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.