Balkinization: Religion, heterosexism, and police reform

Religion, heterosexism, and police reform

Andrew Koppelman

The cause of police reform ought to lead Democrats to rethink their disdain toward conservative religiosity.

The recent deluge of videos of police attacking Americans for exercising their right to protest has shown the urgency of radically reforming police departments. In any well-functioning society, the police must be trusted and respected. If they have forfeited that trust, they must get it back.

The case for reform is not merely speculative. The thing has been done successfully. One dramatic case is Camden, New Jersey, which dissolved and recreated its police department, with a new emphasis on de-escalation techniques. The results have been spectacular: violent crime dropped 26 percent, the homicide rate dropped 66 percent, and excessive force complaints against the police have steadily declined. (Minneapolis is going to try something similar on a much larger scale.)

A key part of Camden’s success has been close cooperation with local churches and nonprofits. It’s clear why this is important: The police, who have lost moral authority, are regaining it by affiliating with institutions that have kept that authority. Criminal law only works if it reinforces community norms.

The American left has enthusiastically embraced this cause, though they have unhappily tagged it with the clumsily misleading slogan “defund the police.” (A moderate reformist proposal to shift scarce resources to social services is thus easily caricatured as a demand for anarchy.) But then, it needs to come to terms with the fact that the new structures will necessarily empower the African-American churches, many of which teach ideas about sexual morality that the left finds repellent.

According to 2019 Pew data, 62% of white people favor same-sex marriage, compared to 51% of black people. According to a 2014 Pew survey, 70% of black respondents said homosexual behavior is a sin, compared to just 47% of whites. Like most Americans, African-Americans who disapprove of homosexuality do so primarily for religious reasons.

A common trope on the left is to brand those who embrace the traditional moral view as bigots. That’s part of the reason why any compromise of the gay rights/religious liberty conflict (about which I’ve just published a book) is seen as morally repellent.

No one is tempted to make that kind of move in this context. It would be another instance of a practice with a long and ugly history, one that really is morally repellent: white people lecturing African-Americans about their allegedly retrograde culture.

Instead, we seem to be capable here of understanding that this is a normal phenomenon of a diverse society: potential allies with whom we have important disagreements. I differ with the African-Americans who think that homosexuality is sinful. I also think that our disagreement is less important than the urgency of protecting them from criminal and police violence. Religious institutions, which teach ideas that I think wrong and destructive, have a valuable role to play.

The problem of American political polarization is in large part a failure to perceive areas of consensus – areas which extremists on both sides have a professional interest in obscuring. The police reform movement creates one opportunity to overcome that. We should be looking for others.

Posted 5:46 PM by Andrew Koppelman [link]