DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

By RAY WADDLE

Nobody’s shy these days about quoting Scripture on sex, war, vegetarianism or the judiciary.

But here’s the dirty little secret: everybody takes some of the Bible literally, but only their favorite parts. The rest they submit to fancy interpretation, reducing it to metaphor, figure of speech, spiritualization.

“We’re all selective literalists,” says activist/author Harmon Wray.

Two examples: Jesus said he came to “release the captives.” And he said visit the prisoners. Two straightforward declarations, widely ignored.

Wray’s unsung destiny to take both quite literally. For three decades, he has been one of Tennessee’s steadiest advocates for prison reform and death penalty abolition.

The Memphis native grew up believing an inconvenient idea: nobody’s inherently better or worse than anybody else. He heard it at home and church: everybody’s made in God’s image, everybody needs moral transformation.

“I don’t believe God gives up on people,” says Wray, a seminary-trained Methodist who co-wrote a new book, Beyond Prisons: A New Interfaith Paradigm for Our Failed Prison System.

“And neither should we.”

America has 5 percent of the world’s population yet 25 percent of the prisoners (two million people). Our prisons teem with poor people and people of color. Why?

Wray blames a legal system that gets away with racism and penalizes defendants who can’t afford lawyers. This is class war, leaving white-collar criminality unchallenged -- boardroom cheapskates and legislative shysters responsible for pollution, workplace safety violations, preventable hospital deaths, prescription addictions, cancer-causing foods and other atrocities that on the whole far exceed the damage to life and property that street criminals do.

Not least, Wray blames the nation’s habitual “bad theology.”

“This theology portrays God as a child abuser who, by proxy, tortures and kills his own child (Jesus) in order to appease his own wrath so he won’t have to eternally torture and kill us all.”

“We project our dark side onto prisoners or onto God, then say God is punitive like we are. But I believe God’s in love with God’s creation, carrying on a lover’s quarrel throughout history with us. We don’t always get it.”

Since 2003, Wray has shaped an unusual series of Vanderbilt Divinity School seminars that meet at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, bringing together graduate students and long-term prisoners. In January, he’ll teach “The Christian Left in the Southern U.S” (I taught a writing class there last spring, with Wray’s assistance.)

Wray says we need to give up reliance on “putting people in cages.” Many prisoners need alternatives to incarceration, politically independent parole boards, skills for returning to society, ways to make restitution to victims.

Prisoners also need hope, healing and dignity. As long as Harmon Wray stays on the case, society’s effort to write them off and forget them all will be frustrated.