Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 8428 Plough Quarterly • Autumn 2016 But what’s unique about the death penalty in the United States is that we Christians own it. Without our support, it probably would no longer exist. Why do Christians love the death penalty? There are many reasons. But the most troubling one stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of why Jesus died. Since I started talking about this issue, I have gotten emails from people asking, “How can God be against the death penalty when God used it to save humanity through Jesus’ execution?” So Jesus’ death is used as a reason to kill people. As you point out, the early Christians would have been appalled at that kind of thinking. The Christians of the first three centuries had a consistent ethic of life – they spoke out against all killing, without exception, including war, abortion, and the death penalty. They asked: Why do we call it murder when one person kills another in private life, but call it killing if it’s done in war or through execution? Two thousand years ago they were already naming these contradictions. An overwhelming majority of Americans actually know this. In a recent Pew poll that asked people whether Jesus would support the death penalty, only 5 percent said yes. Your book discusses the history of American racial violence, particularly of lynching. What’s the link between this history and the death penalty today? A lot of the new research was initiated by Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. He’s found that it’s exactly the places where lynchings were carried out a hundred years ago in which the death penalty flourishes today, in states like Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. Obviously, there’s a complicated story here. Yet there does seem to be continuity between lynching – which, let’s remember, often involved torture, mutilation, and burning in front of audiences of thousands – and what the Equal Justice Report calls “a more palatable form of violence” in the form of the death penalty after World War II. In 1950, African Americans made up 22 percent of the population but 75 percent of those executed. Today, African Americans are 12 percent of the population, yet make up 34 percent of folks executed and almost half (43 percent) of those on death row. Writers like Michelle Alexander and Ta-Nehisi Coates have highlighted the massive racial dis- parities in the US criminal justice system, which affect millions. Meanwhile, conservatives like Heather MacDonald point out that for young African-American males, the greatest risk of being killed is through violent crime. With these problems unresolved, is focusing on the death penalty a distraction? The death penalty is a gateway to talking about the broader issues of racial justice, because what’s true for capital punishment is true for them too. For instance, statistically the biggest determinant for who gets executed is not the atrocity of the crime but the race of the victim. When the victim is white and the defendant is a person of color, he or she has a much higher chance first of being sentenced to death, and then of actually being executed. To learn more about the death penalty in the United States and the move- ment to abolish it, read Shane Claiborne’s book Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us (HarperOne, 2016). For resources and links, visit executinggrace.com.