Death Penalty & Pope Francis

on August 3, 2018

Wednesday eve we hosted at the IRD office visiting Oxford scholar & ordained Church of England clergy Nigel Biggar, a distinguished Just War expert who authored one of the best recent books on that topic, In Defense of War. Rebutting pacifism, Biggar notes Christianity has traditionally taught and should teach that not all killing is murder and that some killing in certain circumstances is ethically necessary. His counsel was fresh in my mind when reading yesterday of Pope Francis’ moving the Catholic Church to more emphatic rejection of capital punishment.

The state’s access to lethal force is essential to all public order, as the church from the start has understood. Yet increasingly Western Christian elites are very discomfited by this principle. Nearly all Western Christian conversation about public theology stresses the state’s nurturing responsibilities but not its far more central punitive duties. Government should provide for the poor, redistribute income, guarantee universal health care, welcome all immigrants, guard against food, equipment and workplace dangers, regulate all industry, protect the environment, mandate universal WiFi access, affirm various gender and sexual identities, among countless other imperatives. Nearly all social desires have become rights that the state must somehow guarantee.

But the state cannot nurture what it cannot protect. Traditionally Christianity, in its approach to society and justice, has focused on the state’s core duty, ordained by God, to provide for security and public order, without which other public goods become impossible. Government collects taxes primarily to provide police, the judiciary, prisons and military. The state “wields the sword” as St Paul declared to avenge evil doers and provide justice. Government at its core commissions agents with weapons to deter and punish the wicked. All competent and legitimate governments have the power and authority to punish, incarcerate and kill in pursuit of public order, without which they are emasculated.

Christianity understands the state’s violent and lethal powers as not capricious human vengeance or bloodlust but, if conducted lawfully, an extension of divine justice, wrath and love. It’s a fearful power and duty, to be carefully regulated, but absolutely essential. Traditionally Christianity, in nearly all its branches, including Catholicism, has understood the state’s lethal authority to include capital punishment at least for murderers.

Liberal Mainline Protestants in the West officially rejected capital punishment starting in the 1950s and 1960s. The Southern Baptist Convention still officially supports it, and its public policy representative Russell Moore responded thoughtfully to the latest papal announcement:

The Pope is here making more than just a prudential argument. He is applying the commandment against murder to every application of capital punishment. On that, I believe he is wrong. We may disagree, with good arguments on both sides, about the death penalty. But as we do so, we must not lose the distinction the Bible makes between the innocent and the guilty. The gospel shows us forgiveness for the guilty through the sin-absorbing atonement of Christ, not through the state’s refusal to carry out temporal justice.

With a different perspective, the National Association of Evangelicals in 2015 effectively renounced its previous support for the death penalty. The Evangelical Left, influenced by neo-Anabaptist thought, has opposed it for decades. Most Evangelicals, and many Mainline Protestants, tell pollsters they still support it. Most Catholics also still support it, although Pope John Paul II, while admitting the church’s historic affirmation of it, changed the church’s Catechism to say its need was “practically non-existent.” Modern wealthy societies could instead incarcerate instead of executing.

Pope Francis continues in that trajectory by, it has been announced, adding to the Catechism that all capital punishment in the church’s view is “inadmissible” as an attack on human dignity. It now asserts that “more effective systems of detention have been developed” as alternatives, without apparently describing what those systems are.

The Pope’s opposition to capital punishment of course is more theologically sophisticated than nearly all Protestant explanations, which typically rely on superficial Bible proof-texting, sociology, and flaccid insistence that all “violence” is wrong, based on a utopian vision that rejects or minimizes the historic Christian view of human nature.

Amid rising Christian voices against capital punishment don’t expect increased ecclesial support or theological justification for incarceration or more forceful police actions. Prisons and armed police are increasingly seen as unsavory and unkind. They are after all “violent.” Pope Francis himself, in comments last fall, has criticized lifetime imprisonment as a “hidden death penalty.” American Christian parlance often focuses on the purported injustice of incarceration, and the police are increasingly condemned for excessive force.

These concerns are often legitimate. But there is rarely in elite Christian thought circles any robust affirmation of armed law enforcement as specifically a public good. A few radical and small Protestant congregations have announced they will no longer summon police, except in life-threatening situations, which is a big exception, and seems hypocritical. True pacifists should not seek any help from gun-toting agents of the state.

Of course, if all killing assaults human dignity, then police and prison guards should be disarmed, to instead focus on non-coercive persuasion, and the military should do likewise or be abolished. There’ve been hints that Pope Francis might revise the church’s Just War teaching. Pacifism is already de rigueur among many Protestant and Evangelical elites, if not among most church goers. For them, violence is part of “empire,” is “Constantinian,” and rejects the authentic peaceful way of Jesus, narrowly construed.

Ironically, these formulations are largely possible only within the context of wealthy, well policed, and well-fortified Western societies that’ve enjoyed over 70 years of peace, order and prosperity. Christian villagers in northern Nigeria who are getting raided, killed, raped and kidnapped by Boko Horam likely better appreciate the blessings of effective law enforcement and military than do their more privileged coreligionists in the West who disclaim from manicured and secure campuses.

Those Nigerian villagers tragically are more exposed to the rawness of depraved human nature and cannot afford to be idealists. But all Christians everywhere, even if privileged and protected, are called to address the reality of the world as it is, for which the historic church has theologically equipped us, if only we will better utilize those resources. Police, judiciary, penal systems and military, armed with lethal force, are, in the performance of their rightful duties, divine gifts for justice and human dignity.

  1. Comment by Quauhtli on August 3, 2018 at 10:19 am

    I find this post very relevant to me because this is a topic area that I have been thinking on lately. I don’t consider myself part of any form or collective intelligentsia, so I will keep my language basic. I wouldn’t attack or repudiate the state’s power (right?) to exercise capital punishment. I think you laid out a foundation for that power belonging to the state, but for me this is a matter of necessity. As a Western republic with vast access to security measures, systems, etc., can we afford not to enforce capital punishment? In other words, I believe the state has the power to execute it, but a country like the U.S. also has the power to restrain itself from doing so. Much like declaring war or engaging in security operations, the state does have the power and authority to use military power in defense of the people, but it could also use economic sanctions to deter aggression, given the proper context.
    All this to say that, even though I wouldn’t go as far as Pope Francis in rebuking states for holding onto the authority to utilize capital punishment, I believe it shows Christianity’s more compassionate side if we encourage our government’s show restraint in its use. This is purely from a Christian angle and not in the context of a lawless region, where NOT executing a Boko Haram fighter is simply choosing to fight him again tomorrow.
    I don’t see myself in this situation any time soon; however, if I am ever in a position to hand down the death penalty, I think I would step back and ask myself if society can be just as safe by withholding capital punishment, sending this individual to prison for a long time, hope the individual comes full circle with the weight of their actions, and meanwhile I can pray for the salvation of their soul. Once again, maybe not a recipe for establishing rule of law, but hopefully a privilege we can exercise as Christian in high-security western republics.

  2. Comment by Pem Schaeffer on August 6, 2018 at 11:53 am

    Some time ago I came across this quote from Lady Thatcher:

    I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.

  3. Comment by Penny on August 7, 2018 at 1:42 am

    Well put, and I agree completely with what Thatcher said.

  4. Comment by Walter Carroll on August 6, 2018 at 1:14 pm

    Here we have a pope who embraces abortionists as cultural heroes and opposes capital punishment, or even life imprisonment, for the vilest of the vile in our society. When the most innocent are put to death and murderers escape punishment, there is little wonder why many evangelicals believe that we are living in the end times.

  5. Comment by Penny on August 7, 2018 at 1:44 am

    Your point is an important one, and it is an oddity that the liberal/progressive citizen is one who supports killing unborn children but not convicted murderers.

  6. Comment by Thomas on August 8, 2018 at 10:13 pm

    You should read what Pope Francis already said against abortion before coming to these conclusions.

  7. Comment by Thomas on August 6, 2018 at 3:35 pm

    I really think that Mark Tooley misses the point that the opposition to the death penalty has been a leading cause for the Roman Catholic Church all over the world. Popes St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI both called for the universal abolition of the death penalty.

  8. Comment by Stan Jefferson on August 6, 2018 at 4:09 pm

    I strongly favor the death penalty. The problem is, the death penalty is not effectively administered. Make no mistake, death sentences are a deterrent to those who might consider committing a capital crime. Unfortunately, two or three decades of appeals ‘dulls the blade’ of the deterrent factor. The quote herein of Margaret Thatcher is spot on.

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