The death penalty: Maga vs Catholicism

In recent years the Church has positioned itself as the guardian of human dignity

The writer teaches at Columbia University

It's surprising that any one member of the Donald Trump administration should stand out for his obvious delight in the cruel and unusual. But Pete Hegseth, US secretary of defence, distinguished himself when he announced in early October that the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the former army major who killed 13 of his fellow service members at Fort Hood in 2009, would be livestreamed for public viewing. The subsequent outrage was swift and vociferous, and even President Trump himself blinked.

The show has since been cancelled, though the killing will proceed. But the episode is a reminder that the US, uniquely among western countries, still regularly practises capital punishment -- and that it does so not simply as a juridical procedure, but as a kind of political-theological self-assertion.

This potential metastasis of state power from the legal to the spiritual realm has been a particular danger for the US from its founding, though Trumpism has shot our ostensibly modern political system through with fresh mythic, not to say cultic, qualities.

Perhaps this is why so many are now paying close attention to the Roman Catholic Church, whose political significance has been elevated and energised since the election of the first American Pope, Leo XIV. The Church has been increasingly voluble in its responses to what seems like an administration -- and a society -- careening out of control. "This decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered," the president of the United States College of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul Coakley, said of Hegseth's gambit.

It's a sentiment that echoes that of Chicago's archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, who, this spring, condemned White House social media posts celebrating the commencement of the war against Iran as a "profound moral failure".

All of this comes at a time of renewed attention to the Church's teaching on the death penalty. Of course, there remains for many a whiff of medievalism about Catholicism as a whole, with its burning stakes and inquisitors, but the modern Church has increasingly sought to define itself as a guardian of human dignity against any violation. After decades of inching towards total condemnation of capital punishment, the catechism was officially amended in 2018 to note that the death penalty is "inadmissible, because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person, and [the Church] works with determination for its abolition worldwide". Pope Leo XIV has affirmed this teaching frequently.

Any development in Church teaching is bound to generate controversy and dissent, but the disavowal of capital punishment has produced such a howl of indignation among many rightwing Catholics -- to say nothing of the anti-Catholic bile it seems to have called up among some evangelicals and fundamentalists -- that it's difficult not to wonder whether their dispute is purely doctrinal.

Indeed, there is almost a sense of injured piety in the defence of state murder, as though the Vicar of Christ were overstepping his bounds in pronouncing against it. Such has been the complaint against this Pope and his predecessor by the likes of vice-president JD Vance and border tsar Tom Homan, both Catholics, who in effect told their Church's leader to stay in his lane when he dared question their decisions in matters of immigration and war-making. Always keen to split the difference between his two adopted faiths, Catholicism and Maga, Vance's initial response was simply that if the execution were broadcast, he would not watch.

The whole affair highlights a tension around American nationalism that has become ever more apparent in Trump's second term, namely whether it is possible to be an American and anything else at the same time. It's a wedge the future of Maga depends on driving, and in service of which it will appropriate and supercharge any myth, totem, ritual or altar.

It would be irrelevant to Maga that the example of much of the rest of the world has demonstrated capital punishment's practical effects on deterrence and social order to be negligible at best, and that one of world's oldest and largest religious bodies deems the practice inadmissible, were these counter examples not further proof of the uniqueness of the movement that is willing to defy them. That the sacrifice will not be broadcast this time is a partial defeat, though it may be next time. In either case, the bullets will still fly.