Adventures In Odyssey Album 2 Episodes 9&10 – The Case of the Secret Room
We are so excited that our special guest, Jeff, joined us today to talk about this episode. He is brand new to the world of Adventures in Odyssey and has a completely different experience with evangelicalism and Christianity. Today’s episode is a 40-year-old cold case solved by an old man (Mr. Whittaker) and a young girl – the most unexpected team around.
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Hey so the Citizen’s Arrest thing is a big concept in American culture that ties in to a kind of libertarian idea that THE CONSTITUTION empowers THE PEOPLE to be the ultimate arbiters of justice, not the big scary government. One of the actual real ways this manifests enshrined in American institutions is in the election of sheriffs and judges, which has an extremely fraught history of horrible outcomes when a racist community can elect a racist asshole to be in charge of their justice. This still happens and is a major tactic of white supremacists, it’s one of the primary things the Klan prioritizes for example.
It’s also where the profession of the Private Detective in the States comes from, the whole idea that you can have random people just doing criminal investigations for hire (and profit) mostly outside of the supervision of the state but still empowered with legally enshrined privileges was very novel… This lead to things like the infamous Pinkerton detective agency which was used as a private force of thugs by the rich to stalk, harass, intimidate, and sometimes outright brutalize union labour organizers.
But the concept of Citizen Justice is also mythologized and mixed up into the whole “tree of liberty watered by the blood of patriots” thing, so this past year when the militia cranks in Michigan attempted to kidnap their governor for the crime of enforcing Covid lockdowns (and being a woman) part of their whole plan was to hold a Citizen Justice Tribunal where all these crazed angry white men would hold their own impromptu trial, ie a lynch mob, which they believe is a hallowed right of every American.
So it’s no surprise Focus on the Family loves it so much that they made one of their episode’s talking points center around teaching kids how good it is supposed to be.