Moral Governance, U.S. Democracy, and Prison Hell: Carceral Theological Imaginaries in the Early Nineteenth Century

This paper shows how early nineteenth-century theological affirmations of hell sutured ideals of U.S. republican democratic governance to ideas about prisons and punishment. Influential New Divinity theologians rhetorically integrated hell and prisons into their idealizations of the United States as a Christian democratic nation. Responding to Universalist arguments against the idea of hell, traditional proponents of hell argued for the necessity of hell in God’s moral governance; to do so, they made analogies to imprisonment in human moral governance. The paper analyzes sermons by Lyman Beecher and Moses Stuart that present prisons and hell as fundamental to human and divine governance. Both prisons and hell are said to keep rebels and unwanted passions in check and produce public and cosmic safety. Fear of wickedness and criminality is rhetorically assuaged by images of sublime safety. In response, Universalists imagined other ways of creating public goods and dealing with social harm.