It Was Always About Healing Anyway
My therapist seems to obsess over the origins of things, as yours probably does, too. “Let’s get curious about where that feeling is coming from,” she’ll repeat in various versions. I recently reflected to her how this prioritization of roots resembles abolitionist values: one observes that police responses for people experiencing emotional distress or erratic behavior in public, for example, serve primarily to incarcerate, injure, or kill people who are homeless. The mainstream rationale suggests we train cops in Homelessness 101. But the abolitionist asks: why are so many people living outside in the first place? Why do their mental health needs go unmet? What is wrong with our collective spirit that normalizes the impulse to turn armed battalions on poor people?
A Zambian immigrant who gives anarchist vibes when she does reveal snippets of her own story, my therapist required no convincing, however annoying my proclivity to make everything about abolition. But then I told her this focus on the source of everything shares attributes with what I mean by theology. God is not a name, not a person: it is a word. It is a signpost pointing in the direction of the mystery from which everything emerges. No doubt countless cultures have anthropomorphized that which creates, but it is the inquiry itself that unites world religions. No matter how many explanations science conjures, we will always find ourselves asking “but where did that come from?” God is the answer to that question and the asking itself. And it is the liberation I continue to uncover through the investigation of what is that inspired me to name this whole endeavor Abolition Theology. But no longer.
Full disclosure, I’m renaming my writing project because it was pointed out to me that someone already coined the term and had previously owned the website domain. If they recreate it, I hope you follow them, too. But it was time anyway. My claim to theology was always tongue-in-cheek. I’ve not darkened a church door for thirteen years and find no belonging in any specific religious tradition. Buddhism comes the closest because liberation is its whole enterprise, but it’s famously nontheistic. And as I have written elsewhere, connotation trumps denotation: what the reader thinks theology means matters more than my unorthodox reinterpretation. As much as I refuse to let “believers” disqualify me from the discipline that radicalized me in the first place, you will find little in my writing that looks like the theology they teach in divinity school. The punchline of the bit has come and gone.
Healing is also fraught: without care and intention, the notion can get ableist. It suggests that there ever existed a state of wholeness to which we might return given enough said healing. Moreover, having been raised in a charismatic strand of Christian fundamentalism that emphasized the miraculous, healing reminds me of toxic magic. All the same, the metaphor suits me. Healing is what I'm up to here because I feel wounded indeed. My writing project is all about recovering from religious trauma by inhabiting a spiritual home in abolitionist dreams. I came up in a cult, one whose creed celebrated everything that drives structural violence and harm: capitalism and colonialism, carcerality and criminalization, white supremacy and anti-Blackness, hetero-patriarchy, imperialism, ableism, etc. I carry these systems of oppression in my body. My very form invites their ghosts into every room I enter. In the most perverse of ironies, however, I experience no disadvantage from this illness but, rather, I benefit. Even as I continuously strive to unlearn the ideologies enabling these systems, I enjoy power, economic stability, and physical safety thanks to this condition.
The corporeal is collective and vice versa. Yes, systems of oppression are embodied: generational trauma lingers in the bodies of criminalized people and generational traumatizing endures in white bodies like mine, inverse lineages that still harm everyone. In turn, the healing of my own personhood relies on my participation in mending the injuries afflicting our collective body. I must work to repair the harms of my ancestors that I all too often reinforce with my own actions. I can never be free - you can never be free - so long as the cancer of colonial violence remains.
It’s the antidote to structural oppression and its somatic manifestation that I have found in abolition. If I lived in 19th-century America, one would hope the abolition of slavery would characterize my whole personality. It would define my politics, even if I also identified with socialism or whatever. How could I prioritize anything else when my own kinfolk perpetuated and thrived off of so murderous an economy? And because enslavement never disappeared but only metastasized, present-day abolitionist movements constitute the same struggle. It is the same movement and, therefore, for me, the politic that inscribes all others. It rightly focuses on carceral systems (prisons, police, immigration detention, etc.) that most obviously reflect the 13th-Amendment slavery loophole, but it applies to every system of domination and the spiritual disintegration that facilitates each one. Abolition is the process and the outcome of midwifing the liberated world where our collective and personal wounds have been healed. I am healing by way of abolition.
So far, my essays have exposed embarrassingly personal tales. I wrote about my recovery from alcoholism, my reckoning with my gender and sexuality, the story of my divorce, how parenting heals my inner child, my negotiation with self-hatred, and my internalized white supremacy, for example. Vulnerability is balm. Because spirituality and politics describe the same organism, my writing all addresses social-justice movements, what fuels them, what holds them back, and the values that might heal movements themselves. It all began with musings on how to garden a spirituality from the composted remains of Evangelicalism. Expect more of the same. But make no mistake, it was only ever about healing all along.
