Editors’ Note: This essay is adapted from an address delivered at the annual meeting of the Front Porch Republic and should be read with that in mind.
It will not be news to anyone that civility seems to be rather lacking in our day. Not that there ever was a Golden Age for civility. The barbs that Jefferson’s and Adams’s journalist surrogates wrote about the other weren’t exactly genteel, and as a recent play reminds us, it wasn’t that long into our country’s history that a sitting vice president shot and killed our first secretary of the Treasury. A lack of civility is nothing new, but we can still sense that things have worsened in the last few decades.
Our social scientist friends tell us about the rise of “affective polarization,” which seems very likely to be connected to our civility problems. Whereas ideological polarization maps out where we differ on various points in the marketplace of ideas, affective polarization measures our affect, how we feel about each other, how we resent sharing proximity in that marketplace. One definition of affective polarization is “the gap between individuals’ positive feelings toward their own political party and negative feelings toward the opposing party.” And the data on affective polarization are not encouraging. University of Virginia sociologist Wendy Wang’s findings on interparty marriages are telling: in 2016, 30 percent of marriages were politically mixed. In 2024, that number was down to 21 percent, with only 3.6 percent being between a Republican and a Democrat. In contrast, in 1967, only 3 percent of marriages were interracial, whereas in 2019 that number was at 19 percent. According to Pew Research:
But it’s also our feelings toward each other that matter, not just the politicians or the system. The proverbial Thanksgiving dinner can feel that much more fraught with stress, making us a little less likely to want to stay in touch with certain people, and so we disengage. We are more likely to hold each other in contempt than simply disagree, and the depth of our estrangement makes civility seem like a rather thin reed to lean on.
I don’t have a grand solution for what ails us, though I confess I don’t think civility alone is going to do the trick.
Civility strikes me as a secondary virtue, and somewhat anemic, one that rests on more powerful, thick-blooded virtues that depend on something more than the merely natural or human. To borrow language from Abraham Kuyper, civility seems more like a mechanical than an organic virtue, something that is good for us, but only necessary because of the Fall, something we wouldn’t need except for the crooked timber of our natures. It’s like how C. S. Lewis describes equality as akin to medicine or clothes: we need them, but they are more like preventive goods than a good in themselves. I think we’ll have art, friendship, and play in heaven; I doubt we’ll need civility or tolerance, though we definitely need them now.
So rather than offer a robust argument or a ten-point plan about restoring civility, I want to do something more akin to offering a testimony of sorts. It is not so much a deductive argument as a bit of wandering meditation.
My testimony is about a community that I’ve come to fall in love with in Michigan, where I live. This community of roughly 1,500 is tucked away in what are not quite hills but rolling fields and patches of trees, not far from the Grand River. Around 1,300 live on site, many of whom have been there for decades and many of whom will spend the rest of their lives there. The buildings are not the newest or shiniest. They give off the vibe of a 1970s community college. They don’t have the latest tech; the wireless is terrible. In fact, there is no internet, no authorized cell phones, and no air conditioning in the summer. But there are flower gardens, manicured lawns, a dog run and training area, and a vegetable garden where the residents grow produce that is donated to a nearby chapter of Meals on Wheels. There are classrooms, a library that is small but includes the classics, basketball courts, softball fields, choirs, band practice, church services, and a running track. There is a bustling trade school in wood and metal work called the vocational village, in which residents work with their hands to craft beautiful furniture and artwork. There are also medical facilities and even a special housing arrangement for those suffering from Alzheimer’s or other cognitive ailments.
While there is something of a market at work, and an underground market to be sure, consumerism is very low compared to most of the country. While there are some distinctions of class, almost everyone enjoys a relatively equal standard of living. As I mentioned, there is no internet or cell phones or social media. Everybody walks to work. There’s no DMV or insurance or even much in the way of taxes.
But there is a lot of barbed wire. There are a few women who work there, but the 1,300 permanent residents are all men. There is communal dining, but the food is not very good and the schedule is not very flexible. There are high towers and a lot of men with radios and guns. You can have visitors, but you can’t leave, and to see your visitors you’ll have to endure a very unpleasant search protocol first.
The place I’m discussing is the Richard Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, Michigan, where Calvin University and Calvin Seminary partner to run the Calvin Prison Initiative (CPI). When the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) first received our proposal nearly ten years ago, they responded positively and pledged to help us find prospective students who would be out of prison in a few years. From the MDOC’s perspective, this would maximally leverage the educational goods for society, but my colleagues at CPI insisted instead that we also get “lifers” for the program. As Abraham Kuyper famously noted, there is not a “single square inch” that escapes God’s sovereignty, and so we believe those square inches behind the fences and barbed wire are also worth investing in.
Each year the program admits twenty-five students from around Michigan to earn a BA by double majoring in Faith and Community Leadership and Human Services over five years. There are a lot of limits, but there is not a lot of freedom, at least freedom defined as being free from external restraints and capable of charting one’s own course in life. Every moment of the day is regulated, observed, time-stamped, and recorded.
It goes without saying that prisons are not known to be the most civil of places. My students there can confirm the obvious: people often don’t treat each other well behind bars, and that includes not only prisoners but unfortunately some correctional officers. And yet there is this strange paradox that I’ve found in teaching several classes at Handlon. There is a lot of civility, good will, and learning happening in an institution that appears from the outside as if it should be the last place you’d find it. Before CPI started, Handlon was known as Gladiator School, as the violence there was so pervasive. Since CPI began in 2015, the number of misconduct reports in the prison has fallen by more than 80 percent, according to the former warden Dewayne Burton.
A reduction in violence, however, doesn’t necessarily mean greater human flourishing. We can recall Rousseau’s quip that a dungeon can be peaceful but no one would want to live there. But if you ask anyone who has worked with the men in this program, you’ll hear testimony that there is indeed a great deal of flourishing going on. There is a great deal of civility, not easily attained at first, but definitely there. But even more than civility there is respect, and, if I can say this without sounding sentimental or mawkish, there is love. And this will sound rather preachy, and I come by that honestly as I am the son of a preacher man, but things have transpired in this community that I cannot explain without invoking the power of God.
Why is it a remarkable teaching experience? For one, my Handlon students all appreciate being there. They’re positively grateful. They’ve learned how to talk about hard things without needing trigger warnings, and that’s quite an accomplishment in an environment where disagreements are often a prelude to a physical confrontation. They love coming to class. That’s not always the case on Calvin’s Grand Rapids campus. For many of them, this has been the first time they’ve been told that books, learning, and the life of the mind are something they can do well. For many of them, their first class with a male professor afforded them the first positive relationship they’ve had with a male authority figure. And it makes for a bad joke, but they do have time to do the reading, and they do it, unlike some students at fancier places.
They also know they’re where they are for a reason. It’s true that they have done terrible things, even though those things are not ultimately what defines them. They’re well acquainted with the ups and downs of life, and original sin is not just an abstract doctrine for them. They have what sometimes is referred to as “life experience,” and going through texts with these students is just different. Debating what Socrates should do when confronted with Crito’s offer to help him escape death row hits differently when your students are incarcerated. When we read Orwell’s 1984, one of my students spoke so movingly of how Winston’s interrogation in the Ministry of Love related to the sixteen months he was in “the hole” or “solitary confinement” that I had to collect myself. It was in the hole, this student said, that he hit rock bottom and finally gave up and turned to God for help. When we read The Locust Effect by Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros, about how ordinary crime is like a plague of locusts in the developing world, one of my students wrote about how he was one of those locusts in his earlier life, and now he wanted to compensate for the harm he’d done.
Another student responded to a prompt asking him to sketch out what justice issue he’d want to work on if he was released from prison. He had never seen a man reading a book until he came to prison, and so if he got out he wanted to start a literacy modeling program where young boys, especially young boys of color, could witness black men reading books. When we read Peter Singer, Judith Jarvis Thompson, and Robert George on abortion, several of my students relayed the pain they felt as would-be fathers who were sidelined when their would-be baby mamas decided to end their pregnancies. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is one of my favorite books; reading through it with these students deepened the meaning and impact of that book for me, something I previously would have thought impossible. One of my favorite anecdotes is learning that two of my students, Brothers Potts, a Christian, and Larry X, a Nation of Islam Muslim, were meeting at 3:30 AM in the bathroom to hash out their thoughts on Abraham Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty because that was the only place they could argue, civilly, in peace, without waking up their bunkies. I could go on.
When I think about the students I see in these classes and compare where they are now to how they describe their past selves, I find it remarkable, miraculous even. But a skeptic might say that of course that’s the case given my priors. And if this was all I had to go on, perhaps they’d have a point. After all, there are secular prison programs in other parts of the country that have also done fantastic work.
But even beyond the remarkable classroom evidence, there are other stories that bear witness to transformations that secular explanations cannot account for. I wish I had more time to tell you about Valmarcus, who was involved in the drug trade in the 1990s and killed another young black man named Jeffrey. Jeffrey’s mom, Jerline, shocked everyone at Valmarcus’s sentencing when she told him she forgave him. Valmarcus rejected this forgiveness for more than fifteen years. He says now his heart was hard, but Jerline would reach out to him from time to time and relate that she gave him over to God, trusting that God would bring Valmarcus to Himself even in prison. Over those fifteen years, Valmarcus gave his life to Christ and enrolled in the Calvin Prison Initiative. In his words, God tilled the soil of his heart until one day he reached out to Jerline and apologized for what he had taken from her. As he recounted it, Jerline cried out: “You don’t know how many years I have been waiting just for you to say that.” Jerline would later say that God gave her another son that day. Valmarcus now calls Jerline “mom,” and Jerline calls Valmarcus her son. They’re both working together on victim-offender meditation for those who are open to it.
I wish I could tell you more about another student, Kris, who went to prison because more than twenty years ago a friend stayed with him and his wife and abused their two-year-old son, and he hunted down this “friend” and killed him. When Kris entered the prison system, he made it a point to make life miserable for any fellow inmates who were inside because of criminal sexual conduct. He was consumed with wreaking vengeance. But he also started learning woodworking in the vocational village, and he was mentored by an older prisoner who became a very good friend to him. The twist came when Kris learned that that friend and mentor was himself in prison because of criminal sexual conduct. God used that moment and relationship to soften Kris’s heart. That older mentor has since been released, and he and Kris talk almost every day. Kris’s son, now grown, has become good friends with Kris’s mentor.
We can make some headway explaining background conditions, family structure, and lack of opportunities to understand how people, mainly men, can commit terrible acts of violence. We can understand, to some extent, how good classrooms work, how great works of literature ennoble us, how talking about what the good life consists of is itself part of what it means to be human. What I cannot understand, what gobsmacks me, are the transformations that we can see in the lives of men in prison, and the love, respect, and yes, civility we find in programs like CPI. To quote someone else who encouraged us to visit the prisoner, with man this is impossible, “but with God, all things are possible.”
I said earlier I am not making an argument, but if I am to draw a conclusion from this meandering meditation, it would be that despair about our national and cultural malaise should not be on the table for us. If civility can flourish amid even more robust virtues, both classical and Christian, in a prison of all places, then we can hope and work for a revival of civility in the institutions and spaces and places we inhabit outside of prison.
We cannot engineer such a revival on a grand scale, but we can pray for renewal and go about the work of loving God and neighbor in the places we’re called to be, whether that’s in the pages of the New York Times, the local crisis pregnancy center, the small town homeschooling co-op, or an out-of-the-way prison in rural Michigan.
Good things can come out of Nazareth. And if we are people of faith, we can do our work with confidence, believing in God’s sovereignty over all things: a conviction that we Calvinists put special emphasis on, even though it is common to all Christians. My students are hard at work learning and loving God and neighbor, motivated by faith, hope, and love, in the most unlikely of places. We should do likewise.
Image by josefkubes and licensed via Adobe Stock.
