5 - Religion and the death penalty in the United States: past and present

Summary

Organised movements of protest against capital punishment have been a regular feature in the history of the United States. As the society itself has changed, cycles of abolitionism have had different characteristics. One such characteristic is the role which religion played in each era. The purpose of this chapter is to review some of this strange history in the hope of seeing whether it may hold lessons for promoting a better future, an America that might finally ‘catch up with itself’.

Early efforts at abolition

In the ‘First Abolitionist Era’, running from the 1830s through to the 1850s, a few states, such as Michigan (1846), Rhode Island (1852) and Wisconsin (1853) succeeded in abolishing capital punishment, but a more widespread legacy of that age was the elimination of public hangings. These were abandoned in at least fifteen states during this period. The removal of executions from public squares to prison yards was a strangely ambiguous social move, since it seemed to hit at the very heart of the alleged deterrent purpose of capital punishment by veiling its reality from the general public. In any event, it certainly changed the setting and tone of executions, which were no longer the popular spectacles of old, and this may have played an ironic role in actually delaying full abolition, ‘the final resolution of the issue’.

From a religious perspective, this alteration in format automatically diminished the role of the clergy by depriving them of a large public audience.