Roll Him Off and Say, "Next!" or The Failure of Evangelical Ethics

Here are the caveats:

• Clayton D. Lockett was a horrible person.
• His victim suffered in horrific ways.
• No argument against the death penalty is an argument against the victim's rights, but is instead a discussion about the merits of the punishment itself.
• The phrase "deserves to die" seems to have no definable parameters, unless you count preference and assumption as parameters.

Oklahoma's recent botched execution of Clayton Lockett made national news because his death was so horrific. Some, of course, see karma or at least justice in this event. (I try in vain to explain that karma is for the next life, but Americans like the idea of instant, and so the idiotic concept abides.) I'm not interested so much in the response of Americans outside the realm of Christianity, and I'm not daft enough to actually believe that more than seventy percent of Americans are really Christian. Cut the number in half and you probably still have a generous estimate, if behavior is to have any meaning in determining religious affiliation. That roughly half of Americans support the death penalty does not surprise me. We are, after all, a culture raised on the myth of redemptive violence, and so the predictable reliance on violence to solve societal and geopolitical (and theological) ills should be as expected as our reliance on prayer, even as it also offers no obvious benefits, outside improvements in mental health if not as a curative for actual diseases.

For Christians, though, who are allegedly raised or catechized within the ethic of Christianity (as broad as that tribe's boundaries can be) the death penalty presents a test of their ethics, and it is, in almost every case, one they fail badly. Lockett presented an excellent opportunity for the flock to respond to a horrific death with some degree of horror, and yet, the title is drawn from an actual facebook post from a conservative Christian "friend" on facebook. The disciple of Jesus said without hyperbole that he would have rolled Lockett off the table and yelled, "Next!," a reference to the second planned execution that night, which mercifully did not go forward. How to explain the impulse to torture another human among the tribe of the Prince of Peace.

Evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has failed as an ethic precisely because it borrows its ethical assumptions from another form of life, which is to say it is practicing the grammar of conservative politics but using the vocabulary of Christianity. Jesus has been reduced to a bloody and battered savior, because if he were an ethical or anthropological model, he would challenge the prevailing ethical assumptions of the conservatives who pretend to practice Christianity, but who, in fact, practice American civil religion as informed by conservative politics post Reagan. His words are filtered through the lens of Pauline nonsense, such that Jesus' clear ethical directives in the Sermon on the Mount only serve as some sort of perverse framework that is meant to reveal our need for grace, and not, as seems more obvious, as markers for genuine Christianity. Far easier, after all, to kill our enemies than love them.

By allowing "the state" to act as the Sword of The Lord (Romans 13), Evangelicals create a fantasy world wherein the state is not a fellow citizen who is tasked with the shitty job of killing other humans, but is, in their mind, a nameless, faceless other who executes Old Testament justice, even as they spare themselves the implications of espousing Old Testament ideals of sin, separation, punishment, and death. "The State" is in fact someone's son or husband or father, and his job is to kill people. And would someone please ask them why "the state" insists on the right to execute citizens? Why is this a good idea? Those conservatives who rail against invasive government extend the most invasive right possible, and they do so with a justification drawn from a text that is thousands of years old, and which contains ethical demands they happily ignore because they have parsed these demands by means of an amazing rubric that allows them their assumptions and their sins while condemning those who sin differently.

Finally, Evangelicals have rejected the only ethical model that actually works within the framework of Christianity: virtue ethics. And it is this rejection that ultimately leads to the utterly incoherent ethic they embrace. The question lurking behind the grammar of virtue ethics is "what kind of person do I want to be?" Evangelicals have become content with executing humans because those humans are "bad people" who "deserve to die." The question of what kind of person gives assent to the death penalty, and who, subsequently, can say "roll him off," is never allowed to shape the conversation. I know what kind of people murderers are; they are murderers. What kind of people do Evangelical Americans want to be?

Comments

[Leighton]

How long until "evangelical ethics" becomes the kind of popularly mocked oxymoron like "military intelligence"?