We may not have to wait for a new Legislature and new Governor to start turning prisoners into preachers. Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, is already acting on Governor Larry Rhoden’s okee-dokee to establish a privately funded prison seminary program in the South Dakota State Penitentiary:
A Northwestern College faculty member briefed the South Dakota Correctional Rehabilitation Task Force on Wednesday about establishing a prison seminary program at the State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls.
Sociology professor Chris Hausmann said Prison Seminaries Foundation would raise funds to pay for program. The college would bill the foundation for the program’s cost, he said.
Northwestern College is a Christian-based four-year campus in Orange City, Iowa.
…[Corrections] Secretary [Nick] Lamb had established a prison seminary program in Illinois when he worked there. The task force on December 17 recommended moving forward on a prison seminary program. Gov. Rhoden decided that same day to accept the recommendation.
Hausmann said Wednesday that Northwestern College could start setting up the program at the State Penitentiary in January 2027.
Secretary Lamb told the task force that the department would assess the interest of inmates throughout South Dakota’s prison system and transfer them to the penitentiary to participate in the program.
Northwestern was founded by a Dutch Reformed pastor in 1882. The college calls itself Reformed in commitment, evangelical in engagement, and ecumenical in spirit, so I’ll be curious to see (as will other close anti-Establishment watchers of the First Amendment) if the pastors the new ecumenically spirited seminary cranks out of the pen will include Lutherans and Methodists… and what accommodations Northwestern will be able to make for inmates who feel called to bring Allah’s or Buddha’s word to the world.
Teaching a convict the art of the religionist grift is peak Republican Zionism.