Is the Death Penalty Effective? An Anabaptist Critique

In my last post, I corrected a misunderstanding of the Anabaptist position on capital punishment. While Daryl Charles has argues that the early Anabaptists supported the death penalty, I showed that his claim is misleading. Anabaptists and the early church recognized the role that capital punishment played in secular society, but they would not practice it themselves.

However, correcting this mischaracterization could seem to be a purely academic issue. A more pertinent question is why the Anabaptist position should inform a discussion on the death penalty.

I suggest that understanding what is or isn’t “outside the perfection of Christ,” as the Schleitheim Confession puts it, can help us come to a more properly Christian response to violence, a response to violence that doesn’t sit well with supporting the death penalty. This article will argue that support for the death penalty undermines the goals of Christianity, as well as, I would hope, any civilized individual. However, the Anabaptist position should not be construed as taking a stance for or against the death penalty as executed by secular authorities. Capital punishment is the ultimate response that law enforcement can bring to an ultimate crime. Still, Christians (and I hope others as well) will see several issues with the death penalty.

The death penalty can be conceived of as either preventing future violence or rewarding past violence, but it is unsatisfactory in either case. First, though societies throughout history have used it effectively as a deterrent for crime, the death penalty is actually worse than useless as a deterrent for some violent crimes. For example, I was surprised by Charles’s suggestion that capital punishment is a prudent response to mass murder, as that seems the last place where the death penalty would be effective. Mass murderers haven’t given the impression of being deterred by the possibility of death—many mass shooters have actually killed themselves or died in a shootout. Typically, they are seeking death rather than trying to escape it. For one reason or another, they wish to gain notoriety by any means possible, and/or wish to hasten their own deaths. The death penalty could easily incite mass violence, since it would provide a perfect assurance of receiving “death by police” and a well-publicized trial and execution. As those who wish to see mass violence end, the death penalty shouldn’t be our preferred solution.

Daryl Charles’s own position seems to be the second potential reason I offered for the death penalty—it is intended to reward past violence. To support this, Charles suggests a social contagion theory of murder, citing David Gelernter as a major proponent of this view. The effect of their shared view is, according to Charles, that “the community needs catharsis” to reconcile society with a murder that has taken place, since “deliberate murder embodies evil so terrible that it defiles the community.” I do not dispute that a murderer deserves the death penalty, but the reason Charles gives is disturbing.

Christians live alongside many unregenerate aspects of society, which no society’s law enforcement has ever stamped out. If our concern is to gain catharsis through killing whoever “defiles the community,” it will therefore open up quite a range of serious abuses. This is no longer just an academic question. The contagion theory has been used to justify ethnic cleansings and religious purges—in fact, this was the reality of the authors of the Schleitheim Confession. The secular governments in their locality saw them as being a religious contagion that would destroy society. Michael Sattler, the drafter of the confession, was executed the very year it was accepted. This is not to say that it is not the state’s right to do capital punishment, but that it seems incumbent on Christians not to use such disturbing lines of reasoning in order to bolster the state’s authority.

In the next post, I will discuss why we risk dehumanizing ourselves and others by supporting the death penalty.