Peace churches and restorative justice: Past, present, and future

Criminologists have long recognised links between technologies of discipline and punishment, and religious doctrines and communities of faith. Taking up the challenge to include theology in interdisciplinary engagement, we use this article to invite secular scholars of restorative justice to engage with and attend to how theologians discuss criminological scholarship, including how it relates to restorative justice. This paper considers a small group of religious communities and these communities’ relationships to criminology and restorative justice. After identifying a set of ‘peace churches’, the paper reviews the historical links between these churches and movements for social and criminological reform, including restorative justice. While peace church communities have been discussed in histories of restorative justice, this article adds to those histories an explanation of how restorative justice is grounded in theological terms. By attending to contemporary discourse among theologians and leaders within peace church communities, the article sheds light on theological justifications for restorative justice and explores how that theology has developed in more recent years. This, we assert, provides context for why many theologians and leaders in peace church communities are involved with movements that challenge technologies of social control, specifically the defunding or abolition of police and abolition of prisons.