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PAGE TITLE: http://www.weeklystandard.com
ARTICLE TITLE: Religion and the
Death Penalty: Can’t have one without the
other?
DATE: Monday 4 February
2008
AUTHOR: Walter Berns
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Walter
Berns (born May 3, 1919) is an American constitutional law and political
philosophy professor. He is currently a resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute and a professor emeritus at Georgetown University.
 |
| Walter Berns |
Religion and the Death Penalty
Can't have one without the other?
Walter Berns
February
4, 2008, Vol. 13, No. 20
The
Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether the Constitution allows the
death penalty for the rape of a child.
--New
York Times, January 5, 2008
The
best case for the death penalty--or, at least, the best explanation of it--was
made, paradoxically, by one of the most famous of its opponents, Albert Camus,
the French novelist. Others complained of the alleged unusual cruelty of the
death penalty, or insisted that it was not, as claimed, a better deterrent of
murder than, say, life imprisonment, and Americans especially complained of the
manner in which it was imposed by judge or jury (discriminatorily or
capriciously, for example), and sometimes on the innocent.
Camus
said all this and more, and what he said in addition is instructive. The death
penalty, he said, "can be legitimized only by a truth or a principle that
is superior to man," or, as he then made clearer, it may rightly be
imposed only by a religious society or community; specifically, one that
believes in "eternal life." Only in such a place can it be said that
the death sentence provides the guilty person with the opportunity (and reminds
him of the reason) to make amends, thus to prepare himself for the final
judgment which will be made in the world to come. For this reason, he said, the
Catholic church "has always accepted the necessity of the death
penalty." This may no longer be the case. And it may no longer be the case
that death is, as Camus said it has always been, a religious penalty. But it
can be said that the death penalty is more likely to be imposed by a religious
people.
The
reasons for this are not obvious. It may be that the religious know what evil
is or, at least, that it is, and, unlike the irreligious, are not so ready to
believe that evil can be explained, and thereby excused, by a history of child
abuse or, say, a "post-traumatic stress disorder" or a "temporal
lobe seizure." Or, again unlike the irreligious, and probably without
having read so much as a word of his argument, they may be morally disposed (or
better, predisposed) to agree with the philosopher Immanuel Kant--that greatest
of the moralists--who said it was a "categorical imperative" that a
convicted murderer "must die." Or perhaps the religious are simply
quicker to anger and, while instructed to do otherwise, slower, even unwilling,
to forgive. In a word, they are more likely to demand that justice be done.
Whatever the reason, there is surely a connection between the death penalty and
religious belief.
European
politicians and journalists recognize or acknowledge the connection, if only
inadvertently, when they simultaneously despise us Americans for supporting the
death penalty and ridicule us for going to church. We might draw a conclusion
from the fact that they do neither. Consider the facts on the ground (so to
speak): In this country, 60 convicted murderers were executed in 2005 (and 53
in 2006), almost all of them in southern or southwestern and church-going
states--Virginia and Georgia, for example, Texas and Oklahoma--states whose
residents are among the most seriously religious Americans. Whereas in Europe,
or "old Europe," no one was executed and, according to one survey,
almost no one--and certainly no soi-disant intellectual--goes to church. In
Germany, for example, leaving aside the Muslims and few remaining Jews, only 4
percent of the people regularly attend church services, in Britain and Denmark
3 percent, and in Sweden not much more than 1; in France there are more
practicing Muslims than there are baptized Catholics, and a third of the Dutch
do not know the "why" of Christmas. Hence, the empty or abandoned
churches, or in Shakespeare's words, the "bare ruined choirs where late
the sweet birds sang."
As
for the death penalty, it is not enough to say that they (or their officials)
are opposed to it. They want it abolished everywhere. They are not satisfied
that it was abolished in France (in 1981, and over the opposition at the time
of some 70 percent of the population), as well as in Britain, Germany, and the
other countries of Old Europe, or that--according to a protocol attached to the
European Convention on Human Rights--it will have to be abolished in any
country seeking membership in the European Union; and its abolition in Samoa
was greeted by an official declaration expressing Europe's satisfaction. (To
paraphrase Hamlet, "what is Samoa to them or they to Samoa that they
should judge for it?") In fact, their concern, if not their authority,
extends far beyond the countries for which they are legally responsible.
Thus,
the European Union adopted a charter confirming everyone's right to life and
stating that "no one may be removed, expelled, or extradited to a State
where there is a serious risk that he or she would be subjected to the death
penalty." They even organized a World Congress Against the Death Penalty
which, in turn, organized the first World Day Against the Death Penalty. They
go so far as to intervene in our business, filing amicus curiae briefs in
Supreme Court capital cases.
What
explains this obsession with the death penalty? Hard to say, but probably the
fact that abolishing it is one of the few things Europeans can do that make
them feel righteous; in fact, very few. Nowhere in the new European
constitution--some 300 pages long, not counting the appendages--is there any
mention of religion, of Christian Europe, or of God. God is dead in Europe and,
of course, something died with Him.
This
"something" is the subject of Camus's famous novel The Stranger,
first published in 1942, 60 years after Nietzsche first announced God's death,
and another 60 before the truth of what he said became apparent, at least with
respect to Europe and its intellectuals. The novel has been called a modern
masterpiece--there was a time, and not so long ago, when students of a certain
age were required to read it--and Meursault, its hero (actually, its antihero),
is a murderer, but a different kind of murderer. What is different about him is
that he murdered for no reason--he did it because the sun got in his eyes, à
cause du soleil--and because he neither loves nor hates, and unlike the other
people who inhabit his world, does not pretend to love or hate. He has no
friends; indeed, he lives in a world in which there is no basis for friendship
and no moral law; therefore, no one, not even a murderer, can violate the terms
of friendship or break that law. As he said, the universe "is benignly
indifferent" to how he lives.
It
is a bleak picture, and Camus was criticized for painting it, but as he wrote in
reply, "there is no other life possible for a man deprived of God, and all
men are [now] in that position." But Camus was not the first European to
draw this picture; he was preceded by Nietzsche who (see Zarathustra's
"Prologue") provided us with an account of human life in that godless
and "brave new world." It will be a comfortable world--rather like
that promised by the European Union--where men will "have their little
pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night," but no
love, no longing, no striving, no hope, no gods or ideals, no politics
("too burdensome"), no passions (especially no anger), only "a
regard for health." To this list, Camus rightly added, no death penalty.
This
makes sense. A world so lacking in passion lacks the necessary components of
punishment. Punishment has its origins in the demand for justice, and justice
is demanded by angry, morally indignant men, men who are angry when someone
else is robbed, raped, or murdered, men utterly unlike Camus's Meursault. This anger
is an expression of their caring, and the just society needs citizens who care
for each other, and for the community of which they are parts. One of the
purposes of punishment, particularly capital punishment, is to recognize the
legitimacy of that righteous anger and to satisfy and thereby to reward it. In
this way, the death penalty, when duly or deliberately imposed, serves to
strengthen the moral sentiments required by a self-governing community.
Walter
Berns is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and professor
of government emeritus at Georgetown University. An earlier version of this
essay appeared in his collection, Democracy and the Constitution (AEI Press,
2006).
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