Chuck Thayer

I support the death penalty. God himself told Noah that those who willfully take the life of another should be executed. The United States Army prohibits public executions, but the Pentagon does not seem to care about following its own rules. The pagan Roman Empire relished the public spectacle of executions. Growing up overseas in an Islamic country, some executions were public. Christendom, over time, recognized that justice is not to entertain or titillate. Justice is not meant to be a spectacle. In Ezekiel 33:11, scripture reads, “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.” Proverbs 24:17 echoes that for us. “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice.” In Chapter 19 of De Spectaculis, Tertullian, one of the early post-apostolic church fathers, wrote about the public spectacle of 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,” he wrote. In Confessions, Augustine wrote of his friend Alypius, who, dragged into the Coliseum to see gladiatorial fights, shut his eyes, though not his ears. Upon the cheers of slaughter, he opened his eyes to the blood, and the bloodlust corrupted him. Augustine’s writing has long taught Christians not to be entertained by the spectacle of violence, as watching it can damage you. I support the death penalty. Public executions are soul-twisting and we should not go down that road.