Ministry to Prisoners

A true Christian is no conformist. He remembers, rather, the exhortation of St. Paul: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Whereas the world encourages a lazy, unthinking acquiescence in its many cockeyed opinions and myriad half-cooked ideas, the gospel calls for a total transformation of the patterns and processes of our thought. It is no easy matter to love God “with the whole mind,” for the unregenerate mind is notoriously sluggish, and the clamor for worldly conformity is all around us.

Among the many ways in which Christians today are tempted to conform to the biases of secular society, I wonder if there is any so pervasive and insidious as the temptation to accept the world’s view of the condemned criminal and how to deal with him. And just what does the world nowadays, in general terms, say about the condemned criminal? Let me suggest that “Lock him up someplace and forget about him” pretty much sums up the world’s solution to the problem.

The world says that we are good people, after all, with busy, productive lives to live and precious little time to worry about society’s moral dregs, whose behavior makes them unfit to live with the rest of us. Whatever doubts we have about the effectiveness of our penal systems, prisons do seem to be effective in lowering the crime statistics in our cities. So we are tempted to let them be.

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Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).

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