An arrest, a jail sentence, or a death penalty are all acts of violence in which the system uses force against a person who has been made in the image of God. God permits this in order to maintain law and order in his world. However, it is critical that such violence be committed justly, which is to say, that it be done in love for both the victim and the accused. Hence, this is a book about love and how a criminal justice system—and especially America’s criminal justice system—can display love, for a truly just system is a system that will be marked by God’s love for accused and victim alike.

Most of us probably assume that the criminal justice system in our country is generally sound. We may believe that it needs some tweaks here and there. We may understand that because it exists in a fallen world it will in some ways reflect the sins and weaknesses of the people who control and oversee it. But rarely do we pause to ask questions like this: If we had to design a criminal justice system from scratch and do so in a way that is consistent with Scripture, what might it look like? What principles would we embed within it? And how closely would it resemble the system we currently have?
Matthew Martens has thought deeply about these issues. He thought about them as a lawyer who graduated at the top of his class at the University of North Carolina School of Law, as a law clerk for a federal court of appeals judge, and then for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist at the Supreme Court. Over the past 20 years, he thought about them while serving first as a federal prosecutor and then as a defense attorney. And then he thought about them as a seminary student who graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary with a master’s degree in biblical studies. He is nothing if not well-qualified. His reflections and analysis of criminal justice in general, and the American criminal justice system in particular, have now been published in Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, a book that is fascinating, concerning, and challenging all at once.
Martens explains that the book had its genesis in a conversation with one of the pastors at his church. This dinner took place shortly after the events in Ferguson, Missouri that followed news of the death of Michael Brown. Knowing that Martens was familiar with America’s criminal justice system, this pastor encouraged him to write a book on the subject. He considered it but, being busy with other matters, set it aside. Several years later, following the death of George Floyd and all the unrest that followed, another pastor encouraged him to write the same book. And this time he agreed.
He begins it this way: “You have heard it said that justice delayed is justice denied. But I tell you that justice denied is love denied. And love denied to either the crime victim or the criminally accused is justice denied. This, I hope to persuade you, is not merely my view but also Christ’s.” He means to show that the Bible speaks to the issue of criminal justice and that “the root of the biblical concept of justice is love.” For justice to be done, love must be extended to both the victim of a crime and to the one who has been accused of it. A system will be just to the degree that it extends love in this way.
Martens believes there are two roadblocks that have prevented Christians from having helpful conversations about criminal justice. The first is that some of the loudest voices on the issue are not well-informed and do not have an accurate knowledge of the way the criminal justice system actually operates. The second is that much of the discussion “occurs without reference to a comprehensive Christian ethic of criminal justice.
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Written by Carolyn D. Gorman |
Monday, April 1, 2024
For the vast majority of children, mental-health treatment will not be necessary. Kids are resilient. Just as a smoker who quits will immediately boost his life expectancy, kids who spend less time and attention on platforms designed to be addictive and anxiety-inducing have a chance to bounce back. Haidt’s proposals can help give them that chance.

In 2018’s The Coddling of The American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt contended that kids are inherently “antifragile”—that is, they benefit from adversity. But instead of “preparing the child for the road, not the road for the child,” parents have surrendered to bad ideas and practices that foster a culture of emotional fragility, with its calls for safe spaces, trigger warnings, and censorship.
Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, is a thematic extension of this argument. It describes how Gen Z—those born after 1995, the first “to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets”—has been made fragile by the transition from a play-based to a smartphone-based childhood. The virtual environment of social media, Haidt contends, amplifies extreme ideas and worsens cognitive distortions, swelling this cohort’s rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm.
Haidt chronicles how the shift to a phone-based childhood affects learning. It deprives children of experiences that make them productive participants in a democratic society. One reason that kids play is to practice adult skills like independently resolving conflicts. Virtual environments don’t offer this practice—kids can just log off or leave a chat to avoid disputes—while crowding out time spent on real-world activities that do. Unsupervised physical play, with opportunity for low-cost mistakes and even some criticism and teasing, are crucial for learning interpersonal skills and building resilience.
Ironically, while we overemphasize protecting children from the slightest physical or emotional harm in the real world, the virtual world has greater potential for danger. In this realm, parents can’t reward kids with increasing levels of responsibility and independence as they get older. Age does not exist online; little more is needed than, say, checking a box without verification to access a webpage meant for those over 18.
Social media exploits our natural sensitivity to others’ opinions and actions. Haidt describes how evolutionary pressures have rewarded those who learn to conform and who pick the right people to copy. Millions of followers or likes on a post tell young people what they should do to fit in. Social media’s architecture is designed to make the most extreme content go viral. It’s easy to see how constant exposure to the pseudo-norms of a virtual environment, whether radical political ideas or unattainable standards of wealth, beauty, and success, can lead to sustained negative feelings.
The virality of social media presents other dangers. A social miscalculation among a few kids on the playground can help children calibrate their behavior; the same mistake on the Internet can result in thousands—or even millions—of harassing comments and will live online forever.
Haidt also recounts concerning examples of social contagion, such as viral posts by users with Tourette Syndrome prompting an exploding number of teenage girls to develop tics.
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The Guardian’sarticle and imagery suggests there are no human body parts at nine weeks development. That’s not true. The irony is that the article is guilty of the deception it castigates.

Abortionist Dr. Joan Fleischman says she sometimes shows her patients the pregnancy tissue she removes after an abortion. She says that post-abortive women are “stunned by what it actually looks like,” and the women “feel they’ve been deceived.”
Her testimony was recently reported by The Guardian in a story about “What a pregnancy actually looks like before 10 weeks—in pictures.” The article contains pictures of a “pregnancy” at four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine weeks.
When I saw the pictures, I was stunned as well. Not only could I not believe my eyes, but I also couldn’t believe the dishonesty of this story. Why? See for yourself. Here is the image the article labeled as “Nine weeks of pregnancy.”
It’s surprising because the image doesn’t show anything resembling a tiny person or even what one would imagine looks like a tiny embryo. All you can see is what appears like wet cotton material floating in a petri dish.
It’s no wonder the article slams pro-lifers for propping up images that, as Dr. Fleischman claims, lead women to expect “to see a little fetus with hands—a developed, miniature baby.” After seeing the tissue, women respond with, “You’re kidding. This is all that was?”
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