“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Those are the words of Dr. King in 1967, in his historic speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” delivered at Riverside Church in New York City.

This past weekend dozens of faith leaders gathered at Riverside, putting our voices together to read King’s words on this 55^th anniversary of the speech. The group that gathered at Riverside for the event — a collaborative effort, sponsored by Red Letter Christians, LIVEFREE, the United Church of Christ, the Black Church Action Fund and the Quincy Institute — included bishops, authors, pastors, activists from around the country and Dr. King’s daughter, the Rev. Dr. Bernice King. Also participating was Bishop Herbert Daughtry, who was present when King delivered the speech in 1967.

Over the course of the evening, we were reminded multiple times how controversial and how courageous the words were … and are. Many of King’s peers deserted him for taking a stand against the war. His board turned against him, except one board member, the Rev. Otis Moss II. In the speech itself, Dr. King mentions all those who question his judgment in speaking out against the war in Vietnam and connecting it to all the other issues of his day. He was increasingly unpopular, and it should not be missed that he was assassinated exactly one year after the Riverside address, to the day.

So what’s so controversial about it?

Well, for starters, Dr. King refers to America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He names America’s “triplets of evil” as racism, extreme materialism and militarism. He calls out the hypocrisy of telling young people “in the ghettoes” that violence will not solve their problems while condoning our government when it resorts to violence. He names the sad irony that we are sending Black kids to fight for liberties thousands of miles away that we haven’t even been able to guarantee them here at home. And yet, just as the speech is filled with hard-to-hear truth, it is also full of hope.

Many folks appreciate the sanitized King and would prefer the “I Have a Dream” speech. You don’t see many monuments with quotes from the Riverside sermon. Bishop Daughtry noted that he doesn’t think a single quote on the King memorial in D.C. comes from this iconic speech.

Before we write off King’s assessment of the U.S. as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, dismissing it as extreme or exaggerated, consider this:

Of the 196 countries in the world, only nine of them have nuclear weapons. And 93% of the nuclear weapons of the world are owned by only two countries — the U.S. and Russia. We are the only country that has ever used them, and we did it twice in one week, killing hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We now have bombs 100 times more lethal than the Hiroshima bomb. And the U.S. arsenal has the capacity of over 100,000 Hiroshima bombs. We have the biggest stockpile, and we have the largest military budget in the history of the world. The Pentagon spends more in 3 seconds than the average American makes in a year, reminding us of King’s words at Riverside: We are approaching a spiritual death.

It is easy for us to be critical of Russia’s violence in Ukraine right now, and we should be. The Riverside speech, however, invites us to get the log out of our own country’s eye.

There are many who speak of “American exceptionalism” — and by that they are referring to America being a beacon for freedom and democracy, the last best hope on earth, God’s anointed messianic force for good. This is a notion King continually challenged with increasing passion all the way to his death. In fact, the sermon King was writing when he was killed, that he never got to preach, was entitled: “Why America Might Go to Hell.”

It’s not hard to see why King’s words were hard to hear and why he was opposed by so many, even by former friends and board members.

But truth sets us free. There is another version of American exceptionalism. We are exceptional in our embrace of violence. Using violence to try to get rid of violence. Among all the world’s nations, we are one of only a handful of countries that continues to practice capital punishment. When it comes to the number of executions, we are always in the top 10, and often in the top five.

SIGN: RED LETTER CHRISTIAN PLEDGE 

America is exceptional in our infatuation with guns. With only 5% of the world’s population, we own nearly half of the world’s civilian-owned guns. There are five times more gun dealers in the U.S. than McDonald’s restaurants. We produce about 9.5 million guns a year, 26,000 guns a day, one gun every three seconds. We have an exceptional problem when it comes to violence. Just as there are companies making millions of dollars off gun sales, we also have corporations like Lockheed Martin that are profiting from war. Over 150 countries have had arms contracts with U.S. companies. After 9/11, the U.S. went to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, even though 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia is still our biggest buyer of weapons, using them to destroy so many lives in Yemen. Dr. King saw all of these connections in his own time, and that is why he had to “break the silence.”

“Live by the sword, die by the sword” — those are the words of Jesus, Dr. King’s inspiration and savior, and we have proved those words to be true again and again and again.

That is the real American exceptionalism — we are exceptional in our addiction to violence.

In addition to this month being the anniversary of the Riverside speech and of King’s death, it is also the anniversary of the most ambitious and horrific bombings in history. In 2003, the U.S. and coalition forces launched the “shock and awe” bombing campaign, dropping more than 900 bombs a day on Iraq, killing thousands upon thousands of people. More recently, in 2016, when Barack Obama was president, we dropped 26,000 bombs, an average of three bombs per hour.

Our military spending is not a partisan issue. Obama raised Bush’s military budget. Trump raised Obama’s budget. Biden raised Trump’s budget. What would King say to that? Probably exactly what he said in 1967: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a spiritual death.”

We have work to do to continue to “break the silence.” As our world is increasingly plagued by violence — not just in Ukraine but also in the streets of America — we must continue King’s legacy of nonviolence. We, too, must keep breaking the silence.

This piece first appeared at Religious News Services.

Alabama has executed convicted murderer Kenneth Eugene Smith with nitrogen gas, the first time the method of capital punishment has been used globally. Christian campaigner Shane Claiborne says the death penalty wouldn’t stand a chance in his nation, were it not for Christians.

Kenneth Eugene Smith was convicted in 1989 of murdering a preacher’s wife, Elizabeth Sennett, in a killing-for-hire. According to an eyewitness, Smith thrashed violently on the gurney on Thursday evening and the execution took around 25 minutes. The UN condemned the execution as cruel but Alabama said the process had been carried out humanely.

Billy Neal Moore returned from the Vietnam War like many veterans, with all sorts of struggles, not the least of which was financial. He and an army buddy came up with a plan: easy access to a large amount of money, with very little risk. Or so they thought.

Billy had no criminal record. This was new terrain for him, but his friend assured him that nothing could go wrong. As they went to rob a house, it turned out the 72 year-old homeowner was in. As things unfolded, Fred Stapleton was killed.

Moore was haunted by what they had done. He confessed to the crime, knowing he would face the death penalty in Georgia. And he did. But as far as Moore was concerned, that was fine. If he could have pushed the button on his own execution, he would have. He was convinced he deserved death. In fact, while in prison, he tried to end his own life.

But in the midst of the long loneliness, there was an interruption.

Grace.

This interruption of grace came from the place we might least expect it – the family of the murder victim. Behind bars Billy had already had a powerful conversion experience. He even got baptised. But it was his relationship with the family of the victim that showed him what grace really is. In his words: “It was the family of the person I killed that helped me get to the point that I could forgive myself.”

WE CAN’T FORGET JESUS’ OWN ENCOUNTER WITH THE DEATH PENALTY AS HE STOPS THE EXECUTION OF THE WOMAN CAUGHT IN ADULTERY.

The family were deeply committed Christians, with a passion for life and a profound understanding of redemption. While not ignoring the evil that was done, they insisted that grace got the last word. They told Billy that because they were Christians, they believed in second chances. They told him they believed God wasn’t done with him yet, and that he had a plan for Billy’s life. They became his surrogate family, the biggest advocates for his life, and the biggest obstacles to his execution. Over two decades (and 13 different execution dates) they were relentless. Through their prayers and persistence, they even got Mother Teresa involved. Not only was his execution stopped, but in an unprecedented move, the Georgia parole board allowed him to be released from prison.

Today, Billy Neal Moore is a pastor.

Every time he preaches, he talks about grace. With a fire in his bones, he proclaims: “No one is beyond redemption.” Grace drips from his lips. Not surprisingly, Billy is also committed to ending the death penalty, which he says: “is the state carrying out revenge—nothing more, nothing less.”

I aspire to be a champion for life on every issue. I believe every person is a child of God, made in the image of God and any time a life is cut short, we lose a part of God’s image in the world.

But here’s what I’ve found with the death penalty: it has succeeded not in spite of Christians, but because of us. Literally, on this issue, we have not been the champions of life. We have been the obstacles. It’s counter-intuitive, and tragic.

When you begin to question how the death penalty has survived, you realise the disturbing answer to that question is: Christians. The death penalty would not stand a chance in America if it weren’t for Christians. 86 per cent of executions have happened in the ’Bible belt’ – the southern states where Christians are most concentrated. The Bible belt is the death belt of America.

RACE AND RESOURCES

I’ve also found that talking about the death penalty it is a gateway to all sorts of other important topics – race, economic inequity, theology, justice, mass incarceration. It’s like peeling away the layers of an onion. We can’t divorce the death penalty from our history of race, white supremacy and the residue that slavery and colonialism has left us. The states that held on to slavery the longest are the same states that hold on to the death penalty.

Executions today are happening exactly where lynchings were happening in the United States 100 years ago. In 1950, African Americans were 10 per cent of our population, but they constituted 75 per cent of executions. 70 years later, African Americans account for 13 per cent of our population but make up almost half of death row (43 per cent) and over a third of our executions (34 per cent).

IF WE BELIEVE MURDERERS ARE BEYOND REDEMPTION, WE SHOULD RIP OUT HALF THE BIBLE, BECAUSE IT WAS WRITTEN BY THEM

When we think of the death penalty, we like to think that we are executing the worst of the worst, but the truth is, too often we are executing the poorest of the poor and people of colour. Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t get the death penalty. Charles Manson died of natural causes in prison. Harvard-educated Ted Kaczynski is still alive. More than the atrocity of the crime, what often determines who gets executed are arbitrary things like the resources, race and where the crime was committed.

And of course, the death penalty raises the massively important question of how much we trust the State with the irreversible power of life and death. There are over 196 people who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, who have now been exonerated after proving their innocence. These are just the people we know about. How many others might there be?

If you wrongfully sentence someone to life in prison, you can free them. But you can’t bring someone back from the dead. As Sister Helen Prejean often say: sometimes the question isn’t whether someone deserves to die, but whether we deserve to kill. Especially when we have a track record of getting it wrong.

DEADLY THEOLOGY

I was one of those pro-death-penalty Christians for much of my life. I had all the Bible verses to support my case, and I wielded them well. I’ve always been passionate, even when I’m wrong! But when I started to look at those Bible verses again, I changed my mind.

Now I want to poke a few holes in the theology of death.

In ancient Old Testament law, the death penalty was permitted. But capital murder wasn’t the only death-worthy crime. There were more than 30 others, including disrespecting your parents, various forms of sexual conduct, witchcraft and even working on the Sabbath. When it comes to disciplining our youth today, not many parents are ready to kill their kids for playing with a Ouija board or talking back. No one actually wants to bring the full death penalty back as recorded in the Old Testament.

There were over 40 strict requirements for an execution, which ensured they almost never happened. The rabbis used to say that if there was more than one execution in 70 years, something was wrong. A rabbinical friend pointed out the irony that Jews did away with the death penalty a long time ago, but Christians still misuse Hebrew scriptures to justify it. He laughed as he pointed out the obvious: “And you all have Jesus to reconcile this with. That makes it even more baffling.”

Some say God is for the death penalty. But think of the story of Cain and Abel, the inaugural murder in the Bible. God doesn’t kill Cain, his life is spared. Moses killed a man in the book of Exodus but God didn’t put him to death. David killed Uriah, yet his own life was spared. Saul of Tarsus was a murderer, but Saul became Paul, and the gospel of grace went forward. If we believe murderers are beyond redemption, we should rip out half the Bible, because it was written by them.

THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS

A recent poll in the United States showed that 95 per cent of Americans think Jesus would stand against the death penalty. The problem is we have to convince the Christians to take Jesus more seriously.

Jesus is the ultimate interrupter of violence. On the cross, he took on the powers of death, absorbing all the evil, sin and violence in the world. He put death on display, not in order to glorify it but to subvert it. As Colossians says: “Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” (2:15) Jesus is like water poured on the electric chair, short circuiting the whole system of retribution, sacrifice and death. Love wins. Mercy triumphs over judgement.

And we can’t forget Jesus’ own encounter the death penalty as he stops the execution of the woman caught in adultery (John 7-8). At the end of that story, Jesus says to her, “Where’d they all go?” The message is clear. The only one who has any right to throw a stone had absolutely no desire to do so. The closer we get to God, the less we want to throw stones at other people.

THE POWER OF FORGIVENESS

Mary Johnson is a hero of mine. On February 12, 1993, Johnson’s only son was murdered. He was only 20 years old. Devastated and filled with rage, she was paralysed with the anguish of it all. The perpetrator was 16-year-old Oshea Israel, who eventually received a 25-year sentence for murder.

But something spectacular, one might even venture to call miraculous, happened. Mary was reading a poem entitled Two Mothers, about two angelic figures meeting in heaven. As they meet, they can tell by the stars in each other’s crowns that they were both mothers on earth. And they can also tell by their blue-tinted halos that they have both known the deep sorrow and despair of losing their sons.

As they describe their boys to each other, the one mother realises that she is talking with Mary, the blessed mother of Jesus. Mary describes the cruel death of her son and how she would have gladly died in his place. The other falls to her knees, but Mary raises her back up, kisses her cheek, wipes away her tears, and says: “Tell me the name of the son you love so”.

The other mother says: “He was Judas Iscariot. I am his mother.”

When Mary read that poem she was moved, compelled, to
meet with Oshea, the man who killed her son, and eventually his mother…and the healing began. As she first met Oshea, she laid it all out there. “You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. You didn’t know my son and he didn’t know you…so we need to lay down
a foundation to get to know one another.” They talked for hours.

Oshea couldn’t believe Mary could forgive him. He asked for a hug. And they did. Mary knows the power of her story, and she knows how scandalous it seems to our unforgiving world. When he left the room, she says she cried in disbelief: “I’ve just hugged the man who killed my son.” But as she got up, she felt her soul begin to heal.

Years later, in March of 2010, Oshea was released after 17 years in prison. And Mary helped throw a welcome home party. In fact, they ended up living next door to each other in Minneapolis.

I’VE JUST HUGGED THE MAN WHO KILLED MY SON

As he returned home, Oshea said he was blessed to have “two moms” who now claim each other as sisters.. Mary went on to start an organisation called From Death to Life.

When I visited Minneapolis I stayed in the house where they all met, a holy place called the St Jane House, with photos of reconciliation and healing plastered all over the walls. Mary came over for dinner and explained that they have two support groups  – the mums whose kids were killed, and the mums whose kids have killed – and both groups meet together whenever they can. They know their healing is bound up together; they need each other.

As Mary hugged me, I thought to myself with profound awe: “These same courageous arms embraced the man who killed her son.” I felt like I had been hugged by an angel, with a blue-tinted halo.

Grace gets the last word.

Some participants in the criminal justice discussion focus on the fact that violent crime rates in the United States are unusually high compared to western Europe. In 2020, there were an estimated 22,000 homicides in the United States, or approximately 6.5 homicides for every 100,000 people. By contrast, the homicide rate that year was ranged from 1.4 in France to 0.5 in Italy. Likewise, the rates of other violent crimes in the United States were generally much higher than in those countries. And the combined arrest rate in the United States for these crimes is only about 10 percent. From statistics like these, some argue that what the United States needs is a tougher approach to crime control. 

Other participants in the criminal justice conversation focus on what has come to be called “mass incarceration” and, in particular, the racial disparity of the American prison population as compared to the population at large. The United States is the world’s largest jailer, accounting for approximately 19 percent of the world’s prisoners but only 4.25 percent of the world’s population. Even removing drug crimes from the calculus, our country has the highest incarceration rate among Western countries by a wide margin. And the percentage of Black people imprisoned in the United States is five times higher than that of White people.

These jarring statistics about the justice system’s input (crimes) and output (imprisonment) are certainly relevant to the conversation. More telling, in my view, are these statistics: 40 percent of murders in the United States go unsolved while, since 2000, 1,027 men and women have been exonerated of murders for which they were convicted. Thousands of guilty wander free while more than a thousand were wrongly imprisoned. This suggests that something in the American criminal justice system is broken.

But these statistics cannot tell us what is broken. To answer that question, an analysis of the design and operation of the features, procedures, actors, and laws that make up the system is required. We need an examination of the machinery, not merely the product, of the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system is, by definition, state-sponsored violence. Every criminal law, even a just one, is an authorization for the state to use physical force against an image-bearer if he or she fails to comply with the law’s mandate. Most Christians do not believe that the Bible either forbids or condemns such violence. It is expressly sanctioned by Scripture in several passages, the most notable of which is Romans 13. This means that the sight of the criminal justice system at work, even in entirely appropriate ways, will be often violent. And viewing physical force brought to bear on another human is upsetting. What is disturbing, however, is not always unjust. Though it might be. So once we understand how the system operates, we need a Christian ethic against which to judge the justice of the system.

Running throughout Scripture is the idea that justice is, most fundamentally, an issue of love. That which is loving is no less than that which is just. As professor Christopher Marshall, a leader in the restorative justice movement puts it, “Love requires justice, and justice expresses love, though love is more than justice.” For the Christian, love is an issue of the highest order. It is foundational to the Christian ethic. Love is—or should be—of utmost importance to Christians because it is of utmost importance to Christ. The implication of Jesus’s teaching is that everything about life turns on love (Matt. 22:37–40). And justice is no exception. 

Some have objected that all this discussion about justice—social justice generally and criminal justice in particular—distracts Christians from what really matters, namely, the gospel. “Just preach the gospel,” some say. But what is the gospel—the good news—if not a gracious promise and provision of justice? The best news you will ever hear is this promise from the one who sits on the throne of the universe: “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Peter encourages us to look forward to “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:13). As Christians have confessed for centuries, we “look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”

Anglican ethicist Oliver O’Donovan rightly observes, “It is the task of Christian eschatology to speak of the day when [divine] justice shall supersede all other justice.” Our eternal hope as Christians is found in the answer to Abraham’s rhetorical question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Gen. 18:25). Indeed, Christ posed—and answered—that same question in his parable of the persistent widow: “Will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily” (Luke 18:7–8).

Some might respond that while our ultimate hope is a just world to come under the only just King, we have no such promise in this present world. And that is true. We will not see perfect justice on this side of eternity. Earthly politics have a “provisional task of bearing witness to God’s justice” fully realized only in the eschaton, O’Donovan reminds us. The danger, however, is that our pessimism is overactive and our eschatology is under-realized.

I think this is a particular danger for Protestants of the Reformed variety. We rightly emphasize that Christ declares us just, but we tend to underemphasize that he is making us into people who live justly as well. We fail to see that we glorify the God who is just and who has declared us just when we, as his image bearers, do justly. As more and more justified people do justly, it makes for a more just, or at least less unjust, world. Our prayer even now is that God’s will for justice “be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). As a result, “social injustice must always be denounced, even if its ultimate abolition awaits Christ’s return.” And as we live justly in this life, we point to that day of ultimate justice in the life to come. “Our membership in the kingdom of God may be transcendent,” O’Donovan writes, “but it can be gestured towards in the way we do our earthly justice.” Every glimmer, however faint, of justice in this life is God’s kingdom breaking through, a reminder that cloaked in fog, just around the bend, perfect justice is on the march. One day soon, he will dwell with us (Rev. 21:3).

And all of that is true because of love. His love. For us.

This is a book about that love and what it means for the American criminal justice system. Crime is conflict. It is a product of a fallen world. God ordained government to address that conflict, and a criminal justice system is one facet of that conflict management enterprise gifted to us by God for our use until that day when conflict is no more. The question I set out to answer in this book is how to conform such a system to Scripture—which is to say, how to do criminal justice justly. In sum, my answer is that a criminal justice system marked by Christ’s love for accused and victim alike is, in a fallen world, a crucial element of what Augustine called “the tranquility of order.”

Much of the story of American criminal justice has been a story of “us versus them.” In a sense, that approach to criminal justice has intuitive appeal. Each criminal prosecution is, after all, the People versus the Defendant. It is the “versus,” however, that frames the problem. It is the “versus” that highlights the conflict that makes love for both victim and accused seem out of reach or, worse yet, unnecessary. We too often fall prey to thinking that the “versus” of criminal justice means that there is a “them,” an accused, a defendant, who is unentitled to our love. That conclusion—or, perhaps, simply an unchallenged assumption—is wrong. It is unbiblical. It is unloving. It is unjust. It is sin. The story of biblical criminal justice is a story of “we.” For the Christian, the defining slogan of the criminal justice system should not be “law and order” but “love your neighbor.”

Content taken from Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal by Matthew T. Martens. © 2023. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

September 13, 2023

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – Red Letter Christians unequivocally stands against all executions. We have, and will continue to, stand with advocates on the frontlines abolishing the death penalty. We stand with the advocates, organizations, and legal counsel on the ground in Oklahoma who are, in good faith, working to save the life of Anthony Sanchez, who is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, September 21, 2023, at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma. 

Red Letter Christians is opposed to the death penalty because of our belief in the inherent dignity of all human life. We also recognize that our justice system is deeply flawed and that capital punishment often means that “those without the capital get the punishment.”

The facts of each death penalty case do not sway our fervent opposition to state-sanctioned murder. We find ourselves well positioned to condemn the same state-sanctioned violence that killed our Savior, Jesus Christ, because the death penalty has succeeded in America not in spite of Christians, but because of Christians. It is our mission to right this historic wrong and forge a movement of Christians centered on Jesus and justice.

There have been disagreements among our partners on the ground in Oklahoma regarding Anthony’s innocence, which he maintains (listen to Anthony’s voice memo).

Here at Red Letter Christians, we strive to harmonize but not homogenize. We have stood shoulder to shoulder with dedicated partners in the streets and in the pews. We have also disagreed with partners on issues close to our hearts and we’ve chosen to love them and do God’s work with them where we can. We have no expectation that our partners will always agree with us or each other. In fact, we intentionally seek to elevate diverse – sometimes uncomfortable – perspectives for our “co-conspirators” to consider. 

God desires to heal the wounds of sin. God wants justice. God cares deeply for the unimaginable pain of those who lost their loved one violently and senselessly. Yet, God’s grace is bigger than sin. 

Despite the different approaches our partners have taken recently in Oklahoma, we remain united in our deep care for Anthony Sanchez and in our belief that he should not be put to death. We invite you to join us standing against Anthony’s execution.

Please sign this petition to add the request to Governor Stitt to grant a 60 day reprieve so that Anthony Sanchez’s brand new legal team has time to review newly uncovered evidence in the case.

The girls, who were then twelve and eighteen, had not been to the prison in a long time, but I could see flutters of memory every now and then as we signed the book, passed through the metal detector, and were frisked. When we finally made it through the second door inside Unit 2, Cecil was standing inside the visiting room, waiting. I thought his face might split in two, his smile was so wide. He rushed us all in hearty hugs and stood back to admire the girls. His pride in them was so evident I could tell he felt ownership in their raising. And that is true. He set an example, like remembering every one of our birthdays—every time—with personal homemade cards, and his ability to laugh and keep a heart full of joy in the face of a hard existence. He shaped their thinking in ways none of us realized, increased their compassion, and caused them to notice injustice in a way no book or lecture ever could have.

There were several other prisoners visiting at that time, so we sat in a corner where we’d never landed before, where rows of chairs faced each other a few feet apart. Cecil didn’t have time to bother with eating the popcorn or pie; he could not stop looking from one of us to the next and back around and laughing and saying, “I cannot believe this!” 

The buttery smell eventually got the best of me; I opened the bag of popcorn, and we started eating. He peppered the girls with questions about school, their summers, and when Anne Grace would leave for college. One of us suggested playing UNO, so Alan grabbed the deck of cards from the nearby bookshelf. UNO is a competitive game that requires you to disregard the feelings of the person sitting next to you, even if you might normally be a more compassionate player. Soon, Cecil was slapping down “Draw 4” cards with relish, and each time someone made a wicked play, he would laugh with his whole body. It really is a game you can’t be nice in, and if you want to win, you must be actively merciless. So, when the girls started griping at each other about certain moves, Cecil would laugh all the more.

As the days toward his execution ticked away, Alan and I were not only wrenching over Cecil’s impending loss of life, but the related fallout: the pain his wife, daughter, and grandchildren, his brother, and our daughters had, too. We wondered how the victims’ families must have been feeling. I sure hoped someone else was tending to them. They must have believed the person responsible for their pain was about to die, and one assumes they were glad for that, even after all these years. As for us, it was way too late to ask for a do-over—if we had known at the beginning what we knew at this point, would we have continued with the friendship? We had put the girls smack in the middle of this bizarre, painful thing. “I remember knowing it was going to be soon,” Anne Grace said of the execution date. “But I didn’t think it would actually happen.”

That family visit turned out to be the last time Anne Grace and Allie saw Cecil, which my husband, Alan, and I suspected at the time but had not said out loud. “I realized I wish I’d gone more. I would’ve talked to him more,” Anne Grace said recently, her sobbing taking her over for a moment. I asked her if she wished she had not been dragged into it at all, not been connected to this eye-opening sadness. I had wondered this for years but feared the answer too much. “No,” she says, struggling through tears. Knowing what she knows has “made it harder,” she said, and has given her a maturity she didn’t really want. This is the kind of pain that can happen when we love someone up close, when we get into their lives and they bring us into theirs, when we show up for one another. The suffering and heartbreak are part of the risk when we reach out to make friends into loved ones, and when we are part of a community. It sure is rotten how that works.

Excerpted from “He Called Me Sister: A True Story of Finding Humanity on Death Row” by Suzanne Craig Robertson (Morehouse Publishing, 2023). Reprinted with permission.

Christian schools are abundant, and Tennessee is often called the “buckle” of the Bible belt.  Tennessee is the home of Elvis, and other legends like Dolly Parton, but Nashville is also the hub of Christian music, and pretty much all things Christian. Tennessee is where I started my own faith journey, dedicating my life to Jesus in middle school, trading in all my “secular” music for the Christian counterparts, most of which were produced in Nashville. Tennessee is where I began to have not just my theology formed, but also my politics and priorities. I grew up with guns. I grew up supporting the death penalty, which Tennessee still uses, even the electric chair.

It was only years later that, as Jesus said, I had “eyes to see” the holes in my own theology. We called ourselves “pro-life” – but we were pro-guns, pro-death-penalty, and pro-military. We had narrowly defined what it meant to be pro-life to one issue – abortion. Even today, many of my fellow evangelical Christians act as if life begins at conception and ends at birth. One of the safest places in Tennessee is the womb.

Guns are now the leading cause of death among Tennessee children and teens, and that is true throughout the country. More kids are dying from guns than from car accidents or cancer. We’re losing 120 lives a day… 40,000 per year – and many of those are kids. Mass shootings like the one at Covenant School and Sandy Hook and Uvalde are absolutely horrifying… but they also make up less than 2% of the overall gun deaths in America. Gun violence is a public health crisis – in Tennessee and in the US. In my lifetime of 47 years, we’ve lost more lives to guns than all the casualties of all of America’s wars combined. That’s why anyone who says they are pro-life can’t ignore gun violence.  Every one of the people killed at Covenant School is a child of God, made in the image of God.  And so are the 120 people killed every day in America.

In an average year, 1,385 people die by guns in Tennessee. The rate of gun homicide increased 110% in the last decade… as Tennessee has refused to pass life-saving gun safety laws.  Governor Bill Lee signed permitless carry into law against the advice of law enforcement experts.  And now the legislature is moving a bill to lower the age of permitless carry from 21 to 18 – which means teenagers who can’t buy a beer or rent a car will be allowed to carry loaded handguns in public.  

There are folks who will say that we shouldn’t talk about gun laws after a mass shooting, but that seems sort of like saying we shouldn’t talk about train safety after a train wreck. This is exactly when we need to talk about laws that will keep our kids safer.  

Think about cars. They aren’t designed to kill, but they can be deadly. So, we’ve done all sorts of things to try to protect people from harm. In order to drive, you have to show that you know how to drive. You have to pass a test, and get a license. We have traffic laws, and speed limits.  We’ve added airbags, and require seat belts.  If you abuse your right to drive, you can lose your license. All of this is to try to keep people safe.  

We can’t save every life…but we can save some. Even those who claim that new laws won’t make a difference know better. After all, many of the same folks against regulating guns are working hard to change laws on abortion. The fact is “well-regulated” was written into the Constitution for a reason.

It was Dr. King who said, “A law cannot make a man love me but it can make it harder for him to lynch me.”  We can make it harder to kill, and right now we are making it really easy.

The shooter legally purchased multiple assault rifles, the weapons of choice for mass shooters.  They are designed for one purpose – to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible.  And that’s what they keep getting used for, over and over. Sandy Hook. Aurora. Las Vegas. Parkland. San Bernardino. Orlando. Nashville. They all had one thing in common – assault rifles.  

Every country in the world has people who want to do harm, people who are violent, racist, filled with hate…but this is where the US stands alone among our peer nations – our access to guns.  It has become a form of idolatry. And as a person of faith, I don’t use that word lightly.  

Over the past few years, a slew of politicians have created Christmas photos of their families posing with assault rifles in front of their Christmas tree. One of those is Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles, whose district includes Covenant Church and school. It is sickening. It is idolatry.

My friend Andy Crouch says this about idols: “All idols begin by offering great things for a very small price. All idols then fail, more and more consistently, to deliver on their original promises, while ratcheting up their demands.”  

Idols are things we put our trust in. They are not God, but we treat them like they are.  We hold them with a sacred reverence that should only be given to God. Idols are things we are willing to die for, kill for, and sacrifice our children for. 

As a devoted Christian, I am convinced that the gun and the cross give us two very different versions of power. One is about being ready to die. The other is about being ready to kill. There comes a point where we cannot serve two masters. We cannot love our enemies as Christ commands, and simultaneously prepare to kill them. 

As the early Christians said: “For Christ we can die, but we cannot kill.” We must choose between the Gospel of Christ and the message of the NRA. We must also decide if we are going to protect children, or guns. Isn’t that part of what it means to be “pro-life”? Imagine if every Christian in America took the Sermon on the Mount as seriously as gun owners take the Second Amendment.  

This Sunday, one week after the Nashville shooting, is Palm Sunday and a week later is Easter. So, this Sunday is the beginning of what Christians around the world call “Holy Week.” The following Friday is when we remember the violent death of Jesus on the cross – and, ironically, we call it “Good Friday.” At the heart of the Christian faith is a Savior who suffered tremendous violence, who put death on display…in order to subvert death with love, and forgiveness, and an empty tomb. That should change everything for us. Having a victim of violence who died with love on his lips should radically reorient us. It should make us all the more compassionate toward the victims of violence. It should make us the enemies of death and violence and hatred and execution.

I hope and I pray that those of us who worship the “Prince of Peace” will become the biggest champions of life. It was Christ who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.” I’d love to see my fellow Christians not just offer thoughts and prayers but put feet on those prayers and change policies. There’s that beautiful verse in James that says, “Faith without works is dead.”  Let’s do it… let’s choose to protect children instead of guns. 

In the name of Jesus… and in the names of the six people who lost their lives this week in Nashville.  

Death Penalty Action, in conjunction with Red Letter Christians and The Wonder Brothers, has been working for over a year to fund and produce a documentary series about the people impacted by the death penalty and those fighting to abolish it. We are creating eight compelling mini-documentaries, each one focusing on the voices of experience. The first four episodes have been released and can be viewed here. The fourth video is shared below.

The next round of filming started on March 1 in Texas, so it is not too late to become a sponsor. To support this project, visit the website to learn more and how you can help with this crowd-funded effort.

EVENT OPPORTUNITY! You can schedule any of the people featured in these videos to come to your school, faith community or civic group by using this form.

Herman Lindsey leads Witness to Innocence (bio here), an important organization in the movement to stop executions and end the death penalty, from the unusual platform of having been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. Herman spent three years on Florida’s death row for a crime he had nothing to do with. In this brief film, Herman shares the traumatic impacts on him and those like him, and their families, and what we must do to stop such from happening again.

Support Herman through his GoFundMe page.

Death Penalty Action, in conjunction with Red Letter Christians and The Wonder Brothers, has been working for over a year to fund and produce a documentary series about the people impacted by the death penalty and those fighting to abolish it. We are creating eight compelling mini-documentaries, each one focusing on the voices of experience. The first four episodes have been released and can be viewed here. The third video is shared below.

The next round of filming started on March 1 in Texas, so it is not too late to become a sponsor. To support this project, visit the website to learn more and how you can help with this crowd-funded effort.

EVENT OPPORTUNITY! You can schedule any of the people featured in these videos to come to your school, faith community or civic group by using this form.

Ron McAndrew works to stop executions and end the death penalty, and he does so from the unusual platform of having carried out executions in the name of the people of Florida. In this brief film, Ron shares how his role as an executioner shaped his life and turned him from a staunch advocate for executions to a leading voice against the death penalty. Ron is active in the Catholic Church and serves on the Advisory Committee for Death Penalty Action. He is also active with Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. Ron no longer travels, but he may at times be available to share his powerful story virtually.

Support Ron and others through this GoFundMe page.

Death Penalty Action, in conjunction with Red Letter Christians and The Wonder Brothers, has been working for over a year to fund and produce a documentary series about the people impacted by the death penalty and those fighting to abolish it. We are creating eight compelling mini-documentaries, each one focusing on the voices of experience. The first four episodes have been released and can be viewed here. The second video is shared below.

The next round of filming started on March 1 in Texas, so it is not too late to become a sponsor. To support this project visit the website to learn more and how you can help with this crowd-funded effort.

EVENT OPPORTUNITY! You can schedule any of the people featured in these videos to come to your school, faith community or civic group by using this form.

Derrick Jamison works to stop executions and end the death penalty, and he does so from the unusual platform of having been wrongly sentenced to death for a crime he had nothing to do with. In this brief film, Derrick shares about how twenty years on Ohio’s death row impacted him and his work to stop executions for both the innocent and the guilty. Derrick is a member of Witness to Innocence (bio here), an organization comprised of exonerated death row survivors and their families. He is also an Advisory Committee member of Death Penalty Action and active with Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Ohioans to Stop Executions, and other organizations.

Support Derrick through his GoFundMe page.