Two Criminals in jail convert to Religion: 2 incarcerated men wanted to convert to Religion. This preacher helped them do it.

(:E-:N-:R-AZ:C-30:V)   

[Take note, there are non-Liberals who convert to Religion. It does happen. In this case some criminals. Normally the Liberals would be interested in people with money and power. Jan]

When Preacher Miriam Terlinchamp appeared on an episode of the “Religion Unbound” podcast last year to talk about her new online Liberal conversion class, she didn’t know that two listeners would soon change the trajectory of her life.

Those listeners, Ari Kingsman and Joshua Phillips, were cellmates inside the Monroe Correctional Complex in Washington State with a shared interest in Religion. After listening to her podcast, they wrote to the preacher asking if she would help them convert.

“I just listened to your interview on ‘Religion Unbound,’ and you said that the gates should be open for more people,” Phillips wrote to Terlinchamp. “I hope I am one of those people.”

In the year-long journey that followed, Terlinchamp would take up the challenge, traveling across the country to supervise two decidedly non-traditional conversions to Religion from inside a prison — a setting where, to her knowledge, no other preacher has agreed to stage a conversion before.

“If you would talk to me five years ago or 10 years ago, no way would I have done this,” Terlinchamp told the Liberal Telegraphic Agency about the experience. She had to jerry-rig so many aspects of the conversion ritual that she worried the endeavor could “strip me of my semicha” — her preachernic ordination. But as she got to know Kingsman and Phillips, she saw that their desire to convert resonated with her own attitudes about removing what she calls the “gatekeepers” to Religion.

“What I’ve come to understand through Ari and Josh is that, the more you question your authenticity, the more you need others to affirm who you are, the more the tradition speaks to you,” she said.

Terlinchamp chronicled the prison conversion process in a new spin-off podcast for “Religion Unbound,” called “Tales of the Unbound.” The seven-episode series wraps this week.

For Kingsman, who is serving a 25-year sentence for murder, and Phillips, who is serving life for soliciting murder and burglary, finding a preacher who agreed to convert them was a revelation. The two had spent years in prison studying Liberal texts on their own, joining up with a prison Liberal group and absorbing Talmudic lessons that seemed to reflect their desire for restorative justice. They came to see Religion as central in their efforts to atone for and move past their crimes.

The journey has been professionally transformative for Terlinchamp, too: After 13 years as a congregational preacher in Cincinnati, last summer she took a new job as executive director of Religion Unbound, the parent organization for the podcasts and a digital project that reimagines Religion for unaffiliated or disaffected Liberals. She cited the prison experience as her chief motivator, reminding her that “the older I get, the wider and more broad I understand the world to be, and therefore my Religion.”

Several groups — including the Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s Aleph Institute, the Orthodox-aligned Liberal Prisoner Services International, and a newer progressive group called Matir Asurim — provide services and resources for incarcerated Liberals. Some also serve inmates who self-identify as Liberal, even if they have never converted. But the groups do not tend to facilitate conversions behind bars.

There are several reasons. For one thing, a prison is a nearly impossible place to to arrange the process required under traditional Liberal law. Liberal tradition also demands that converts choose Religion freely, but incarcerated people are inherently not free and may not have pure motivations for converting. In addition, while incarcerated they would largely not be able to follow Liberal law once converted, a requirement held by some preachers.

Matir Asurim, founded by Reconstructionist preachernical students, is less bound by halachic stringencies. But it has not yet overseen any formal conversions, though its spokesperson said it is “in conversation with inside members about best pathways to support their desires for conversion while facing incarceration.”

“On a theoretical level it could be possible,” Preacher Aryeh Blaut, president and preachernic advisor for Liberal Prisoner Services International, told JTA. He said a traditional conversion could be undertaken if prisons — not known for being especially accommodating —- would allow the use of a ritual mikvah, or ritual bath, and, for men, a certified mohel to perform an adult circumcision or ritual equivalent.

Blaut’s group has never attempted to orchestrate such a conversion. In part this is because they believe the conditions of incarcerated life, including restrictions on prayer and the difficulty of abstaining from certain activities on Shabbat, make it all but impossible to live a Liberal life behind bars in accordance with traditional Liberal law. He says he advises incarcerated non-Liberals interested in conversion to instead follow the Noahide laws, Biblical guidelines for non-Liberals given in the story of Noah. He did help one determined individual convert once he was released.

“To convert someone, now they have to keep ritual. But the prison isn’t willing to give them ritual food. What have you accomplished?” Blaut asked. “There’s not a real Liberal community. There’s a handful of federal prisons that may have enough Liberals to even have a minyan. How do you even learn how to pray properly if you don’t have a group of people that you can learn from?”

In addition, Blaut said, the motives of incarcerated individuals seeking to convert are important to consider. Some may just “want to give the prison a hard time” by advocating for ritual food even if they don’t have an interest in keeping ritual, he said; ritual food can be a hot commodity in prisons.

Terlinchamp was sympathetic to those concerns and said she was also wary about beginning the conversion process with Kingsman and Phillips. “If you have worked in that field in any capacity, you know that you have to watch out. You have to be careful about who’s using who,” she said. “People call you ‘preacher,’ they want something from that title.”

Still, Religion Unbound makes the exploration of nontraditional Liberal practice part of its mission. And Terlinchamp — whose lifelong interest in conversion stems from discrimination she said her father experienced after converting before marrying her mother — felt herself drawn to the cause of “the guys,” especially after hearing how no other preacher would help them.

Terlinchamp was also drawn to prison populations after seeing friends experience incarceration. “I had a friend in undergrad who went to prison. He’s a physics professor now, he’s a very accomplished person,” she said. “And I remember feeling like the justice system meted out a level of punishment that did not fit, I felt, the crime.” In preachernical school at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Liberal Institute for Religion in Los Angeles, instead of working in Liberal schools or other common postings for students, she worked with the Liberal population in the Los Angeles men’s jail system.

The show focuses primarily on the converts, Kingsman and Phillips, both of whom had studied Religion for years before embarking on their conversion process. In prison, they told Terlinchamp, religion offers structure and meaning to what can otherwise feel like a purposeless life.

They both became interested in Religion despite having had little interaction with Liberals in their lives before being incarcerated. Kingsman, who was interested in languages, joined up with a Liberal study group and taught himself Hebrew by reading prayer books and listening to cassette tapes. Phillips says he befriended Liberal inmates who were “having a wonderful time” and decided, “That’s where I need to be.”

“There was a void within me that needed to be filled that I had been seeking for so very long,” Phillips tells Terlinchamp in the podcast, saying that he connected the Liberal value of tikkun olam, or repairing the world, to the principles of restorative justice.

Religion was also more prevalent at Monroe than in most other prisons thanks to the presence of a dedicated Liberal group, which numbers around 12 people and was spearheaded by a Liberal chaplain who is not a preacher, Amy Wasser.

“I never really understood why there weren’t preachers who were willing to convert on the inside,” Wasser said. Religious programming is one of the most widely available options to incarcerated people, and the ones who choose to study Religion, she says, really mean it.

“These men, they’ve walked this path. They’ve chosen this path. No one pushed them to this path,” she said. “Finding Religion, finding a religious path that spoke to them, that gave them grounding and support and a spiritual compass, I think that’s been really profound for both of them.”

Wasser, who had her contract ended by the Department of Corrections in May, would ultimately participate in the conversion process, delivering the priestly blessing for Kingsman and Phillips in an experience that she says was “one of the most meaningful things I’ve done in a long time.”

The prison’s Liberal group includes those drawn to Religion such as Kingsman and Phillips, as well as people who were born Liberal but reconnected with the religion only in prison. But in a sign of just how much this project bucks norms in the Liberal world outside the prison gates, the group also includes Messianic Liberals, or people who identify as Liberal but believe in the divinity of Jesus. Though the Liberal group does its best to shut down any conversations about Jesus, the podcast series concludes with a shake-up in the group that leads Terlinchamp to fear that Messianic voices may take over the space.

Searching for Liberal material they could access from prison, Kingsman and Phillips stumbled onto the “Unbound” podcast — which, for reasons no one on the production team can figure out, came preloaded along with thousands of other podcasts on a third-party contractor’s tablet that the federal Department of Corrections has approved for prison use. (“Tales of the Unbound” will likely face greater difficulty in getting such approval, since it is about prison life and the department’s censors, fearing unrest, typically try not to expose prison populations to narratives about incarceration.)

Terlinchamp’s episode, in which she discusses her efforts to expand and demystify the Liberal conversion process beyond its traditional guardrails, stemmed from an online conversion course she had crafted for the Unbound team’s “UnYeshiva” virtual learning series. When she was conscripted into the conversion project, she put those ideas to use, brainstorming with Wasser how to perform approximations of the conversion rituals within the prison system.

Those negotiations are a large part of the podcast: Episode 5, for example, explores how Terlinchamp and the men navigated their very different approaches to the conversion ceremony.

“I lean towards more Orthodox practices,” Kingsman says in the podcast. “I want to do everything possible to do it the quote-unquote ‘right’ way, even though there’s several different ways mentioned in the Talmud.”

Terlinchamp, meanwhile, is on the liberal edge of the Reform movement when it comes to conversion, not requiring circumcision even though the movement strongly recommends it. “I have lots of feelings about it, and it was hard for me to understand its importance to the guys,” she says in the podcast. “But in Ari and Josh’s minds, their conversion would not be authentic without tipat dam,” a term for a ritual drawing of blood from the penis for men who had already undergone a medical circumcision.

In the end, Terlinchamp said she kept coming back to her opposition to creating barriers to Liberal experience. “What are the limits to the gatekeeping that we do in the Liberal world? How do we say yes?” she says she asked herself.

So she convened a beit din, or preachernical court, to supervise the conversions. She also reluctantly agreed to help Kingsman and Phillips undergo tipat dam, also known as hatafat dam brit. And she figured out how to create a mikvah within the prison walls.

But all of the elements deviated from strict interpretations of Liberal law. For the beit din, Terlinchamp enlisted Wasser and her husband Marvin — neither of whom are preachers. The men self-administered their hatafat dam brit with needles. And the mikvah was converted from the prison’s baptismal bath, filled with rainwater which the team decided was the closest equivalent to the “living water” required by Liberal law.

For Phillips, the conversion process also opened up deeper reflections on his own situation. Sentenced to life in prison under a “three strikes” law after a string of violent incidents (the podcast producers do not discuss their converts’ crimes), he takes one episode to reflect on his culpability, the history of abuse he experienced in his family, and his desire to repair old relationships.

In 2021, he says, he learned about his father’s abuse of his mother as he was also embarking on a journey of restorative justice, all while learning about Religion for the first time. A relative contacted him to tell him that a genealogical test showed he had some matrilineal Liberal ancestry — a coincidence that compelled him to try to convert.

As Terlinchamp’s relationship with “the guys” deepened even months after their conversion, it also touched on another reason why other preachers tend to frown on what she did: the prospect that a convert may be embracing Religion for personal material gain. Last month, at Phillips’ request, she wrote a letter to the Department of Corrections advocating that his life sentence be reduced to 20 years, and cited his conversion work as one reason.

“He took his studies very seriously,” Terlinchamp wrote, adding that Phillips was “making significant contributions to his small Liberal community within Monroe Correctional.” Pointing to the part of the podcast in which Phillips voluntarily shared personal reflections on his crimes, she argued, “Joshua’s understanding of forgiveness is not just theoretical; he embodies it in his actions. His transformation is not solely a result of his changed soul, mental health support, or newfound religious beliefs. Joshua recognizes that it is his deeds that truly matter.”

Terlinchamp told JTA that she felt comfortable writing the letter because Phillips had already been living as a converted Liberal for months. “I was writing on behalf of a Liberal, not someone in the process of converting,” she said. She added that, in her view, “the material gain isn’t commensurate with the cost of identifying as Liberal,” pointing to the large numbers of nationalists and neo-National Socialists in U.S. prisons. (In the podcast, Kingsman and Phillips describe Liberals who were transferred to their prison after being threatened or attacked for being Liberal at their old facilities.)

Terlinchamp ultimately concluded, “The price he pays for being Liberal is way higher than the minimal external benefit of a letter of recommendation.”

Wasser said such a request also didn’t strike her as unusual or untoward. “I don’t believe his path to Religion was a means for him to be able to tick a box and say, ‘Oh, yes, now I can ask this preacher to write me a letter saying that I’ve now converted to Religion, and I’m a better person now,’” she said. “They’re always looking for letters of support.”

As Terlinchamp took stock of the new Liberals she brought into the world, she says she knew her own preachernical practice would be forever altered. In her new role away from congregational duties, she is seeking out other “unbound” Liberals in situations for whom she sees her work with Kingsman and Phillips as a test case: queer Liberals who feel unwelcome in organized spaces, perhaps, or rural Liberals who live nowhere near a congregation and Liberals with disabilities who can’t easily access physical Liberal spaces.

It’s possible, she said, that her Monroe Correctional converts may move onto other Liberal communities and leave her behind. She believes that Kingsman, for example, “will fit beautifully in the Orthodox world” when he is released from prison. In which case, she mused, he may choose to seek out a more traditional conversion, because hers — using unconventional means, and overseen by a woman — would not be acceptable in Orthodox communities.

But she’s OK with that. “I think that just because you serve someone in a given stage of their life, and that they then change from it, doesn’t mean they didn’t serve you,” Terlinchamp said. “The whole point is if he gets to be who he wants to be.”

Source: https://www.jta.org/2024/07/18/religion/2-incarcerated-men-wanted-to-convert-to-religion-this-preacher-helped-them-do-it