Reno on the death penalty

Rusty Reno has some interesting thoughts on capital punishment, and the Court's recent lethal-injection decision, here, at the First Things blog.  A taste:

We live in complicated times, and I’ll admit that I have found it reassuring that American voters have resisted the sirens of moral relativism, soft-headed liberalism, and rhetorical simplifications. The popularity of the death penalty is not a function of primitive desires for revenge that overtake beer-drinking guys with guns in their pickups. Support for capital punishment is not a sign of a latent lust for violence in American society. It no more reflects a culture of death than does the Book of Deuteronomy. On the contrary, persistent support stems from a collective confidence that some acts are deeply wicked, and that as a society we need to respond with the firmest possible “NO!”

I share the sentiment. I think any person with a sense of our collective responsibility to moral truth should. But I also worry that times have changed. In his First Things essay “Christians and the Death Penalty,” Joseph Bottum meditated on our modern political condition. As he observed, the secular state is not vested with the same divine purpose as the older sovereignty of Christian kings. In fact, one feature of our American consciousness is the conviction that the older view of sovereignty was overinflated and dangerously sacred in its self-image. If this is so, then perhaps we wrongly look to the courtroom and prison and other instruments of the state for fullest expression of our shared moral vision. The expectation is especially suspect when it comes to what Bottum calls “high justice” of a properly authorized and painstakingly orchestrated execution on behalf of justice.

To a great extent, the American experiment in limited, secular sovereignty has won out in the West. After their bloody modern experiments in the deification of the nation-state, Europeans societies have embraced a much more modest view of the moral and spiritual role of their governments. Not coincidentally, they have also taken away from government the power to inflict the death penalty. The Bible consistently teaches that God alone has the power of life and death. Human authorities rightly possess that power only as authorized by God himself. Thus, to abolish the death penalty sends a clear message: The secular state has no avenue to divine authorization. Given the history of Europe and the countless dead bodies piled up by governments self-ordained to serve the various modern gods—the People, History, the Master Race, and the Workers—it seems to me that the European abolition of the death penalty has been extremely prudent. As John Paul II knew only too well, the modern ideological state serves strange and bloodthirsty gods, and is easily tempted to use death as a means to assault and destroy society.

Perhaps because we inherited an Anglo-Saxon system for constraining governmental power, America has seen many unjust social policies, some with lethal consequences, but never political prisoners marched to the gallows for mass execution. This goes a long way, I think, toward explaining our singularity. Europeans view our loyalty to capital punishment as barbaric, but, in truth, we retain the death penalty in large part because we have no rich history of barbarism to give us a sober sense of the need to remove the sacred power of the sword from the hands of the secular state.

Prudence is easy after the fact, but the wise seek to avoid evils before they overwhelm us. We would do well to give some collective thought to our present situation. Global terrorism now requires the already powerful security apparatus of Western governments to extend their reach. Today, closed-circuit TV puts the city of London under constant observation. American intelligence services monitor global Internet traffic, and secret operations now seem to be a matter of course. In these and many other ways, our government and the governments of our allies project power ever more deeply into the fabric of our lives.

This expansion of state power is necessary. Those we elect must do exactly what John Paul II identifies as the bottom-line responsibility of civil authority: defend society. But we also need to exercise caution. These days our government seems compelled to operate secret prisons in various places around the globe and to hold prisoners without trial. Such policies, however justified, however temporary, however rightly criticized by Congress and duly corrected by the courts, cannot help but remind us of methods once used by the Nazis and the Soviets. It’s a chilling thought, especially since we continue to vest our government with the power to execute. Therefore, in these perilous times a prudent citizen should seek the abolition of the death penalty. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

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