12/05/01

Beliefsby

PETER STEINFELS Only a few years ago, few lost causes seemed quite as irretrievablylost as opposing the death penalty. Not only did 8 out of 10 Americans favor capital punishment in 1994, but that proportion had been growing for over a quarter of a century. Such overwhelming support may still exist for the execution of Timothy J. McVeigh, but not for the death penalty generally. Thisshift in public opinion is remarkable in itself. But so are twoother things. First, a major factor behind the shift is religion.Second, virtually no one has thought to complain about that fact. According to polls conducted by the Pew Research Center for thePeople and the Press, the public's support for the death penalty has slipped back to 66 percent, about the level typical of the1950's, and if other polls are to be believed, even those Americansstill backing capital punishment harbor doubts about its fairnessin practice and its effectiveness in deterring murders. At the core of this reassessment, wrote Andrew Kohut, director ofthe Pew Research Center, on the Op-Ed Page of The New York Times onThursday, is religion: "Pew Center surveys this year show thatpeople most often cite their religious beliefs as a basis for theiropposition." This is an interesting development, to say the least.Historically, religion has sanctioned capital punishment far moreoften than opposed it. The God of the Bible is not obviously opposed to the death penalty. Strong arguments in favor ofexecutions for heinous crimes continue to be mounted on religiousgrounds. But in recent years religious leaders have issued a steadydrumbeat of challenges to capital punishment, at least in itspractical application if not in principle. Of course, many liberal Protestant and Jewish leaders, along withhistoric advocates of nonviolence like the Quakers, had longquestioned the practice. Then, in 1998, evangelical leaderspleaded, to no avail, with Gov. George W. Bush of Texas to sparethe life of Karla Faye Tucker, a murderer who was "born again" ondeath row and became a model prisoner. That appeal forced manyconservative Christians at least to think twice about the wholeprocess. Roman Catholic reinforcements to anti- death-penalty ranks havebeen swelling since 1983 when Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicagosucceeded in linking the church's opposition to abortion to a broad"ethic of life" agenda. Pope John Paul II made his opposition to capital punishmentconcrete when he visited St. Louis in January 1999 and successfullybegged Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri to commute the sentence of aman on the brink of execution. Catholic bishops have not backed offtheir opposition to the death penalty, even in the case of Mr.McVeigh. Granted, none of this might have caught fire with church-goingcitizens except for the cases of wrongful convictions and legalerrors increasingly coming to light. However, the religious component of the opposition is likely togrow more intense. A conference in March at the Catholic Universityof America even raised questions whether Catholic prosecutors couldseek the death penalty or Catholic judges preside over deathpenalty trials. If citizens with religion-based objections to capital punishmentcame to constitute a fourth of the pool of potential jurors andwere barred from serving, could that render those juriesunrepresentative or qualify as religious discrimination? Strikingly absent in all of this have been the usual phrases thatfrequently buzz around religious involvement in politics:"absolutism," "intrusion," "imposing sectarian views," "mixingchurch and state." One obvious explanation is simple inconsistency among critics ofexplicitly religious political activity. Opposing the deathpenalty, like banning land mines or forgiving poor nations' debts,is their kind of cause - and therefore religion-based politicalactivity is fine. Another explanation would be that religious mobilization againstcapital punishment seems to escape a stereotypical view held bymany people of how religious faith contrasts with secular thinkingin forming politically relevant moral convictions. The stereotype has it that religiously grounded politicalconvictions arise from otherworldly sources, are inscribedunambiguously in sacred texts (or interpreted unambiguously byirrefutable authorities) and must be followed almost slavishly.Secular convictions, by contrast, are supposedly based on testedevidence and human reasoning, are subject to rethinking andrevision and can be compromised if necessary. There is some basis for this contrast, particularly in regard toreligious systems generally labeled fundamentalist. But anyone whohas survived a dinner-party argument about capital punishment knowshow both religion-based and secular opposition to the death penaltydefy that dichotomy. Religious opposition can seldom rely on unambiguous texts andalmost always requires some degree of rethinking that takes accountof tested evidence and human reasoning. Secular opposition can beno less absolutist in its premises, even though they are based onthis-worldly ideals, and as uncompromising in its conclusions. But anyone who has survived a dinner-party argument about abortionmight have noticed the same thing. Despite the differentconclusions people reach, the structure of the argumentation itself- in terms of reliance on bedrock absolutes, appeals to congenialauthorities, citation of empirical evidence and, of course,emotional pitch - is often quite similar, whether the contendingpositions are religious or secular. So is the religion-based campaign against capital punishment someexceptional model of religious engagement in politics? Or is it infact a fairly typical form of that engagement, just exceptionalenough to make people reassess their assumptions about how religionactually functions in political life?