George Floyd's murder offers a Christian path to justice
Restorative rather than retributive justice is not only the heavenly way, writes George Pitcher, but it also keeps the peace on Earth
The public outpouring of relief at the conviction on all counts of former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd may have had politics at its heart. That President Joe Biden effectively called the verdict ahead of the jury, letting it be known that he was praying for the “right verdict”, suggests that such relief may have been as much to do with the avoidance of nationwide American violence in the wake of a potential acquittal as it did with concern for justice for the Floyd family.
The aphorism that this kind of justice must not only be done but seen to be done was never more urgently applicable. The principle of those words actually arose from a relatively minor court case, concerning a motorcycle accident near where I live in Sussex in 1924, and relates to the idea that it’s not good enough simply to be satisfied that the law has been properly applied so long as there is a public perception that it might not have been.
But in an immeasurably more high-profile case such as the Floyd murder trial it might mean – as President Biden evidently felt it did – that public opinion was so convinced of Chauvin’s guilt, as a consequence of the amateur cell-phone footage of him kneeling on Floyd’s neck for 9-plus minutes, that no other verdict was admissable.
If that’s the case, then this is trial by PR, in both senses of that acronym. It’s a public-relations verdict in that it shows the US criminal-justice system in a good light to the audience it serves. And it’s a verdict by proportional representation, in that the overwhelming majority of Americans were “voting” for it.
Among all that, it’s a bit difficult to unpack a proper moral response that isn’t populist, far less a theological one. But the easiest place to start is at the image of a man whose life is taken unjustly, an event which serves to reconcile and justify his people through his sacrifice.
Floyd’s killing was not an atonement for the sins of the whole world. So we can dispense with any idea that his death was Christ-like, even before we get to the revolting commentaries that he had a petty and violent criminal record (as if that in some way mitigates his fate). But what we can say is that the Christ was Floyd-like, in that he shared the human and inhuman experience of a degrading and unjust death at the hands of a brutalised state authority.
And it’s from that proposition that Christians are entitled to examine what justice means; to ask what we want from our systems of justice that affirms what it means to be human in the light of the Christ’s atonement.
Pagan retribution
Perhaps a good place to start is in examination of the difference between retributive and restorative justice. At its basest, the former is pagan and the latter Judaeo-Christian in character. Restorative justice, which seeks to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator of a crime, often fails for any number of human reasons.
Vincent Brummer, the Dutch theologian who died just a few weeks ago, lists three of them: First, that the living have no right to forgive on behalf of the dead; second, that forgiveness trivialises the awful experience of victims and, third, failure to forgive is itself an appeal to justice.
Brummer argued against all three motivations on the premise that none of them can “restore fellowship”. This is significant in so far as it is precisely the healing of division to which campaigns such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) appeal and for which the conviction of Chauvin for murder was deemed so vital. In this context, Brummer quotes former African Archbishop Desmond Tutu as asserting that the central concern of restorative justice isn’t retribution or punishment, but
the healing of breaches, the redressing of balances, the restoration of broken relationships… restorative justice is being served when efforts are being made to work for healing, for forgiveness and for reconciliation.
These are declared aims of many who work to heal the open wounds of American racism. They are aims that don’t dispense with justice, nor do they undermine the search for justice. But they seek the justice of reconciliation rather than of retribution, which has to be the lodestar of a Christian form of justice.
Unsurprisingly, this will require standing in Chauvin’s corner as well as Floyd’s. That’s a tough call, but it speaks to our co-responsibility with everyone without exception. And it’s a theme, as Rowan Williams points out in his work on faith in the public square, that is deeply rooted in the Judaeo-Christian ethic:
From the question of God to Cain - “Where is your brother?” - to St Paul telling us to “bear one another’s burdens”, this ethical tradition affirms that the most fruitful and peaceful common life depends on willingness to speak and act for each other…
Again, nothing here for BLM to contradict. It’s important to stress that this isn’t the removal of justice – and therefore an argument against the prosecution of heinous crimes such as Chauvin’s – but rather a search for a justice of reconciliation rather than of retribution (which was such a guiding light for those who worked for a new polity in the wake of apartheid in South Africa). To face a word so central to the Christian creed, forgiveness doesn’t undermine the search for justice, it facilitates it.
Stable polity
Such an approach to justice isn’t of itself as radical nor as scandalous as some Christians would claim. Nor, actually, does it even date to the birth of Christianity. As the systematic theologian Colin Gunton pointed out, Plato “sought to show that a stable polity could be built only on the basis of the deep metaphysical structures of the universe.” So it follows that:
Tyranny and mob rule are the most chaotic and degenerate forms of polity because they are furthest from the eternal archetype. There is social order when the order of the universe is reflected, disorder when it is not.
In this model, restorative and reconciliatory justice is to be preferred to retributive justice, because by its nature the latter is disruptive of the natural order. We would see that disruption in BLM riots, which consequently adds ethical weight to the criminal conviction of Chauvin.
It’s reasonable to conclude that the Christian ethos picks up on this tradition of restoration and reconciliation. But there is a critical point at which the Christian narrative becomes utterly disruptive itself in its exposition of natural justice. And that point is reached at the cross.
The conviction and execution of Jesus of Nazareth is extraordinary precisely because it is so unjust. If this is a window into the justice of God, then it begins to look unfathomable. Those who have tried to do the fathoming down the centuries have tended to give us theisms such as penal substitution – the idea that Jesus took an almighty one for the team, by dying on behalf of the whole world for its sins.
This week (April 21st) saw the feast of St Anselm, the 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm’s proposal that the Christ carries human debt on the cross to pay off a wrathful God (the doctrine of “satisfaction”) is criticised because it’s a transaction through which humankind avoids a just penalty. This has been called a “stock-exchange divinity”.
But it has nevertheless imbued western society with the idea that justice means inflicting punishment and as the American theologian J. Denny Weaver writes:
The assumption reigns virtually unchallenged today as the foundational principle of the North American judicial system. In the popular mind, to “do something” about crime means to punish. To get “tough on crime” means to demand harsher punishments.
We may see that when it comes to the sentencing of Chauvin. But it bears little witness to the principles of restorative justice.
Truly radical
This is the part of the Christian story where God’s justice does get truly radical. It is precisely in the disruption of the cycle of violent retribution for crime that the Christian God breaks all the rules. In his book Radical Sacrifice, the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton points to “the fruitless circuit of sin, guilt and expiation”, which offers only
the tit-for-tat reciprocity of justice, which exacts a condign penalty for each offence, as well as the “wild justice” of revenge. For Christian faith, it is God’s refusal of this sterile principle that overthrows the “ancien regime” and inaugurates a new order, one in which equivalence gives way to excess. Forgiveness is the enemy of exchange value.
Ultimately, this is about the quality of mercy, which for the Christian God is not transactional (nor strained, as it happens). This is the justice of God which is limitlessly restorative in its fellowship with his created humanity, rather than retributive. It is, of course, also redemptive.
Weaver points by way of illustration to the account of the crucifixion in the Gospel of Luke, when two criminals are crucified alongside the insurgent Nazarene, to whom (and it’s far from clear that this is restricted to only one of them) in response to a plea of mercy he promises that “today you will be with me in Paradise”.
The “plain justice” of the criminals on the cross was retributive, the kind of justice in which “we are paying for our misdeeds”. This is the justice of Hell where we suffer eternal punishment for our sins. This is the kind of justice we tend to seek in relation to each other, the justice that fails to restore our broken fellowships. Jesus, however, sought the restorative justice of Paradise. This is the justice of God that restores us to the fellowship with him which is ultimate happiness.
It’s a mercy that is scandalously offered to Floyd’s murderer as well as to his victim. This is the nature of God’s justice. And it falls to those who sign up to the Christian faith that not only do they ensure that God’s justice is done, but that by their actions in this world it is seen to be done.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.