Livestreaming an execution is barbaric, not biblical

Some Christians are defending Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth’s plans to livestream the firing squad execution of Fort Hood killer Nidal Malik Hasan.“I support the Pentagon’s decision to livestream the execution of mass-murderer Nidal Hassan,” announced Dallas Southern Baptist Pastor Robert Jeffress, a prominent MAGA supporter. “Capital punishment is commanded by God in Genesis 9:6 to remind people of the sanctity of human life. The more people that can see that truth illustrated through a public execution, the better.” The Center for Baptist Leadership’s William Wolfe pithily agreed: “For the record, I support this — because the Bible tells me so.”Prominent Baptist polemicist Megan Basham, rebutting Nikki Haley, who decried that only Islamists and North Korea do public executions, explained: “Public executions for capital crimes are biblical. There is a reason to demonstrate the wages of evil acts. For one thing, it reminds society that evil exists and must be stopped.”Basham, with others, cited Deuteronomy 21:21: “Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.”Communal stoning might strike most as an unhelpful exemplar. And nearly every branch of Christianity has long understood that the Mosaic law’s civil punishments, which entailed stoning for not just murder but also adultery, blasphemy, and disobedience by children to parents, were binding for the ancient Hebrew theocracy, not for today’s nations.As the Church of England’s articles summarize: “Although the Law given from God by Moses, as touching Ceremonies and Rites, do not bind Christian men, nor the Civil precepts thereof ought of necessity to be received in any commonwealth; yet notwithstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral.”But in the age of Christian nationalism, more evangelicals are pushing for an America that is not just culturally but also legally Christian. Christian nationalists typically deny that they are theonomists, who want to implement Old Testament civil law. But those boundaries seem to be blurring.Christian support for capital punishment is typically rooted in the pre-Mosaic command to Noah in Genesis 9:6: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man.” This command is widely deemed to be timeless and universal in application. But it says nothing about public executions, which some evangelicals are now insisting is a “biblical” imperative.Skeptics of MAGA Christianity might wonder if the newfound insistence on public executions, via livestream, is simply the latest political exigency. But beyond MAGA, our current online age’s preference for zealotry is fostering a Christianity more interested in hot provocation than careful continuity with historic Christian teaching.With church teaching in mind, the president of the U.S. Catholic bishops denounced the proposed public execution as “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death” that will “further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.”Over the last forty years, Catholic teaching has moved against all capital punishment, making the Catholic view on this issue less persuasive to evangelicals, who prefer the more traditional Christian stance that murder justifies execution. But not all evangelicals agree with livestreamed public execution.One of the nuanced responses came from Protestant ethicist Matthew Lee Anderson at Baylor University, who avoided narrow biblical proof-texting in favor of a wider Christian moral perspective about human life.“As a rule, human beings should never film or televise (much less “livestream”) another person’s death — regardless of whether they are being executed in the name of justice or not,” Anderson wrote.“The respect we owe to life is inherently degraded when we film people dying. Screens inherently participation (sic) in the voyeurization of our life together, which cannot but trivialize everything they depict,” Anderson explained. “Broadcasting death dehumanizes the offender and, ironically, so destroys the very rational basis that is required to make punishment just. It intrinsically participates in the barbarism that terrorism thrives on.”Responding to Christians citing Old Testament public executions, Anderson said the “formative power of being required to participate by way of stoning is different in kind than that of viewing others killing, as even the Pharisees understood in John 8,” when Jesus confronted them over their desire to stone an adulteress. “The ethical question cannot be answered without attending to the nature of public communication and the differences between their world and our own.”Speaking with less varnish, evangelical influencer Erick Erickson cited Proverbs 24:17: “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice.”Erickson also quoted early church father Tertullian about public executions in Rome: “It is good, no doubt, to have the guilty punished. Who but the criminal himself will deny that? And yet the innocent can find no pleasure in another’s sufferings: he rather mourns that a brother has sinned so heinously as to need a punishment so dreadful.”WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE ARMY’S PLANS TO LIVESTREAM THE EXECUTION OF FORT HOOD SHOOTERErickson affirmed the death penalty but called public executions “soul-twisting.” He argued it would inspire other suicidal terrorists and undermine support for capital punishment.Undoubtedly. And it’s a profound Christian insight that none of us is intrinsically morally superior. Executing a vicious killer after due process is just, but watching it live is likelier to gratify our basest desires than to strengthen any desire for godly justice.