Renouncing State Violence
Content Warning: This blog contains reference to violence, sexual assault, and abuse.
The stories of their crimes make for harrowing reading.
Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row in the U.S., strangled a pregnant woman and brutally murdered her unborn baby.
Brandon Bernard, executed on Dec. 10, was involved in the murder of two youth ministers.
Alfred Bourgeois, executed a day after Bernard, was convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter after subjecting her to physical and sexual abuse.
Ten Americans have been executed by the federal government in 2020, a year of unspeakable American death. They are the first Americans to be executed by the federal government in 17 years.
The crimes for which they were sentenced to death are unspeakably horrible. Murder, rape, white supremacy, death of children, sexual assault, dismemberment.
For none of these convicted criminals did the horror begin with their crimes. Uniformly, they too are victims of traumatic childhood experiences, of unspeakable cruelty, of poverty, of hatred, of drug addiction. Violence begets violence. Once we knew this.
Only a federal government set upon cruel and unusual punishment, equipped only to rule under a reign of terror and hatred, would inflict upon our nation government-sponsored homicidal violence in a year of mass American death, when more than 300,000 Americans have died of COVID-19.
We stand alone among nations atop of towering heap of discarded corpses, deflated lungs unable to breathe, dead healthcare workers with discarded PPE dangling around their necks. Our government sees the grief and destruction and collective despair and opts only to kill more and more.
LAW AND ORDER!
A return to normalcy and predictability is understandably desirable on the part of everyday Americans. But those in power twisted that desire for peace and turned it into war, knowing that chaos and fear would only tighten their grasp on undiluted violent might. They suggested that it was kill or be killed, that only more death would feed the insatiable beast of a nation propped up by consumerism and celebrity more than shared commitment and sacrifice and democratic ideals.
The crimes of the ones our government killed are horrific, and so are their deaths.
They’re strapped down, unable to move. They’re injected against their will with a powerful sedative otherwise used in euthanasia for animals, or, in lower doses, for sedation. Medical experts can’t be sure if the high doses of the drug used for executions cause pain or suffering before death. Drug companies in America are skittish about providing drugs used in executions. States have had a tough time obtaining pentobarbital for purposes of execution.
After a 17-year break from the business of death, the federal government authorized pentobarbital for lethal injection under Attorney General William Barr in 2020. Barr chose to retire after overseeing the federal government’s return to death. His work was completed, but it carried with it a shroud of shame and secretive dealings. The Department of Justice would not comment on where it would obtain the drug it used to kill 10 Americans, according to TIME magazine.
Death is shameful business.
Killing is expressly condemned in the Bible. And yet research has shown that a combination of being white and being a biblical literalist is the strongest predictor of Americans who would rather punish the innocent than let the guilty go free, according to research by Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead, in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
The year 2020 has shown that white American Christians are unduly predisposed to inflict harsh punishment on others, and worry little about unjust punishment, whether that’s in treatment of Black Americans by law enforcement, or the disparate effect of Covid on Americans of color and Americans living in poverty.
This blood-thirst betrays how far we’ve strayed from Jesus, whose birth on Christmas again we desperately await next week. Yet in our churches’ preparations for Christmas, with our outsized light displays and garish Christmas trees laden with ornaments purchased online, we would do well too to prepare for Christmas by returning to the words of our Savior, particularly when it comes to our understanding of our federal government’s recent return to the business of death and execution.
You’ve heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
These are the words of Jesus himself, from his Sermon on the Mount. American proponents of the death penalty, among them purported Christian leaders, suggest that death is the only righteous and worthwhile deterrence.
But I suspect I am not the only parent of a willful child reading this article. And no matter how I scream until my lungs wear out and insist upon timeouts and lost privileges and early bedtimes and harsher and harsher punishment, I know my words are not truly heard until we nestle together, heads bent quietly, and in the trustworthiness of love and mercy, we hear what one another have to say.
Two thousand years ago, God had every violent punishment available at God’s disposal, and God still does. But in God’s infinite wisdom, God knew that the greatest deterrent of unremitting and horrific violence and sin was not violence and sin itself. God had tried that.
And so on Christmas more than 2,000 years ago, God chose to respond to sin, evil, and death with forgiveness, love, and mercy. Would that American Christians advocate for the same of our all-powerful nation and those who would seek to lead it.
