“Americans are incurable legal optimists. One reason why American Christians have behaved as we have is that we have been more American than Christian. That’s why so many of us have believed that criminally prohibiting liquor or cocaine, gambling or abortion would actually put a stop to those practices, when all the available evidence suggests otherwise.”
In this talk (the talk is available in audio and video formats), Bill Stuntz tries to take a stab at explaining why we see the American criminal justice system become more punitive when we see Evangelical Protestants become more active on moral issues. He argues that this result is surprising because one might expect a faith rooted in grace to be more lenient.
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