A lot of American conservative Christianity is affected by Calvinism, not necessarily the most complicated aspects of John Calvin’s beliefs, nor even all of what he said, but what might be called a popular (or lay) version of Calvinism.
(As an aside, I’ll mention that’s pretty common—what actual people in the congregation believe is not necessarily what their sect is supposed to hold dear. I know a lot of Catholics who don’t believe that the host is literally Christ’s body, Lutherans who believe in “decision theology,” people who say the Nicean Creed on a regular basis but who don’t actually believe in the physical resurrection of the body, so that people would have a modified version of Calvinism isn’t a criticism. It’s just a fact.)
There are several ways in which lay Calvinism comes up, but here are the ones that are important for the question of what we should do (or not) about police violence:
• that humans are so corrupted by original sin as to be in constant danger of slipping into sin.
• that everyone knows what is and isn’t sin (right and wrong are not only in a zero-sum relationship, but, at any given moment, what’s right or wrong is absolutely clear).
• that sin is the consequence of giving in to sinful impulses (that we know to be sinful in the moment); that is, a lack of control. Therefore, only very controlling people can do the right thing, and only a culture of control can get people to behave well.
• that the world is divided into saints and sinners, and that saints are the ones capable of self-control.
• the only way to get sinners to behave is to punish them; if you punish them enough, they will behave well;
• that immorality and crime are (or should be) the same, because otherwise immoral people will not be punished and they will create a culture of immorality. Since immorality = crime, this failure to control the sinners will mean that everyone—including the faithful—will be punished with a high crime rate. A nation that is not following God’s obvious rules will be punished by losing its dominance. [1]
If you accept all these premises, and I think they’re a fair summary of what a lot of self-identified conservative Christians believe, then, it follows that we have to have a culture with a lot of punishment. Since immorality and crime are the same (people who are immoral will commit all the sins), then a culture that tolerates immorality will be a culture with a lot of crime. [2]
So, what many conservative Christians believe is that, if we want to have a culture that is moral (and with less crime), we must have mechanisms of social control because, if people are not threatened with punishment, they will fall into sin. People—all people–who are not threatened with punishment will sin. Therefore, we have to have a police force that can punish people—that’s the only way to have a culture without a lot of crime (other than massive salvation to their specific sect, but the Calvinist notion that the elect are few makes that problematic).
In my experience, conservative Christians who “support the police” don’t want the police to do what is actually their job: that is, arrest, and not punish, people. They want a police force that is empowered to punish in the moment. That stance, I think, has to do with their sense that the judicial system is too concerned with process, too likely to insist on fairness, and too “liberal” (in the old sense of the word). They think a police officer should be able to decide, in the moment, that a person is good or bad (saint or sinner), and act accordingly.
If you accept all the premises of this version of Calvinism—people are basically bad, they only behave well if punished, right v. wrong is obvious to good people—then you can end up with thinking that the police should be able to punish people.
Except for one problem. Police are people.
If all people are prone to sin unless threatened with punishment, then, if we give the police the power to punish people, some of them will use that power in a sinful way. That conclusion necessarily follows from the premises of this version of Calvinism.
So, were these conservative Christians consistent in their application of Calvinism, they would be strong advocates of punitive policies in place for police forces. They would insist that police be held accountable, and punished for misbehavior. They would want to make sure that the police who abused their power—since, as their model of human behavior says, all people will behave sinfully unless threatened with punishment says—are guaranteed to be punished. They would be as committed to punishing abusive police as they are to punishing any other criminal. They would advocate strong and powerful community control of the police, and criminal charges for abusive police.
But they don’t. When it comes to the police, suddenly people don’t need accountability or punishment. How interesting.
[1] As another aside, this is the weakest part of the lay Calvinist argument for social control. They have a tendency to cite stories, like those about Sodom and Gommorah, that are actually about saving the righteous. While there are Hebrew Bible passages that say that God punishes communities that have fallen, there are none that say that the righteous will be punished for being in a fallen community. God always protects the righteous. It’s also impossible to make a good faith argument that the history of triumphal civilizations is one of Calvinist v. non-Calvinist, or even “follow the rules that current conservative Christians believe are absolutely clearly right v. wrong.” It’s all no-true Scotsmen. When in-groups triumph, it’s proof that God prefers them, when out-groups triumph, it isn’t proof that God prefers them.
[2] Another aside, this is sometimes a circular argument—if you criminalize normal behavior, then it can look as though immorality and criminality correlate. You can break that correlation by decriminalizing immoral behavior, of course. The more important data would be whether decriminalizing “moral” behaviors—women speaking in church, for instance—correlates to civil crimes like murder. There’s no evidence to suggest it does.