"yes" and "no" to restorative justice as a "mennonite thing"

'Yes' and 'No' to Restorative Justice as a “Mennonite Thing”

BRIAN R. GUMM1

Abstract: This paper will take an historical and narrative approach to address the restorative justice movement and its resonance with overarching biblical themes of justice and community. It will do so by comparing the histories and assumptions of both the restorative justice movement and the criminal justice system. Finally, early Anabaptist experience will be examined as a way to see how the beginnings of the restorative justice movement may have been conceivable centuries later.

I. Restorative Justice: From humble beginnings

Restorative justice is a values- and principles-based framework that attempts to address incidents of

wrongdoing by asking three questions: 1) Who has been hurt? 2) What are their needs? and 3) Whose

obligations are these?2 In its early days in the 1970s and '80s, before it was even called “restorative

justice,” the field's practitioners saw the Western criminal justice system as implicitly asking a very

different set of questions when addressing wrongdoing: 1) What laws have been broken? 2) Who did it?

and 3) What do they deserve?3 When contrasting these two sets of questions, it's quickly seen that the

starting points for restorative justice and the criminal justice system are fundamentally different. One

assumes a powerful system where the other assumes relationship. One focuses on an individual, the

other, a community. Finally, one prescribes punishment where the other seeks restoration. But these are

boring, abstract ways to talk about restorative justice, so let me tell you a story. It's a story first told to

me by the “grandfather” of the restorative justice movement, my mentor, colleague, and friend, Dr.

Howard Zehr. I lovingly call this the “creation story” of restorative justice.4

One night in in the spring of 1974, in a small town in central Ontario, two teenage boys got

1 Brian R. Gumm is a dual-degree student at Eastern Mennonite University in the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (MA, Conflict Transformation, emphasis in restorative justice) and Seminary (Mdiv, emphasis in theology). This paper was originally prepared and delivered as “Restorative Justice: Revisiting Punitive Interpretations of the Bible,” a presentation for the Student Learning and Global Justice Conference hosted by International Justice Mission and Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, Friday, April 8, 2011, in Vienna, Virginia.

2 Howard Zehr. The Little Book of Restorative Justice, Little Books of Justice & Peacebuilding. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2002, 21.

3 Ibid.4 This story has been told by Howard Zehr countless times and has been recorded in a handful of restorative justice books.

I'm drawing on the account from Gary Nyp. Pioneers of Peace: The History of Community Justice Initiatives in the Waterloo Region, 1974-2004. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2004, 13-15.

Gumm : 'Yes' and 'No' to Restorative Justice as a “Mennonite Thing” 2

drunk and went on a vandalism spree throughout the town. The two eighteen-year-old boys smashed

windows, damaged vehicles, defaced church signs, and even pulled a boat out of a driveway and into

the middle of the street before going back home and passing out. They awoke the next morning to

police knocking on their door. The boys were charged with vandalism of twenty-two properties. In the

midst of the sentencing process, two Mennonite men working as probation officers were assigned to the

case. Seemingly on a whim, one of them suggested that it “would be neat” to have the offenders in this

case meet the victims of their vandalism face to face instead of simply sending them both off to jail, to

which the other replied “why not?”5 Along with their pre-sentence report to the judge in the case, who

had a reputation for being strict, the two Mennonite probation officers suggested their wild idea. Much

to everyone's surprise, the judge accepted their suggestion in lieu of jail time for the boys. So the two

Mennonite probation officers took the two young men around Elmira, Ontario, knocking on doors,

meeting their victims face to face, and apologizing. This experience radically reoriented the life of one

of the boys, Russel Kelly, who had lost both of his parents and was struggling with substance abuse

issues before this. From these humble beginnings began a movement that nearly forty years later has

circled the globe and spread far beyond its origins in the criminal justice system.

But let's take our three restorative justice questions and explore this creation story a bit more.

First: Who has been hurt? The obvious answer is the twenty-two people or families whose properties

were vandalized. But wait a minute, we also heard that one of these boys, Russel, had lost both of his

parents before he was even eighteen years old, and was coping with drugs and alcohol. Does this not

sound like someone who is hurting? So any justice process that is restorative will quickly show how

easily lines are blurred when you shift from blame in an isolated incident to identifying pain and

brokenness in a community who has experience wrongdoing. Once we have an idea who has been hurt

in a situation, we ask: What are their needs? The people whose properties were vandalized had their

5 Ibid., 15.


sense of safety and security shattered like the very rocks careening through their plate glass windows,

thrown from the boys' hands. These people needed to feel safe again in their own homes and

neighborhoods. And what of the boys? We know from Russel's experience of losing his parents that he

likely needed the experience of a family which he'd since lost, the need to feel connected and

supported. Lastly, we'll ask: Whose obligations are these? As members of the community, the boys had

an obligation to help restore their victims' sense of security and safety, but the victims and the wider

community hopefully feels – even in the midst of their distress at the violation – a sense that these boys

are one of their own and might be successfully brought back into relationship through the justice

process.

This last bit on community obligations is tricky business, as we are so conditioned to think of

justice as a one-way street. But at the same time you can't command someone to suddenly begin

thinking and acting restoratively in this way. Indeed, when I've heard Howard Zehr tell this story,

having been later influenced by and talking to some of the people in this situation, he adds a little piece

about the boys walking up to one house in particular, which they'd vandalized, knocking on the door,

only to be greeted by a gruff, shirtless man, with a beer in his hand and his eyes locked suspiciously on

the two boys. Try telling him to be restorative! The question that hasn't yet been made clear – which is

very important when addressing skeptics of restorative justice – is the process question: How you do

the stuff the first three questions only help describe? One you have a larger, more communitarian sense

of what's going on in a case of wrongdoing, you need to actually do something about it in ways

consistent with the assumptions of the initial questions, namely a community seeking to repair harm vs.

a system seeking to punish the lawbreakers.

So far we've taken a look at the fundamental questions and assumptions of restorative justice

contrasted with assumptions of a perhaps oversimplified account of the Western criminal justice. We've

then seen how those questions and assumptions were at work in the creation story of restorative justice.


This has hopefully served as a suitable introduction to the field of restorative justice. But I haven't

talked about the Bible yet, as the title for this paper advertises. What punitive interpretations of the

Bible am I assuming? In the next section I will show how the prison system in the U.S. was modeled on

European monastic orders and how these religious impulses mixed with questionable philosophical

commitments lodged firmly in the nineteenth century American social imaginary. 6 The consequences of

such a mixture has produced profoundly sour fruit throughout the years, into our own time.

II. Criminal Justice: Engineering penitence, producing madness

Through his survey of literature covering post-Enlightenment legal traditions and prison systems,

David Cayley helps us see that the penitentiary system that developed in eighteenth and nineteenth

century America had its roots in early modern European monastic orders who practiced particularly

harsh forms of punishment, including solitary confinement and physical mutilation.7 But as even the

word “penitentiary” shows us, it goes back further than that. What made such an idea conceivable in

the first place? Cayley makes the claim that “(t)he idea that crime demands prosecution and

punishment seems no more than common sense to us today. But it cannot be found in Western society

before the twelfth century, when modern conceptions of law first made their appearance.”8

In early European society, law was “embedded in social life rather than embodied in special

legal institutions.”9 If this sounds familiar, it should. Pre-modern practices of law and justice were

inherently social, just as restorative justice approaches are and criminal justice approaches are not. This

sociality began to shift in Europe, however, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when the Roman

church began to assert itself over-against ruling authorities, resulting in a long and conflictual, often

6 Cf. Charles Taylor. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.7 David Cayley. The Expanding Prison : The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives. Toronto:

House of Anansi Press, 1998, 138.8 Ibid., 123.9 Ibid., 126, emphasis mine.


violent, social-economic-political battle. Results of this power struggle produced among other things

the Inquisition in the fifteenth century, the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth, the so-called “Wars

of Religion”10 in seventeenth century Europe, all of which helped give birth to the Enlightenment

intellectual project and its political progeny, the powerful Western systems we inhabit today: the

modern nation-state and democratic capitalism. Mixed up in all of this was the developing idea that

crime is primarily an individual matter rather than social, and therefore the solution is also individual,

namely punishment.

What I've just tried to do is to take a quick sprint through Western history from the medieval

period into the early modern period in hopes that it can become at least conceivable that the whole

cluster of thoughts and practices encapsulated in a phrase like “crime and punishment” or a word like

“penitentiary” are not givens, but are rather products of messy history in which the church is very much

enmeshed. So even though today Americans live in a country where the church is disestablished from

the state, we can look back over history and see that some of our ideas had unintended consequences as

they worked out in practice and gained institutional momentum and collided with other forces.

The so-called “war on drugs,” for instance, is predicated on the assumption that “crime and

moral evil are identical” and that “whatever is wrong should be illegal and whatever is illegal must also

be wrong.”11 American Christians are often the most vocal supporters of legislation on moral issues, but

as Cayley convincingly shows, the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing “reform” in the

early 1980s created the conditions in which the prison system has exploded in America at a startling

rate, not just in terms of the number of people incarcerated but also the entire prison-industrial complex

that has cropped up in order to support such a system, which itself develops “into a formidable lobby

with a vested interest in further growth.”12 Indeed, the situation has only accelerated since Cayley's

10 Cf. William T. Cavanaugh. The Myth of Religious Violence : Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

11 Cayley, Expanding Prison, 292.12 Ibid., 54.


book was published in the late 90s. Since that time we've seen prison populations only continue to rise,

and since the global economic crisis broke out a few years ago, we're now seeing states in budget

crises, unable to support the criminal justice practices they signed on for under valiant “tough on

crime” political rhetoric that still has considerable currency in public opinion. Under such tough

economic circumstances, states are increasingly turning to something that may be a completely new

phenomenon: privately-run, for-profit jails. Christians must ask themselves in light of the Bible's many

warnings against the idolatrous desire of greed and power: Do we think capitalism is the solution to our

prison crisis?

III. Anabaptism: An alternative history

In the last section I tried to show that, as it relates to the criminal justice system in the U.S., we've

gotten ourselves into quite a pickle. To do this I made use of a broad historical narrative that traced the

lines of major intellectual and sociopolitical movements over nearly a millennium, with the church

deeply in the mix for most of it. Now I want to turn to history again but this time I want to trace a little

line, the line of the Anabaptists. I know here at this conference I can safely assume everyone is

Christian, but what I cannot safely assume is that many if any people here will know what Anabaptism

even is.

Before I start tracing this line, though, I want to call back into our awareness the story from the

beginning of this paper: the creation story of restorative justice. Specifically, I want to remind us that

the two probation officers who dreamed up the crazy idea – the idea to make the two boys apologize to

the victims of their vandalization – those probation officers happened to be Mennonite. For reasons I'll

go into shortly, the vocation of probation officer was not then – and probably still isn't now – a

typically “Mennonite” thing to do. Indeed, as one of the officers reflects, “As a Mennonite, I always

considered the court system as too military, too aggressive,” and it was only at the urging of his church


agency, the Mennonite Central Committee, that he agreed to take the volunteer position. 13 What I want

to suggest is that it's no accident that these two Mennonite men would think of such a thing in this

strange new job in which they found themselves, and that it didn't just come out of the clear blue sky.

Rather, this idea was the fruit of a peculiar strand of the Christian tradition, whose collective memory

and faith practices shaped these men in such a way as to make it seem conceivable despite the long

odds of the idea being accepted by the judge in the case.

The Anabaptist tradition which eventually formed into groups including the Mennonites began

in sixteenth century Germany, roughly contemporary with the beginnings of the Protestant

Reformation. While there is no single “myth of origin” for the Anabaptist movement,14 one of the more

straightforward and observable dimensions was their dawning conviction – based on a deep

engagement with the Bible – that the rite of baptism was to be a person's own conviction discerned in

the fellowship of believers. In other words, they became convinced and practiced adult baptism, which

in that generation meant re-baptism, the source of the word “Anabaptism.” This word came from

outside the group – from the dominant churches – and was intended as an epithet, an insult, much like

the word “Christian” functioned in first century Antioch, which as Kavin Rowe shows us in his study of

Acts, came from the Roman government as “a uniformly derogatory term.”15 In Reformation-era

Europe – the highly volatile climate described earlier – such a move as adult baptism was political from

the word “go.” For both Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany, hand in glove with provincial

governments, the practice of infant baptism served not only a spiritual function but a civic one as well,

namely being registered as a citizen to your territory and, if you were an able-bodied man, being

subject to inscription into your prince's wars. Simply put the Anabaptists were not only heretics but

13 Nyp, Pioneers of Peace, 14.14 Cf. Thomas Heilke. "Theological and Secular Meta-Narratives of Politics: Anabaptist Origins Revisited (Again)."

Modern Theology 13, no. 2 (1997): 227-52.15 C. Kavin Rowe. World Upside Down : Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age. New York: Oxford University Press,

2009, 129-30.


treasonous heretics at that, which earned them death by drowning, burning, hanging, and my favorite:

being put in a cage and ran up a chain to the top of the church steeple where you would eventually die

of starvation or exposure, and where your bones would take over 400 years to break down to the point

of falling through the bottom of the cage. (Do I sound bitter?)

All of these things happened, and I only make a dramatic show of it to underscore the

importance of the martyr tradition in Anabaptism, especially among Mennonites even today, nearly 500

years later.16 Early persecution led eventually to migration to the American colonies, and later Canada

and Latin America, at the promise of religious tolerance and abundant land for this mostly-agrarian

group. Used to being separated from society by necessity, those walls eventually began to break down

for many North American Mennonites in the 20th century as they moved from what Driedger and

Kraybill call “Quietism” to “Activism” or what Ervin Stutzman has shown in his new rhetorical study,

from “Nonresistance” to “Justice.”17

But from the earliest days of this movement, a strong communal sense pervaded, galvanized by

persecution, but also evident in their experience of the Holy Spirit. As Stuart Murray points out, early

Anabaptists saw the congregation as “the primary locus of the Spirit's activity, as well as the setting

within which Scripture was read and obeyed.”18 Their reading of Scripture, too, as Driedger and

Kraybill show us, “clearly tilts toward the New Testament. And within the Gospels, Matthew's story

predominates because of Mennonite deference to the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5 is quoted most

extensively. Moreover, within chapter five the cluster of verses dealing with nonresistance and love of

enemies...”19 Early Anabaptist conflict within the fellowship was also handled with deference to Jesus'

16 Cf. Thieleman Van Bragt. Martyrs Mirror: The Story of Seventeen Centuries of Christian Martyrdom from the Time of Christ to A.D. 1660. 2nd reprint ed. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2001; and Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror. Edited by Kirsten Eve Beachy. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2010.

17 Cf. Leo Driedger and Donald B. Kraybill. Mennonite Peacemaking : From Quietism to Activism. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1994; Ervin R. Stutzman. From Nonresistance to Justice : The Transformation of Mennonite Church Peace Rhetoric, 1908-2008. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2011.

18 Stuart Murray. Biblical Interpretation in the Anabaptist Tradition, Studies in the Believers Church Tradition. Kitchener, Ont; Scottdale, Pa.: Pandora Press; Herald Press, 2000, 145.

19 Driedger and Kraybill, Mennonite Peacemaking, 30.


own instruction in Matthew's gospel, namely Matthew 18:15-18, which for generations Anabaptists

would call the “Rule of Christ.”20 Now with the restorative justice creation story in view, let me read

the first few sentences of the Rule of Christ: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault,

just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen,

take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three

witnesses'" (NIV).

Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that this verse, so important to early Anabaptist experience,

could have somehow helped spark the imaginations of the two Mennonite probation officers on another

continent a few hundred years later? I'm aware of a number of risks with making such a suggestion, but

I don't want to rule it out completely. While I'm not suggesting that these two men were cognitively

recalling this verse in this particular situation, I am suggesting that their community's faith practices,

informed by its history and theology, provided the social imagination, or better yet the theopolitical

imagination, necessary for such an idea to be conceivable in the first place.21 Wouldn't it be “neat”22 if

offenders could encounter their victims and be put into such a place as to be transformed? Neat,

indeed..

IV. Conclusion

As I close, let me make a few things clear as to what I am not trying to say in all that's preceded. I am

not trying to colonize restorative justice by claiming that it's solely a “Mennonite thing.” Doing so

would be ignorant and irresponsible considering the directions that the field has taken since the 1970s.

Another thing I am not trying to say is that the communal/relational attitudes inherent to restorative

20 Ervin A. Schlabach. "Rule of Christ among the Early Swiss Anabaptists." Mennonite Quarterly Review 52, no. 3 (1978): 265.

21 Cf. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries and William T. Cavanaugh. Theopolitical Imagination. London: T & T Clark, 2002.

22 Nyp, Pioneers of Peace, 15.


justice are necessarily new. In fact, if anything, I hope I have shown through my construals of history

that they're actually quite old. When my mentor, Howard Zehr, tells this creation story and his later

work in articulating the field, he's quick to point out that non-Western people who come to know

restorative justice often say quite matter-of-factly, “Well, of course! That's how we've handled

wrongdoing all along!” or “That's how our elders handled these situations!” Indeed, a communal

awareness as it relates to handling wrongdoing is a very, very old impulse, and that it's so surprising to

Westerners only underscores how our societal imagination has been captivated by the habits of

individualism.

So to summarize, I've tried to show that restorative justice is a “return to the teachings”

approach for understanding and repairing harm in communities and societies. Much could be said about

the field as it is currently conceived and practiced, as it is now a truly global phenomenon. But rather

than doing that, I chose in section one to focus on the creation story of restorative justice from a little

town in Ontario nearly 40 years ago, and to show how that story fits with the basic questions of a

restorative approach to repairing harm: 1) Who has been hurt? 2) What are their needs? and 3) Whose

obligations are these? And lastly: How do we proceed? In section two I focused on the Western

criminal justice system and attempted to give it a coherent historical narrative that showed both 1) it's

inherently individualistic orientation and 2) the dominant church's complicity in its formation and

continued maintenance. Finally, in section three I attempted to give a story behind the story of

restorative justice, namely the experience of Anabaptist Mennonites, not to lay claim to restorative

justice, but rather to offer the gifts that such an approach has to those who might listen and benefit.

After all, as the Sunday school song goes: “Love is something if you give it away. You'll end up having

more.”


Works CitedCayley, David. The Expanding Prison : The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for

Alternatives. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998.Driedger, Leo, and Donald B. Kraybill. Mennonite Peacemaking : From Quietism to Activism.

Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1994.Murray, Stuart. Biblical Interpretation in the Anabaptist Tradition, Studies in the Believers Church

Tradition. Kitchener, Ont; Scottdale, Pa.: Pandora Press; Herald Press, 2000.Nyp, Gary. Pioneers of Peace: The History of Community Justice Initiatives in the Waterloo Region,

1974-2004. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2004.Rowe, C. Kavin. World Upside Down : Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2009.Schlabach, Ervin A. "Rule of Christ among the Early Swiss Anabaptists." Mennonite Quarterly Review

52, no. 3 (1978): 265-66.Zehr, Howard. The Little Book of Restorative Justice, Little Books of Justice & Peacebuilding.

Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2002.

BibliographyBragt, Thieleman Van. Martyrs Mirror: The Story of Seventeen Centuries of Christian Martyrdom from

the Time of Christ to A.D. 1660. 2nd reprint ed. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2001.Cavanaugh, William T. Theopolitical Imagination. London: T & T Clark, 2002.___. The Myth of Religious Violence : Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict . New York:

Oxford University Press, 2009.Critical Issues in Restorative Justice. Edited by Howard Zehr and Barb Toews. Monsey, N.Y.;

Cullompton, England: Criminal Justice Press; Willan, 2004.Heilke, Thomas. "Theological and Secular Meta-Narratives of Politics: Anabaptist Origins Revisited

(Again)." Modern Theology 13, no. 2 (1997): 227-52.Hunter, James Davison. To Change the World : The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in

the Late Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Johnstone, Gerry. Restorative Justice : Ideas, Values, Debates. Cullompton: Willan, 2002.Stutzman, Ervin R. From Nonresistance to Justice : The Transformation of Mennonite Church Peace

Rhetoric, 1908-2008. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2011.Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror. Edited by

Kirsten Eve Beachy. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2010.Uelmen, Amy. "An Alternative Lens on Crime." Living City, April 2007, 18-20.Zehr, Howard. Changing Lenses : A New Focus for Crime and Justice. 3rd ed. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald

Press, 2005.

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