Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation examines the relationship between a maximum-security prison and Christianity in rural Cotton County, Alabama. It describes how a fractured prison-security apparatus relies on pastoral authority – an obedience to Christ set within the discipleship trope of shepherd and flock – as it strives to capture Christian discipleship for the prison’s goal of penal compliance. I show, however, that as St. Kolbe’s administration creates the inmate “faith dorms” and death-row "fellowship" areas central to my project, the prison opens to outside chaplains, theological imaginaries, and local notions of place, through which new ethical concepts and possibilities of solidarity and care emerge within penal compliance. In tracking the close interaction between carceral and pastoral authority, I posit that following the ethical lives emergent from this relationship reveals inmate agency beyond resistance, and it throws into relief how inmates engage religion not to be insulated from the prison’s violence but, rather, to absorb it into making novel subjectivities and social commitments beyond the state. Prison ethical life, I argue, is a constellation of penal and religious actors, forces, imaginaries, and social projects rather than something contained within the prison itself as singularly reflective of state dominance. In bringing together scholarly literatures on ethics, Christianity, prison studies, and the U.S. South, my study lays bear the entanglement of the state punitive with the Christian redemptive, and it will contribute to better understanding the relationship between the ethical and the political in American religious life.