GODSTUFF: Will people of faith support abolition of the Death Penalty?

On Ash Wednesday, Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn signed a bill abolishing the death penalty in his state, adding the Land of Lincoln to the growing list of 16 states where capital punishment is no longer an option.

“It is impossible to create a perfect system, free of all mistakes,” Quinn said after signing the death penalty law, which takes effect July 1. “I think it’s the right and just thing to abolish the death penalty and punish those who commit heinous crimes — evil people — with life in prison without parole or any chance of release.”

Quinn, who is Roman Catholic, revealed that he turned to his faith — to the Bible and to Catholic leaders and tradition — in contemplating whether to sign the bill delivered to him last year by Illinois lawmakers.

The governor even quoted the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the beloved archbishop of Chicago who succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 1996, saying, “In a complex, sophisticated democracy like ours, means other than the death penalty are available and can be used to protect society.”

Bernardin cited a “seamless garment” argument, based on the Catholic “consistent ethic of life,” for his passionate opposition to and lobbying against the death penalty.

Cardinal Francis George, the current archbishop of Chicago and former president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Demetrios Kantzavelos of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago and E. Garnett Fay of the Chicago Meeting of Friends (Quakers) were among a number of religious leaders who had urged to Quinn  to sign the death penalty ban in the days leading up to his Ash Wednesday announcement. (A dozen years ago, George joined Kantzavelos in his fight to block the execution of Andrew Kokoraleis, a convicted murderer who had renewed his Orthodox faith while imprisoned. On March 16, 1999, Kokoraleis  died by lethal injection — the last prisoner executed in Illinois before former Gov. George Ryan issued a moratorium on the death penalty.)

Religious leaders long have been at the forefront of the death penalty abolitionist movement in Illinois and nationwide. But there has been an ongoing disconnect between faith leaders’ activism against capital punishment and the opinions of their flocks.

According to a 2010 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey, 62 percent of Americans support the death penalty in murder cases, with only 30 percent saying they oppose it. That figure is nearly identical to the results of a similar survey in 2007, and only marginally less than survey results from 1996, when 78 percent of Americans said they supported capital punishment for murder (and just 18 percent said they were opposed.)

Survey results on the death penalty vary little across religious groups — at least among white Americans. Last year, 74 percent of white evangelicals, 71 percent of white mainline Protestants and 68 percent of white Catholics said they were in favor of capital punishment, according to Pew. But less than half of African-American Protestants (37 percent) and Hispanic Catholics (43 percent) said they favored the death penalty.

“The light of God is shining, shining positively on our state,” Illinois State Sen. Kwame Raoul of Chicago said in response to Quinn’s ban on the death penalty Wednesday.

Raoul was not alone in his thinking — that the Illinois ban is a moral as well as a legal victory for people of good faith. As more states continue examine whether to eliminate capital punishment, some wonder whether the days of the death penalty are numbered and what, if any, role people of faith might play in reaching such a tipping point.

Racial disparity in its application, along with cases of wrongful convictions, is often cited as compelling reasons to abolish the death penalty. In Illinois, for instance, the state has executed 12 prisoners since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. In that same time period, Illinois has also exonerated 20 Death Row inmates.

“One significant moral problem with the State having the authority of capital punishment is that the decision is irrevocable and so often carried out in ways that are racially questionable — studies prove this,” Richard Cizik, former vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, told me earlier this week. “My conscience can’t accept this appalling reality.

“If it’s not a matter of serious reflection — especially given the racial disparity in sentencing and that many death sentences don’t satisfy the biblical requirement of two witnesses — it should be!” Cizik continued. “To miss the moral questions at stake is to be hard of heart.”

According to Mike Farrell, president of Death Penalty Focus, a grassroots organization dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment, many evangelicals and other religious folks still have pretty tough hearts when it comes to moral questions about the death penalty.

What Farrell referred to as the “fundamentalist Christian community” remains “wedded to a political position that embraces state killing and insists that its use is right, holy, biblically ordained and necessary — ‘the Lord’s work,’ as some would have it,” he said. “I suspect the purpose of holding to that line today, as was the case with opposition to abolition in those early years, may have more to do with politics than faith.”

Farrell, a longtime activist and actor perhaps best known for his portrayal of the character Captain B.J. Hunnicutt on the television series “M*A*S*H*,” said he is seeing a change of opinion on the death penalty among rank-and-file Catholics, a shift he attributes to the “strength of their leadership’s advocacy.”

He sees a similar trend emerging among mainstream Protestants, but senses “that the shift toward abolition in their community of believers is more reflective of a general awakening on the part of the American public to the argument we’ve been making for years.”

That said, Farrell believes people of faith will have a significant impact in reaching a tipping point on the abolition of the death penalty nationwide, by addressing capital punishment as a pressing moral and spiritual concern and shedding light on the “sins of the [justice] system.”

“I believe we are moving, ever more rapidly, to a point where abolition is inevitable,” Farrell said. “After all, as Paulo Freire told us, ‘to dehumanize another is to dehumanize ourselves.’”

A version of this piece originally appeared via Religion News Service.