Thou shalt not kill?

Christians’ shared faith splits on death penalty

Barring extraordinary circumstances, Billy Ray Irick probably will be dead by the time you read this.

Irick faced lethal injection for the rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl in 1985. His case and those of other death row inmates put questions about the ethics and morals of capital punishment front and center.

Christians — despite their shared core beliefs — do not agree on the an- swers. Just as the death penalty divides the nation, views among the religious on state-sanctioned execution splinter along denominational lines and from pew to pew.

Those perspectives are shaped by how they view Scripture and how much weight they give to church leadership, said Graham Reside, an ethics and society professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville.

“It’s a question of authority,” he said. “Where do you place your authority?”

Evangelical Christians, for example, tend to place theirs in the Bible instead of denominational leaders. Roman

Catholics put theirs in Scripture as well as church teachings.

The Bible is ambiguous on the death penalty, said Reside, who teaches philosophy and religion courses to inmates on Tennessee’s death row. That means believers can interpret Scripture as either for or against it, he said.

The majority of Americans support the death penalty. Fifty-six percent said they favor it for those convicted of murder, according to a Pew Research Center survey in 2015.

The survey breaks down support and opposition by religious affiliation:

❚ 71 percent of white evangelical Protestants support the death penalty;

25 percent oppose it.

❚ 66 percent of white mainline Protestants support it; 27 percent oppose it.

❚ 53 percent of Catholics support it;

42 oppose it.

❚ 37 percent of black Protestants support it; 58 percent oppose it.

Regardless of the moral questions, capital punishment is legal in 31 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Gov. Bill Haslam pointed out the legality of the death penalty in Tennessee on Monday night when he declined to intervene in Irick’s lethal injection. In

1986, a Knox County jury convicted Irick of the murder and aggravated rape of

7-year-old Paula Dyer.

Marvin Padgett, an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in America, said he supports the death penalty and believes the Bible permits it. But it should not be taken lightly nor celebrated, he said.

“It is something to be approached with gravity,” Padgett said.

The racial imbalance of those sentenced to death in America concerns Padgett. People of color account for a disproportionate number of those sentenced and executed, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Pope Francis changed the Catholic Church’s stance on the death penalty last week. It is now “inadmissable” because it attacks the inherent dignity of all humans; before, an exception allowed for it if no other way to defend human lives against an “unjust aggressor” existed.

After the Vatican announced the change, prominent Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore republished a response to Pope Francis he wrote in 2016.

At the time, the pope had cited one of the Ten Commandments – Thou shalt not kill – in opposing the death penalty. Moore argued that it was wrong to apply the commandment to every application of capital punishment.

“We must not lose the distinction the Bible makes between the innocent and the guilty,” Moore wrote.

W. James Booth visits Tennessee’s death row nearly every Saturday for an ecumenical service and study group. Like Pope Francis, Booth, director of prison ministry for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Nashville, opposes capital punishment.

“We try as Christians to educate our passions in light of Christ’s teachings,” Booth said. “That teaching is one consistently of forgiveness, not being the first to throw the stone, that human beings are capable of change and not to be treated as if they are mere objects to be killed in order to satisfy a thirst for revenge.”