of freedom” was inextricable from “the principle of strength, the principle of fitness, the principle of revolution.” Such a mishmash might seem strange to a Sunday school teacher, but not to a member of MOVE. How one ate, how one organized one’s family, how one prepared for the future, all these were to be lived in refusal of the existing order. For MOVE, the carceral state was the imperialist state was the polluting state, and such a state merited no accommodation. To combat this state, which was manifested all around them in the decomposing and simultaneously militarized Philadelphia of the 1970s, men and women had to go all the way. Withdrawal, repudiation, and the cultivation of a new way of life: for the catastrophe at hand, only a total solution would suffice. “This meant fidelity to a new Law, a Law that repudiated entirely the law of the state. As Louise Africa explained it in 1975, “Lest the impression be given that we have no respect for the LAW, we’d like to make clear that we know the LAW, and we have the most profound respect for IT. LAW is the very basis of our Organization, it is our Doctrine, it is our—Religion—and when you know what LAW is—you know what ‘law’ ain’t.”
There are quite a number of abolitionist faith movements that have been emerging over the past number of years, and it was great being able to read something like this, published by OUP no less, that was very explicit about its politics. I found the presidential and evangelical history a bit hard to get through, partly because I don’t get excited about reading that sort of stuff and partly because I found it all rather unsettling having grown up in evangelicalism — just bad flashbacks I guess, haha. But I loved listening to the radical history that’s covered in the second half of this book. There was this fascinating vision Eldridge Cleaver had that I found very interesting:
“...how, during the era of mass incarceration, American prisoners’ aspiration to secular revolution was tamed and domesticated into varieties of individualized religion. In Cleaver’s case, that religion was evangelical Christianity. With tropes that would become only more familiar, Cleaver describes a conversion that involved weeping, falling to his knees, and saying the Lord’s Prayer... Cleaver wrote a new account of conversion, but this time—in Soul on Ice’s sequel, Soul on Fire—Cleaver narrates his turning away from revolutionary organizing and toward his personal savior, Jesus Christ... In telling of his turn to Christ, Cleaver describes how he was exiled in Paris, depressed, when he saw a vision of Castro, then Mao, then Marx. “Finally, at the end of the procession, in dazzling, shimmering light, the image of Jesus Christ appeared.”"
I wish he had that vision while he was still a radical, that would have been a lot cooler. It's too bad it was some reactionary version of Jesus that appeared to him then.
I was especially interested the section on MOVE, a group I heard about a number of years ago when someone was discussing the 1985 police bombing of the MOVE building. I’ll put a few excerpts from that section below:
“In July 1981, Frank Africa, a member of the black naturalist sect MOVE, was transferred from Holmesburg Prison, a Philadelphia county facility, to Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Graterford. MOVE was a self-declared “revolutionary organization,” whose members rejected the modern world’s mores and modes of consumption. Spiritually, MOVE’s members were pantheistic vitalists: the world pulsed with life, and all living beings merited respect and care. Members of MOVE were exceedingly self-conscious about the pollutants in the air and water, and they followed a regime of abstemious naturalism. Central to this was a diet committed to simplicity, which consisted primarily of fresh fruits and vegetables. In county jail, Africa had requested and received a special allotment of raw vegetables and fruits, but at Graterford, no such accommodation was guaranteed. Africa sued in federal court. In October, the court ruled that MOVE’s beliefs and practices did not rise to the level of “religion” and denied First Amendment protection to the group.21 To this day MOVE members remain incarcerated in Pennsylvania prisons, and their practices and beliefs garner from the administration no special accommodation.”
There was a fascinating account in parallel with the book’s account of MOVE, focused on Harry Theriault and the Church of the New Song, which was a radical prisoners’ rights movement that Dubler and Lloyd describes as an abolition religion. Tillich’s theological work ended up being cited in court cases that were trying to evaluate the legitimacy of this religious group:
“To extend the standard in this way, the Court found theological inspiration in the thought of existentialist Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. For Tillich, as quoted by the Court, God is not a projection “out there.” He is rather “the ground of our very being.” Religion becomes a matter of a person’s “ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation.” From the standpoint of Tillich’s normative anthropology, every life is built on such epistemic bedrock—or, at the very least, every life ought to be.
It was a pluralist standard, and in the jurisprudence to come, it would provide protection to a wide range of religious and secular Americans. But even the warmest embrace has its limits, and in establishing limits on religion, the Court established a two-pronged test: the petitioner must possess a “belief that is sincere and meaningful,” and this belief must play a role “in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God.” In the subsequent jurisprudence, perhaps no plaintiffs have run afoul of the sincerity standard more gloriously than the Church of the New Song.”
“For the El Paso court, Theriault failed Seeger’s sincerity test, but he also flunked Seeger’s authenticity test—that is, in the language of Paul Tillich, whether a given belief occupies “a place parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God.” But, if not religion, then what precisely was CONS? Following Tillich, the court provided a short list of ways for conceiving that which wasn’t quite religion. Its “views” were “essentially political.” That is, even if Theriault had been sincere (which, the court decided, he wasn’t), CONS would still have fallen short of a religion. Religious sincerity was one problem; religious authenticity was another. In CONS, the court made clear, the doctrinal core was politics, with religion providing merely a façade: “The claim of Mr. Theriault to be the second Messiah is merely a front for what is essentially a political ‘union’ or organization with primary goals of establishing a unit to bargain with prison officials and ultimately to establish a new social order . . . with Harry W. Theriault as its head.”41 The court’s reasoning here is exceedingly revealing and underscores the way in which “religion” in this carceral jurisprudence is always and essentially religion within the scope “of the secular state. Religion’s “concern” may be ultimate, but religion’s sovereignty is subordinate to that of the state, and as the state would have it, to be political, to posit and actively pursue an alternative social order, is to be essentially not religious.”
“But take a critical step back and it speaks volumes about what, during the era of mass incarceration, prisoners’ “religion” was allowed to be. Inflict Tillich’s exclusions onto religion’s prototypical cases and the same political stuff that sank Harry Theriault would surely have sunk Moses, Jesus, and the Prophet Muhammad. To wield justice onto the world via the realization of a new social order is not, sayeth the court, religious.”
To conclude I’m just going to finish with another excerpt from this same chapter that is elaborating on the judicial appropriation of Tillich (who was a socialist btw) and how it came to be used to discredit the convictions of Black radicals, who by the way the Philadelphia Police Department literally dropped a fucking bomb onto in 1985 that killed six adults and five children — one more reason to abolish the police:
“to qualify as religious before the law, would-be religious practitioners were forced to evince fidelity to something higher and more amorphous than a materially minded politics could accommodate. This, the requirement of religion within the scope of the secular, was a language game that the Black populists in MOVE were ill-equipped to play. For the followers of John Africa, MOVE’s founder, “the principle of freedom” was inextricable from “the principle of strength, the principle of fitness, the principle of revolution.” Such a mishmash might seem strange to a Sunday school teacher, but not to a member of MOVE. How one ate, how one organized one’s family, how one prepared for the future, all these were to be lived in refusal of the existing order. For MOVE, the carceral state was the imperialist state was the polluting state, and such a state merited no accommodation. To combat this state, which was manifested all around them in the decomposing and simultaneously militarized Philadelphia of the 1970s, men and women had to go all the way. Withdrawal, repudiation, and the cultivation of a new way of life: for the catastrophe at hand, only a total solution would suffice. “This meant fidelity to a new Law, a Law that repudiated entirely the law of the state. As Louise Africa explained it in 1975, “Lest the impression be given that we have no respect for the LAW, we’d like to make clear that we know the LAW, and we have the most profound respect for IT. LAW is the very basis of our Organization, it is our Doctrine, it is our—Religion—and when you know what LAW is—you know what ‘law’ ain’t.”
March 2, 2022
This book offers a thought-provoking, unique, and transformative angle on abolition from two religious scholars with deep connections to organizers inside and outside prison walls. I really appreciated the emphasis on the radical moral messaging that we need to build the world without caging, which will resonate wherever people may fall on the religiosity or spirituality spectrum.
December 6, 2022
This book exhibits everything I love about political theology.
What stood out to me most was Dubler and Lloyd's conviction that you need *morality* to challenge a corrupt system. People are too often concerned with policy change: how to make oppression better. As with the abolition of slavery, morality is required to push the envelope of our imagination of what life can be.
I found particularly insightful the authors' analysis of liberal secularism and conservative Christianity. Both have an emphasis on religion being an individual and private matter (thus both are secular, or at least secularized). Conservative Christians value individualism and person accountability, and so allow themselves to limit their idea of "justice" to the status quo which (more or less) facilitates personal accountability. Secularists maintain a more systemic view of justice and work on large scale reform, but limit "justice" to doing bad things better. Dubler and Lloyd intervene in King's fashion by reminding us that there are the laws of man--and the laws of God. One must rule the other, and they are never the two the same.
The authors write with conviction. Though I cannot compel myself to agree with their stance on prison abolition (I'd like to have seen more theological arguments against prisons), I fully admire their scholarship and passion for what they write about.
What stood out to me most was Dubler and Lloyd's conviction that you need *morality* to challenge a corrupt system. People are too often concerned with policy change: how to make oppression better. As with the abolition of slavery, morality is required to push the envelope of our imagination of what life can be.
I found particularly insightful the authors' analysis of liberal secularism and conservative Christianity. Both have an emphasis on religion being an individual and private matter (thus both are secular, or at least secularized). Conservative Christians value individualism and person accountability, and so allow themselves to limit their idea of "justice" to the status quo which (more or less) facilitates personal accountability. Secularists maintain a more systemic view of justice and work on large scale reform, but limit "justice" to doing bad things better. Dubler and Lloyd intervene in King's fashion by reminding us that there are the laws of man--and the laws of God. One must rule the other, and they are never the two the same.
The authors write with conviction. Though I cannot compel myself to agree with their stance on prison abolition (I'd like to have seen more theological arguments against prisons), I fully admire their scholarship and passion for what they write about.
August 23, 2025
So far, everything I've read from Vincent Lloyd has challenged and provoked deeper reflection on the meaning and role of political philosophy and political theology, especially in relation to movements, organizing, and ideology critique. To break every yoke requires us to smash the false idols that prevent us from adequately recognizing the nature of our chains. This work doesn't just discuss the religious and theology dimensions of the abolitionist spirit in both secular and religious expressions of the abolitionist tradition, but does so from the perspective of a serious commitment to realizing the project of abolition itself and not simply as an academic exercise.
May 8, 2020
I haven't read this style for a long time. How refreshing it is to read ideas as voices, rather than an object of study being analyzed and contained.
June 6, 2023
file under: books that will / have re-converted me
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews