The region at the center of Making a Murderer has been my home for the last two years. I hunt in Manitowoc County, three miles from the home place of Steven Avery, where Teresa Halbach’s burnt remains and vehicle were found. My family has swum at the beach where the sexual assault occurred for which Avery was wrongfully convicted in 1985. Almost weekly I drive by the prison in Green Bay that has held Avery and Brendan Dassey, who was also convicted in Halbach’s murder. I serve two churches as pastor, and have gotten to know, and to admire, the people here.

The Netflix series has aroused many reactions. Those angered at Avery’s 2007 conviction in the murder of Teresa Halbach have the loudest voice. Others, a smaller but substantial group, have called attention to the slanted presentation of the Avery case by the makers of Making a Murderer. A few have expressed dismay over the fact that the series and the reaction have largely ignored Halbach and her family.

As far as I am aware, no one has spoken up for the people of this region, which is a shame, because they have been falsely portrayed by the series.

Welcome to Wisconsin

Making a Murderer’s makers aimed at indicting the American justice system, and in order to do this they had to portray Avery as the victim of an elaborate frame-up, a conspiracy that would have involved not only law enforcement but also the regular civilians of the region as witnesses and jurors.

The filmmakers have two easy motives with which to justify their accusation of law enforcement: a grudge over Avery’s exoneration in the 1985 sexual assault case and fear over his multi-million-dollar lawsuit against Manitowoc County. These two are possible but not plausible motives. The individual officers could lose everything but would gain nothing by participating in a frame-up. Why would they risk their freedom in order to protect the county from a lawsuit?

Even less plausible is the case that Making a Murderer pressed against the region’s civilians. A motive for the civilians was harder to find, but Making a Murderer attempts to portray the civilians’ participation in the frame-up as a case of class-based social prejudice: The Avery family was ostracized by a community that looked down upon them as poor junk peddlers. This, they indicate, was also the motive that enabled Avery’s false conviction in 1985.

This is even less plausible than the motives attributed to law enforcement. The filmmakers don’t know the area or the people. Neither in Avery’s wrongful 1985 conviction nor in his supposed framing in the Halbach case did class-based social prejudice motivate the complicity of this region’s people. Avery was poor, but poverty carries little stigma in rural Wisconsin. He had a “lowly” occupation as an automobile junker. Among so many manure haulers, truck drivers, and construction workers, a job like that has no shame.

The Avery family built a little community for themselves on a road bearing their name. Welcome to Wisconsin, where siblings and cousins live within walking distance of each other on land that has been in the family for five generations. This is no sign of ostracism.

The People’s Motivation

The vice of social prejudice would not motivate this region’s people to participate in an injustice like that committed against Steven Avery. Their pursuit of a virtue might.

The people of this region value life to a unique degree, in part because of the many dangers aligned against it. Men provide for their families in perilous jobs. Four-fingered hands and prosthetic legs bear witness to the hazards of farming, ship building, and construction. Women bundle their children against bitter cold. Grannies must be checked daily to ensure that their furnaces are keeping them warm. Roads frequently become deadly with snow and ice.

All of this makes for a gentle, careful, and caring people. In another state, I once found myself lying next to a busy road with a bloody face and three broken ribs, and not a single car stopped. Here, when a driver slides into a ditch, everyone pulls over to help. Never have I seen the elderly so highly esteemed and so lovingly tended to.

Even animal life is cherished. Though few keep dairy cows anymore, the dairy farmer’s ethos of careful husbandry endures. Farmers attentively watch their individual cows and pigs and keep their pens exceptionally clean. Their wives occasionally betray that tears might be shed when the time comes to sell a particularly beloved animal.

Avery demonstrated a callousness toward life that was antithetical to the care for life his peers treasured deeply. In 1982, he was convicted of animal cruelty for pouring gasoline and oil on a family cat and throwing it into a fire to watch it burn, a fact downplayed by Making a Murderer. In early 1985, he ran his own cousin off the road and pointed a gun at her, an act which led to charges of “Endangering Safety Regardless of Life” and “Felony in Possession of a Firearm.”

Peculiar Virtue

The vice of social prejudice would not cause this people to become complicit in an injustice, but their peculiar virtue, the treasuring of life, might. How did the people of Manitowoc County become complicit in his unjust 1985 conviction for sexual assault? Why did the victim of that assault wrongly identify Avery as her assailant, and why did the jury convict him despite his strong alibi?

I think, from the time I’ve spent here as a pastor, that they participated in this injustice not because of contempt for his social position but rather because he was known as a threat to life, and this region’s people zealously guard against such threats. Their righteous desire to protect their families and neighbors from harm gave them an inordinate confidence in their dealings with Avery. Humility should have made them wonder if they were bearing false witness against Avery or discounting strong evidence of his innocence.

Instead, their pursuit of the good led to their participation in injustice. And, if they took part in a similar injustice in the Halbach case, once again they did so not because of the vice of social prejudice but because of their injudicious pursuit of public safety.

Gregory the Great warns in the Book of Pastoral Rule that, “For to some the greatness of their virtue has often been the occasion of their perdition; causing them, while inordinately secure in confidence of strength, to die unexpectedly through negligence." He continues,

For virtue strives with vices; the mind flatters itself with a certain delight in it; and it comes to pass that the soul of a well-doer casts aside the fear of its circumspection, and rests secure in self-confidence. ... But through this same confidence it is led to fornication; because, when the soul is deceived by its own thoughts, malignant spirits, which take possession of it, defile it through the seduction of innumerable vices.

Our sinfulness is so deep that we must be just as cautious with our virtues as our vices, for treasuring life can lead to injustice. And treasuring justice can lead to slander, as the producers of Making a Murderer have done to my neighbors.

Christopher D. Jackson is pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church and St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Northeast Wisconsin, and is a coauthor of the forthcoming Foundations for Online Theological Education (B&H Academic). Follow him on Twitter: @revcjackson.