National Security Expertise, and Borderland Saints: Policing Religion and Police Religion

Abstract

A skeletal saint graces the side of DEA collectable coin, busts of a mustachioed bandit fill sets of crime-drama television, white blocks of cocaine top shrines during police press releases. Images of borderland religion have arrived in United States popular media, the news cycle, and its defense culture and US law enforcement officers routinely profile migrants who practice these forms of Catholicism. Saints like Jesús Malverde and the now infamous Saint Death, Santa Muerte, have entered into the American cultural consciousness. Termed “narco saints” by law enforcement– these informal saints have been appropriated into the professional cosmologies of police and security practitioners as representations of alterity and threat, resulting in religious profiling and arrests of devotees. Through ethnographic and textual analysis of recent religious profiling incidents, police training manuals, and online culture in US security communities this project uses mixed-methods to ask why these religious communities have become visible in law enforcement spaces. This project argues that as state agents link religious beliefs to forms of crime and violence, they reflect a robust ideological defense culture that resists reform efforts and emotionally rationalizes state policing of already vulnerable individuals and communities.