The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile

The Bible in American Law and Politics

The Bible in American Law and Politics - John R. Vile

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Debate.” Fox News. July 29. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pete-buttigieg-democratic-debate-2020-bible-republicans-christian.

      Peters, Jeremy W. 2019. “Pete Buttigieg, Gay and Christian, Challenges Religious Right on Their Own Turf.” New York Times. April 10. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-sexuality-religion.html. Accessed April 11, 2019.

      Wehner, Peter. 2019. “Pete Buttigieg’s Very Public Faith Is Challenging Assumptions.” The Atlantic. April 10. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/buttigieg-wrong-about-christianity-and-progressivism/586810/.

      As with the issue of slavery, individuals who favor and disfavor governmental imposition of the death penalty both have favorite biblical proof tests.

      Dan Van Ness, the former president of the Justice Fellowship, identifies and summarizes views of Scripture into three categories. The favorite text of those who believe that Scripture mandates capital punishment is Genesis 9:6, where, after destroying all but eight people in a flood, God provided that “whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.” Moreover, because God gave this instruction prior to the Mosaic law, it “apparently had universal application” (Van Ness n.d.). As American Puritans observed in formulating their own laws, the Mosaic law provided for the offenses of “murder (not accidental killings), striking or cursing a parent, kidnapping, adultery, incest, bestiality, sodomy, rape of a betrothed virgin, witchcraft, incorrigible delinquency, breaking the Sabbath, blasphemy, sacrificing to false gods, oppressing the weak, and other transgression (See Exod. 21, 23, 35; Lev. 20 & 24; Deut. 21–24)” (Van Ness n.d.). While speaking more closely to permission, rather than to mandate, Romans 13:1–7 takes it for granted that government has the right to “bear the sword.”

      Those believing that the weight of Scripture prohibits capital punishment distinguish the use of the penalty in a theocracy, like Israel, where people were collectively responsible for cleansing the land of slain blood, from others where God is not considered the direct ruler. They may further argue from Hebrews 9:14 that God has already vindicated the value of human life through Jesus’s death on the cross, or that the New Testament virtues of forgiveness and the “willingness to suffer evil rather than resist it by force” prevail over Old Testament practices (Van Ness n.d.).

      Those who take the middle ground that the Bible permits capital punishment without requiring it can point to biblical limitations on the penalty, for individuals such as Cain, Moses, and David who were not punished for their murders, as well as to the previously cited passage from Romans 13 (Van Ness n.d.). One writer thus notes that modern readers must “distinguish between descriptive Bible content (that simply describes, in a historical sense, the state of things in Bible times, without necessarily requiring it of believers today) and prescriptive Bible content (that imparts an authoritative command or guidelines for Christians of all eras)” (Rau 2011).

      Perhaps as important as whether the Bible mandates or permits capital punishment are the ways that Scripture limited such punishments through principles such as proportionality (Exodus 21:23–25), certainty of guilt (the two-witness rule delineated in Deuteronomy 17:6 and Numbers 35:30), intent (as evidenced by the creation of cities of refuge), due process requirements, and expressions—like that in Ezekiel 33:11—of God’s reluctance to punish (Van Ness n.d.).

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      Historically, some of the leading exponents of opposition to capital punishment have been motivated by Christian principles. Dr. Benjamin Rush was among early Americans who sought to replace the death penalty, and especially public executions, with incarceration. He cited Matthew 16:26: “The Son of Man came not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” (Vile 2019, 192). There was an anti-gallows movement that lasted from the writing of the Constitution to the Civil War, peaking in the 1840s, in which individuals citing such diverse sources as the Bible, the writings of the Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), romanticism, Quaker thought, and utilitarian philosophers offered a variety of arguments opposing capital punishment. Although a few states actually eliminated the death penalty, it was more common for states to circumscribe the offenses for which it could be imposed and to limit its public displays (Davis 1957).

      Debates over capital punishment were renewed in the twentieth century, in which courts restricted the punishment to cases of capital murder and insisted on greater procedural protections. In Furman v. Georgia (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty, as it was then being imposed, violated the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in the Eighth Amendment, which is applied to the states through the Fourteenth. A majority of states, however, responded by passing laws dividing capital trials into separate guilt and innocence and punishment stages, mandating consideration of aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and providing automatic appeals. The court upheld such laws in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). Continuing points of dispute involve whether retribution is an appropriate approach to punishment, whether the penalty serves as a deterrent to other crimes, and whether the penalty can be administered in a nonracially discriminatory manner. One difficulty with the death penalty is that, once administered, it is irrevocable. Moreover, Christians believe that Jesus, an innocent man, was one of its victims (Osler 2009).

      It has been argued that the standard for criminal punishments, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” was developed in part for Christian jurors who feared that if they inadvertently condemned an innocent person to death, they were committing a mortal crime (Whitman 2008).

      Although lawyers have long cited biblical passages in attempting to persuade jurors either to inflict or to spare defendants, in People v. Harlan (2005), Colorado invalidated a death sentence when a juror brought a Bible into the jury room during deliberations, although appellate courts sometimes rule that judicial references to the Bible during sentencing have been harmless errors. A central concern has been that jurors are limited by rules of evidence to the evidence that is presented to them and the fear that jurors will be unduly swayed by references to holy writ (Hudson Скачать книгу