How I changed my mind (kind of) on the death penalty
Christianity Today
October 21, 2026
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Unsplash / Edits by CT
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Several years ago, Shane Claiborne joined me on my podcast to tell me where I was wrong on the death penalty. He is against it; I was for it. I told him afterward that he had “almost persuaded me,” but not quite. I’ve kept thinking about it, with an uneasy conscience. A few events over the past couple of weeks though have made me reconsider whether, as a Christian, I can keep supporting the American system of capital punishment.
For the past several weeks, the entire country has engaged in a controversy about the upcoming execution of Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 people at the Fort Hood Army base. The controversy was not about whether Hasan is guilty—there’s virtually no dispute about that, or even about whether his penalty of death by firing squad should happen (most Americans seem to agree that it should). The controversy instead was because of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s claim that the execution would be livestreamed so that everyone could watch it. President Donald Trump later announced that this livestream would not happen.
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Here in my state of Tennessee, Christa Pike, convicted of the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville, was set to be executed by lethal injection, but the execution failed. Witnesses claimed that Pike was “crying, whimpering, and breathing loudly” but lived, waking up later on a ventilator in a hospital here in Nashville. Governor Bill Lee paused executions for the year and ordered an independent review. Pike’s back in jail, and no one’s sure what will happen now.
Here’s why I’ve always supported capital punishment, in theory if not always in the way it’s practiced. The argument that “one cannot be pro-life if one supports the death penalty” has always struck me as a lazy argument. Those of us who believe that innocent life should be protected are not, it seems to me, obligated to hold a pacifist view of public justice. The pacifist view—that all violence is always wrong, no matter by whom or for what—is a perfectly respectable Christian view with plausible arguments and ancient support. On war, though, many Christians—including me—believe the Bible does allow, under very strict limiting circumstances, nations to defend themselves in acts of just war.
Whatever legitimate arguments pacifists and those of us who hold to such just-war views might have, most of us would agree: Believing that World War II was a just cause for the Allies does not also require believing that a private citizen shooting his neighbors is right. The difference between war and capital punishment is a matter of scale, not a matter of two completely different problems.
I believe the Bible gives different responsibilities to the state as the state than it does to private citizens (much less to churches or to individual Christians) when it comes to public justice. One can dispute the meaning of what Paul affirms as “the sword” against wrongdoers, which the apostle argues is a real authority (Rom. 13:4). But most of us can agree that states have at least some aspects of police power that individuals do not. Almost all of us would affirm that jails are right for some crimes, but very few of us would want vigilante mobs with the power to imprison people. The Bible, on the other hand, repeatedly condemns the killing of innocent people—by anybody, for whatever reason.
When I hear about the crimes of murderers such as Hasan and Pike, I feel anger—especially when I think about the cruelty and bloodlust with which these murders happened or when I think about the families of the people whose lives were taken. And while I don’t fully trust my own emotions, I think that anger is right here, given the value of the human person as image of God. When God said to Noah, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed,” it was specifically because “God made man in his own image” (Gen. 9:6, ESV throughout). Murder is categorically worse than crimes against property.
This requires certain things of us. However one defines the sword of Romans 13, it is clear that God puts it in the hands of “the governing authorities” (v. 1) in the context of a biblical revelation that defines justice in terms of rules and norms that are not about personal vengeance. If someone close to me were killed, I would not want personal discretion as to what to do with the killer, because I would be consumed with wrath. It would destroy me from the inside out. At its best, the American system has recognized this.
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It is one thing to conclude that a penalty of death is necessary in a certain case for a killer to be restrained or for further crimes to be deterred; it is quite another to delight in the death of someone—even one guilty of the worst of crimes. The justice system is designed to prevent vengeance and vigilantism, not to indulge them.
The question, then, is not what capital punishment does to the criminal, or what it does for the victims, but what it does to us. In that sense, the arguments that Pope Leo and others offer about an inconsistency of such with a pro-life ethic are compelling and convincing.
To turn justice into a vehicle of entertainment is as far away from a Christian perspective as one can get. To watch another person killed with the thrill of the spectator might not do anything to the person executed, but it warps the viewer. It makes cheap what God has created to be holy. This is the way of the Roman gladiator, not the way of Christ crucified. It’s the way of the lynching mob, not of a justice system. The president was right to stop these plans, but the fact that a significant number of Americans were willing to go along with it—including some who claim the name of Christ—ought to serve as a warning sign to us.
The botched executions we have seen in recent years also make me rethink my view on the death penalty. The Romans 13 “sword” is carefully limited in terms of who can wield it, against whom, and for what. However, what if the sword cannot be wielded without inflicting torture? What if the sword is inconsistent in terms of justice, where the rich and the poor get different standards of penalty? Does that kind of capital punishment really mete out justice? I think not.
A conscience informed by Scripture must take crime and justice seriously. Human beings cannot be at the mercy of the murderous among us. But the Bible does not mandate that capital punishment be the penalty for murder, since God showed mercy on the primal murderer, Cain, sentencing him to exile instead and protecting him from anyone seeking his life (Gen. 4:13–16).
Those of us who think that war is sometimes allowable bear a special responsibility not to be warlike. There are times, Jesus tells us, when even those who believe they are allowed to go to war shouldn’t do it (Luke 14:31–32).
And now, maybe the time is over for arguments about the abstractions—whether in theory capital punishment is always and everywhere wrong. Maybe now is the time to look at what we actually see in front of us: this broken system. Maybe now is the time to look at what we actually see around us: a culture that too often delights in cruelty and violence. If we do, I think we must conclude that, whatever justice requires, this isn’t it.
Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.
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