On the Rittenhouse Verdict
This text also served as my weekly newsletter article for Trinity Episcopal Church, Oshkosh, WI, if you’re wondering about some of the strange-for-a-blog hedging.
I don’t usually comment on breaking news, especially news that has become symbolically charged in a partisan way. However, some events touch on so many of our present age’s ills and hit so close to home that it feels irresponsible not to provide theological interpretation and pastoral analysis.
Last Friday, news came from Kenosha of Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal. For those not following the story, the then-17-year-old Rittenhouse traveled from Illinois in the wake of protests sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Arriving at the protests with an AR-15-style rifle, he claimed he had intended to act as a medic and protect private property. In the chaos of encounters between protesters, counter-protesters, and police ostensibly there to preserve order, Rittenhouse shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and injured Gaige Grosskreutz. The prosecution argued Rittenhouse acted with criminal recklessness. The defense argued he was reasonably seeking to defend himself.
I am far from a legal expert, and I certainly did not follow the trial closely enough to have even non-expert opinions about its specifics. I have seen quite a few people on social media speak about their sense that this was a massive miscarriage of justice, feeling that this will encourage copycats to escalate violence or out of the belief—and an idea not without scholarly support—that the American legal system, for all its claims of objectivity, provides an undue advantage to some and disadvantage to others on the bases of race, gender, and wealth. Others in the media have sought to make a hero out of Rittenhouse, saying the acquittal vindicates some right to self-defense under attack. Some have even gone so far as to claim that the victims deserved to die because they participated in protests.
Setting aside the ways in which the legal system may prove less equitable than some Americans may envision it, research on unconscious bias shows that even well-meaning people will carry bias into courtroom decisions. It may indeed be that the jury allowed Rittenhouse no unfair advantage during their deliberations. Still, it also seems pollyannaish, given what we know about human bias, sinfulness, and fallibility, to discount that possibility. But in any case, we should also be wary of taking ethical cues, in a robust sense of what is and is not just, from a courtroom verdict. Even if it operates without bias, the American legal system is founded on protecting the innocent against false accusations and unwarranted punishment (and to be clear, I think this is a just principle). Hence, in criminal trials, we have an incredibly exacting standard of proof—beyond a reasonable doubt—and the tradeoff for protecting the innocent is that the state will not punish some guilty people if they have good enough defense teams or bungled investigations.
With this said, I think there are several important points for us to consider as Christians in the wake of this verdict.
First, Christian moral expectations are robust and demanding. They are a far cry from the ethics underlying our legal system that is necessarily minimalist to allow people to freely adopt various religions and worldviews. For this reason, we can say that Rittenhouse and his family acted irresponsibly and recklessly. The example of Jesus, who tells us to turn the other cheek, makes the possibility of self-defense for the Christian extremely complicated. Certainly, though, the idea of valuing property over human life is impermissible. Rittenhouse is, of course, offered abounding grace and forgiveness from our God. Still, we cannot celebrate his behavior, and I would find it very difficult even to justify the circumstances that led to such a use of force. In truth, one of the marks of God’s forgiveness and mercy is precisely this awareness that we are all sinners “of [God’s] own redeeming,” as our burial liturgy says. This awareness frees us from needing to downplay the poor and harmful decisions we humans make. It is the logic of the world that says that only those who act valiantly deserve their human dignity. God, on the other hand, offers forgiveness to the repentant whether we are heroes or not, freeing us to tell the truth about the real harms we have perpetrated.
Second, there are, unfortunately, some influential people in politics and the media who want to do everything in their power to lionize Rittenhouse as some courageous, vanguard hero anticipating a sectarian war between the political left and the political right. If this is not bad enough, some of these actors want to see this in racial terms to promote an agenda of white supremacist authoritarianism and violence against ethnic and racial minorities. Some are already spinning this acquittal as a call to arms for further violence against protesters. I do not think it is responsible for the courts to decide based on how those decisions could be spun. In fact, I think that kind of utilitarian logic would further instrumentalize and objectify people, and that burden would almost certainly fall on the poor and marginalized. But because we have a legal system that presumes innocence and has a high bar for conviction, we bear the responsibility as a society for counteracting the nefarious purposes to which legal decisions can be spun. Our obligation to challenge misinformation and hyperpolarization rises above mere civic duty and touches on our Christian commitment to truth-telling and reconciliation. We must challenge and critique calls for vigilantism when we see or hear them and deplore the use of violence as a tool for preventing political and social dissent.
Finally, we should mourn for the injustice that led to the protests and Rittenhouse’s presence in Wisconsin in the first place: the police shooting that left Jacob Blake paralyzed. Far from an isolated tragedy, this incident was one of a string of such incidents shining light for many in this country on the fact that police violence disproportionately affects people of color. Black and Hispanic Americans, whether armed or not, are both more likely to be killed by police than white Americans. Such information combines with, for instance, the fact that black and Hispanic Americans are twice as likely to live in poverty as white or Asian Americans to stand as a stark reminder of racial inequality and systems of racism that can affect how even the most well-meaning people in our country make decisions.
To affirm that inequality persists is not to say that progress has not been made. Poverty rates for all people of color, for instance, hit historic lows in 2019. But progress does not mean completion. Christians should continue tirelessly combating the lie that human beings are more or less intelligent or more or less prone to poverty or crime because of their skin color or what part of the world their ancestors came from. This is a lie that runs counter to the message that there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ and that we should strive to respect the dignity of every human being. The truly insidious thing about this lie is that its effects can continue to exert themselves in the structures of our society even without significant numbers of people actively holding to it. This means that the lie can continue to perpetuate inequality even as many of us no doubt do not consciously believe it.
Our mourning for continued inequalities in this country should spur us to whatever action we can take to help continue reducing those inequalities, and that should start with us taking stock of the inequalities in our own community (for instance, Hispanic residents of Winnebago County are three times more likely to be in poverty than white residents and black residents are three and a half times more likely to be). We should look to ways that we, individually and as a church community, can soothe the effects of these inequalities and advocate for changes to the underlying forces that perpetuate them.
Our community likely had a wide variety of responses to the verdict. For some, it was probably little more than another piece of news. Some may have had satisfaction about what they understood to be a just verdict tempered by sadness for the tragic loss of life. For others, it was a cause for a temporary upwelling of sorrow and perhaps feelings of cynicism or resignation. And finally, for some, it was a devastating reminder of the significant progress we still have to make in our country toward fuller equality and human dignity. Regardless of our feelings about the verdict, racism and its effects are sins. As we enter this time of Advent, we remember God’s willingness, out of God’s abounding love and grace, to humble Godself and become human to repair the breach between the world and God. We remember that part of what it means to have that breach repaired for us is to emulate Christ and work to repair the effects of sin and broken relationships in the world around us. Working to undo the sin of racism and its nefarious consequences is not primarily a matter of working off whatever guilt we may carry from our participation in such systems—although repentance is undoubtedly warranted for those of us convicted of such complicity. Instead, we seek to follow the example of Christ, who, being sinless, certainly was moved not by guilt but by a loving desire to see the world flourishing in restored relationship with the God who is our source of life and light.
