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Christians have burnt each other,
quite persuaded
That the apostles would have done as they did
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George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don
Juan
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Capital punishment was accepted as part of God's great
design, and no attempt was made to ban it by any right-thinking
Christian. In the Middle Ages capital punishment was inflicted
for religious offences. Examples included robbing a church,
sacrilege , eating meat during Lent, cremating the dead, and
omitting to be baptised*.
Petty vandalism against Church property also attracted the death
penalty. Churchmen advocated not only the death penalty but
also a range of accompanying horrors. Criminals were hanged
in chains. Sometimes bodies were gibbeted, i.e. they were coated
in tar to preserve them, then hung high up on a post, often
in sight of their family home, where the birds and the weather
would destroy them only after months or years. Some victims
were hanged, drawn, and quartered, after which their heart would
be held up to the crowd, and their severed head would be stuck
on a spike and left in some prominent place for everyone to
see. Here is a typical sentence :
You shall be drawn upon a hurdle through the open streets
to the place of execution, there to be hanged and cut down
while yet alive, and your body shall be opened, and your heart
and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off, and
thrown into the fire before your eyes; then your head to be
struck off, and your body divided into four quarters, to be
disposed of at the King's pleasure.... *
On God's behalf, English churchmen confirmed in the early
nineteenth century that it was perfectly acceptable to tear
out the heart and bowels of condemned but still living men.
Some clergymen advocated hanging whether the accused was guilty
or not. One argument was that capital punishment was a deterrent
for the criminally inclined, so the guilt or innocence of the
individual on trial was irrelevant*.
Another was that all sins are equally damnable in the eyes of
God, so the extreme penalty was appropriate for all*.
Support for capital punishment provided a rare example of ecumenical
concord. As one modern cleric who made a study of the topic,
put it:
Orthodoxy, Reformed as well as Catholic, identified itself
closely with the secular power, supported the sword of the
secular arm, and benefited from it. God and the gallows together
kept society secure, anarchy at bay, and heresy suppressed*.
St Thomas Aquinas had justified the death penalty, and the
Roman Church followed him. The death penalty was not merely
permitted by God: for certain crimes it was required
by God. Other authorities surpassed him in their zeal.
Martin Luther criticised the practice of the executioner asking
forgiveness of his victim, since the executioner, like the magistrate,
was an instrument of God*.
According to this view, the Christian officials responsible
for inflicting the death penalty had no more say in the matter
than the axe or rope or stake. The Church of England enshrined
its acceptance of the state's right to kill in Article
37 of the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church. The full flourishing
of the code regarding capital punishment in western Europe coincided
with the Protestant ascendancy. The ultimate penalty was imposed
in England for such offences as destroying certain bridges,
impersonating a Chelsea pensioner, associating with gypsies
, stealing letters , and obstructing revenue officers.
The Roman Church continued to sanction its own secret executions
well into the nineteenth century. Other denominations also approved
of capital punishment. Methodist ministers took children to
watch public executions, such scenes being considered "improving".
Wesley himself had been keen on gibbeting and had wanted to
extend the practice to suicides. Calvinists concurred. A leading
nineteenth century minister styled the "Champion of the
Sacred Cause of Hanging", was critical of the exercise
of mercy in capital cases. As he pointed out, God himself had
tried mercy with Cain, and everyone knew how badly that had
turned out.*
Evangelicals like the nineteenth century politician Anthony
Ashley-Cooper (later seventh Earl of Shaftesbury) advocated
the traditional view that God not only permitted capital punishment
but also demanded it*.
Judges pointed out to those found guilty of certain crimes that
God required them to die.
Churchmen claimed that the deterrent effect of capital punishment
was enhanced by due solemnity, mystery and awe. The Church therefore
buttressed the ceremony of execution, and surrounded it by ritual.
In England a chaplain was on hand in court to intone Amen
to the judge's sentence of death. A prison chaplain might
hold a service before the execution with a coffin displayed
in the presence of the congregation and the condemned prisoner.
After English executions were confined to prisons in 1868, a
black flag was hoisted over the prison on execution days; a
bell would toll; and the chaplain would intone the burial service
as he accompanied the condemned prisoner to the gallows*.
The Church was involved throughout, into the twentieth century,
validating the procedure on behalf of God. It was generally
accepted that the main business of prison clergymen was to break
the spirits of capital convicts so that they would offer no
physical resistance to the hangman*.
Sometimes the chaplain himself gave the signal to carry out
the execution.
Time and time again bishops and archbishops opposed the abolition
of capital punishment. In 1810 the Archbishop of Canterbury
and six other bishops helped defeat a bill that would have abolished
the death penalty for stealing five shillings from a shop. Capital
punishment was so much part and parcel of the Christian faith
that bishops would go to almost any lengths to keep it. When
secularists advocated the abolition of the death penalty, the
bishops rushed to its support. When it looked like public revulsion
at public executions might force Parliament to abolish capital
punishment in the mid-nineteenth century, zealous Christians
pressed for hanging to be carried out inside prisons. The idea
was that, once removed from the public gaze, executions could
continue without fuss or popular revulsion. This plan was advocated
for example by Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford*.
So it was that in 1868 public executions ceased in England and
private ones began. As the bishop had hoped, pressure for abolition
subsided.
Well into the twentieth century most English bishops were in
favour of capital punishment and used their votes in the House
of Lords to oppose abolition. For example the bench of bishops
helped defeat the Criminal Justice Bill of 1948 during its passage
through the House of Lords. In the 1950s it looked again as
though Parliament might abolish the death penalty. The Archbishop
of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, was alarmed that this attempt
might succeed. He therefore adopted a similar technique to that
adopted by Bishop "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce
in the previous century. This time public sentiment was opposed
to the death penalty, even behind closed prison doors. In order
to retain capital punishment the Archbishop advocated classifying
degrees of murder. In this way he hoped to retain the death
penalty for at least some crimes.The Christian line was that
it was better to hang some offenders rather than none at all.
Fisher was not keen to have his traditionalist views opposed:
"Anyone who says that it is unchristian to hang puts himself
out of court" he wrote*
Other Churches held similar views. When abolition of the death
penalty was again being considered in Britain in the 1960s,
Cardinal Godfrey appeared on television to advocate the traditional
Roman Catholic line. As he said, the state had not merely the
right, but the duty to exact the death penalty
whenever, in its own judgement, the life of the community was
threatened by a particular sort of crime*.
The first stirrings of opposition to the death penalty in Britain,
in the early nineteenth century, came principally from those
who rejected the prevailing Christian consensus. The philosopher
Jeremy Bentham, reputedly an atheist, and the poet Shelley,
an avowed atheist, both opposed capital punishment, supported
by Quakers*. They were
opposed by all right-thinking organised Churches*.
As we have seen, in the House of Lords the bishops consistently
supported capital punishment. The loudest parliamentary voices
raised in the Lords against the death penalty in the nineteenth
century belonged to men like the godless Lord Byron , as outside
the Lords they belonged to atheists like Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891),
Annie Besant (1847-1933) and George Holyoake (1817-1906). Holyoake
wondered why the Archbishop of York could find time to condemn
sensationalist novels but not to utter a word against public
execution*.
The Churches could have demolished the moral case for capital
punishment, but instead they bolstered it:
In a Christian country, such as England was, a death penalty
devoid of religious sanction could not have survived. It was
an issue over which the church could have exercised a moral
hegemony and failed to do so. It shadowed public opinion rather
than led it. It left the moral high ground to Quakers, lapsed
Jews, maverick Christians of all denominations, and men and
women of none*.
In the second half of the twentieth century the bishops finally
adopted the secularist view. Prison chaplains in Britain got
round to considering the morality of the death penalty just
as Parliament abolished it in 1969.
The same pattern was followed in North America. Quaker laws
proposed for Pennsylvania had been vetoed by London in the seventeenth
century as they were far more lenient than the capital laws
of the mother country*.
The complete abolition of the death penalty was first proposed
in a paper read at the house of Benjamin Franklin. This paper
likened public execution to "a human sacrifice in religion"*.
In the years to come the battle was largely between on the one
hand freethinkers, and on the other Calvinists and other traditional
Churches. In Continental Europe the abolitionist cause was espoused
by independent writers like Goethe and Victor Hugo but opposed
by the Churches. As in Britain and America all abolitionists
were condemned as infidels.
The only Christian sect consistently to have opposed the death
penalty was the Quakers. Like non-Christians who led the reform
movement, they regarded it as immoral. This is all rather an
embarrassment now in liberal countries. Liberal churchmen would
have preferred it if the Church had opposed the death penalty.
In fact most Anglicans and Protestants have opposed the death
penalty since the 1960s, and in 1999 they were joined for the
first time by the Pope. Attachment to capital punishment is
now unfashionable, so most Churches around the developed world
tend to play down their traditional views. Many clergymen do
their best to make out that their Church has always supported
the biblical injunction Thou shalt not kill, a principle
that in truth was adopted only after Western society had been
thoroughly secularised. Only in places like the Bible belt in
the USA do traditional Christian views still predominate. Capital
punishment continues to be inflicted in such places, despite
secular opposition.
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