Feature
Lethal Rejection
Is Capital Punishment Barbaric, Uncivilized & Always Wrong?
It is the issue that simply will not go away. No, not that issue. The other one—or should I say, one of the other two. In any case, it is less intrusive into our daily lives than homosexuality and abortion. But it is nonetheless recurring. Yesterday it revolved around what to do with people like Karla Faye Tucker, Timothy McVeigh, and the "Unabomber." Today it concerns our response to the Boston Marathon bombings, the D.C. mansion murders, the Memphis mother who (as I write) has just slit the throats of four of her children under five years of age, and—of course, more mundanely—death penalty referenda such as that of the state of Nebraska. Tomorrow, rest assured, we will be confronted with it once more, if not by individual states rushing in a fit of moral clarity to abolish capital punishment, then by the very people who are presently clamoring to normalize abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex everything.
But the dogged fact remains that people do evil things to their fellow human beings, and this because of our fallen nature. Psycho-socio--pharmacology, brain research, and preventive bio-genetics—it is hoped—will alter that stubborn reality, but in the end these preemptive strategies will only make us less -human. The question, at bottom, is whether a civilized culture will tolerate those who murder in cold blood and whether we are willing to clear our throats and make moral judgments.
Ah yes, making moral judgments. Standing in the way of this inconvenient task (which we are loath to embrace) is the fact that the debate over capital punishment rarely proceeds with an honest consideration of the moral merits of both sides of the issue—indeed, of the morality of punishment, period. And we can expect that genuine debate will only be stifled by both the electronic and print media. This does not excuse the Church, however, from her role in elucidating the moral parameters of that debate culture-wide, even when she is inclined to follow politicized lines of the argument. What demands our reflection—and our response—is why people like Tucker, McVeigh, the "Unabomber," the D.C. mansion murderer, the Tennessee mother, and countless other murderers (including terrorists)—regardless of whether their victims are one or multiple hundreds in number—should or should not forfeit their right to live. Why or why not? On what moral grounds?
A Minority Position
Today, to affirm the death penalty in the case of premeditated murder is to take a clearly minority position. The average layman perhaps intuits that it serves justice for the ultimate crime, but among the cultural elites and the enlightened of our day it is anathema, a sign of barbarity, a mark of an uncivilized and unsophisticated culture.
This "barbaric" stance, however, has been the overwhelming testimony of Christian history—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. It has been the position of the Church in its mainstream through the ages—including even among pacifist types, such as Tertullian and Lactantius and the sixteenth-century Anabaptists (The Schleitheim Confession of 1527, an exemplary document adopted by the Swiss Brethren, reads: "The sword is an ordination of God . . . Princes and Rulers are ordained for the punishment of evildoers and putting them to death")—regardless of how many signatories are presently being gathered by religious activists to denounce the death penalty. And the Catholic Catechism, to its credit, remains in that mainstream (nos. 2265–2267), notwithstanding the occasional wearisome attempts by the Catholic bishops to keep up with the times.
Of course, to argue today with Thomas Aquinas that "the common good is better than the good of the individual," and that "the life of certain pestilent fellows is a hindrance to the common good . . . [and] to the concord of human society," and that "such persons therefore are to be withdrawn by death from the society of men," strikes us ultra-moderns as wildly oppressive and downright totalitarian, even when it might be true.
A Recent & Intensifying Debate
No serious student of the historic Church's social teaching can fail to note that opposition to capital punishment is only a recent phenomenon among the religious. The abolitionist argument, however, was fueled not by the Church but by Enlightenment thinkers who were notably secular in their worldview. Catholic theology—and I write as a Protestant who was nurtured chiefly by Catholic social ethics while doing public policy research in criminal justice—until recent decades has defended the right of the state to impose capital punishment for certain heinous crimes, and properly so. In the public debate over the death penalty, we are dealing with values of the highest order, namely, respect for the sacredness of human life and its protection; the preservation of the tranquillitas ordinis in society, wherein people might flourish; and the attainment of justice through law.
We can expect that, as a trend, the ever-increasing role of the media in manipulating public sentiment with regard to sensitive ethical issues will not subside; thus, debates over the death penalty will only suffer. Moreover, given the increasingly violent and often fiendishly pointless face of crime in the U.S., coupled with individual states' growing sense of exasperation over pandemic violent crime in their own jurisdictions, the debate over capital punishment—for better or worse— will intensify.
J. Daryl Charles is the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology & Ethics. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including Retrieving the Natural Law (2008), Natural Law and Religious Freedom (2018), and, most recently, Just War and Christian Traditions (forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God's Gifts for a Fallen World, Volume 3 (2020). He is a contributing editor to Touchstone.
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