For author and journalist Lawrence Wright, understanding the power of belief has been a lifelong quest. He’s written about people of faith, from the Amish and Mormons to Satanists and atheists. He covered the fatal 1993 clash between the Branch Davidians and federal agencies at Waco. His book about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. He investigated Scientology for his 2013 book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.
His new book may be the capstone of that effort. Redemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row, published this month by Knopf, is the true story of a monastic order of Catholic nuns that formed a relationship with the women prisoners on death row in Texas—meeting, worshipping together, and learning about each others’ lives. “I’ve been fascinated by the power of religion in people’s lives to do good or ill,” Wright says. “And mostly I’ve been writing about the ill part. This was an opportunity for me to look at religion doing something positive.”
It’s a powerful, moving, and unsettling book, nothing less than a journey into the best and the worst of humanity. In a phone interview, the affable, soft-spoken Texan answered questions about his project.
You first wrote this subject as a story for The New Yorker. As I was reading it, I thought: What a hard story to report! The nuns spend their days working and praying, and they speak very little to anyone, including each other. The prisoners were worried that something they might say to you could affect the appeals of their death sentences. Why did you decide to expand it into a book?
I’m drawn to these cloistered communities—I don’t know why. I’ve written now about cults and intelligence agencies and terrorists, and, in every case, these are communities that have set themselves apart from traditional society. It’s not so much that I’m drawn to the challenge; it’s more my curiosity about how people adjust to intimate communities like these, communities that are bound by law or faith not to deal with outsiders.
In the book, you write about your own history with religion, including your beginnings as a believer. You even considered becoming a minister at one time. How would you describe yourself today?
I think that language is not complicated enough to describe one’s stance towards religion. I don’t recognize myself as a believer or an agnostic or an atheist—those seem to be the categories that you’re slotted to fall into, but I don’t feel comfortable with any of them. I grew up in the Christian belief, and I still revere the teachings of Jesus, but I don’t go to organized religious gatherings except as a reporter, and, usually, they scatter when they see me.
I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that we take politics so seriously, which is the main subject of a lot of reporting. People can have strong political beliefs, and it doesn’t affect their behavior at all. But if a person has strong religious beliefs, it tends to govern every aspect of their lives.
Initially, your access to the prisoners was very limited—two interviews with two prisoners in one day, of one hour each, and then you couldn’t see them again for 90 days. How did you eventually get to see more of them?
I had been interviewing Ronnie Lastovica, the Catholic deacon who really brought me into this world, and he ran interference for me. And C.F. Hazlewood, the head of the chaplaincy at the prison, saw wisdom in having me do this story. So he gave me four passes that are normally given to chaplaincy volunteers—in other words, religious counselors. I scarcely qualified in that regard.
Deacon Ronnie Lastovica was the one who initially had the idea of pairing the nuns with the prisoners.
Yes, he had the idea of bringing the nuns to the prison. He knew that his ability to communicate with these women was circumscribed by the fact that he was a man. To really reach the women, it would require other women. He was humble enough to understand that he couldn’t do it alone.
He also had the experience and insight to recognize that these were women who live very similar [cloistered] lives. And he thought that encounters with the women who choose this life would lift the burden a little bit of the women who are on the row. It would teach them the lessons of a monastic tradition, of living in community.
Your portraits of the prisoners include the crimes they committed, and they’re difficult to read about. Some prisoners were convicted of killing their own children. How did you handle that personally?
Part of reporting is that you have to deal with complicated and tragic human events. I’ve observed a lot of evil in my role as a reporter. You can’t look away from it. The challenge is that it’s going to be shocking and upsetting for readers. And in some cases, I think that the prisoners are innocent. [Ed: One prisoner, Melissa Lucio, was the subject of a documentary, The State of Texas vs. Melissa; her execution has been stayed, and her case is currently being considered by the Texas Court of Appeals.]
You write about two family members of a victim, the daughter and brother of a woman who was murdered at random during a burglary. I can’t imagine their grief, but they eventually started a program where prisoners and crime victims could meet and learn from each other. That amazed me.
People surprise you.You have an expectation of how they will behave, and, of course, many people do harbor a lifelong bitterness and a wound that can never heal. In the case of Kelley [Meagher, the daughter of murder victim Marilyn Sage Meagher], she saw another route, and it wasn’t one I anticipated, and it wasn’t one I was sure I could sustain myself.
What have the prisoners have learned from the nuns?
When Ronnie Lastovica first got to the prison and talked to the women on the row, he described them as being like feral cats. They couldn’t get along, they were sentenced to death, but the sentence they were actually experiencing was life with people you hate. It’s a horrible sentence. And some of the women had been there for decades.
I think Ronnie saw that it didn’t have to be that way. They could learn something from these nuns about living in community. Monastic orders have traditions of how the days are filled and how personalities are reconciled to live in community, and he thought these women on the row could learn from them. It was a very daring thing for him to do.
And six of the seven women have converted to Catholicism.
They’re now able to get along in a way that they couldn’t before. That was the ministry of the nuns, and their example has been profoundly moving. Whatever stage of redemption the prisoners might have been in before the nuns came into their lives, they have taken another step.