This was the era of the social gospel and revivalism and the burgeoning interest in that kind of individualism and pietism that spawned the many splinters of the fundamentalist movements that ruled America’s cultural religion well into the 1960s and still shows its influence today. I think Americans got so used to hearing that Jesus was about second chances and reform that such has slipped well into our cultural subconsciousness. If religion is good and religion is about reform, then the judiciary is good if it is about reform as well. Conversely, justice is the province of the Old Testament God in all his wrath and fury, not of Jesus and his mercy and offer of a second chance at life. A chance to be good.

Of course these thought processes are all subconscious, but I think they can be traced.

One thing about your article that I’m not so sure about is that at the end, your push for justice seems pretty wholly pragmatic. Your reason to not support reformation over justice is that reformation doesn’t “work.” Ignoring that you’ve already said that the shock reformation idea is “proving to be rather effective in both Ohio and Kentucky,” you set up an argument that justice is better than reform for presumably biblical reasons but then sidestep those reasons to lean on this more utilitarian track. It just didn’t flow for me. You do offer a single note of support when you mention passingly Romans 13, but I think your argument deserves more.