Who Would Jesus Execute? (Part One)
Inside This Episode
Those who argue in favor of the death penalty often emphasize capital punishment as a means of justice for victims and their families. But what if those impacted by the crimes in question desire a different kind of justice? Rev. Sharon Risher, daughter of one of the nine churchgoers slain in the 2015 hate crime at Emanuel AME Church, is one of those people. In part one of this series, we hear Sharon’s reasons for forgiving her mother’s killer, even though he’s shown no remorse for his heinous crime. We also hear from Christian anti-death penalty activist Shane Claiborne, who offers a theological exploration of redemption.
Want to share your thoughts? Send an email to [email protected]!
Read Sharon’s book: “For Such a Time as This: Hope and Forgiveness after the Charleston Massacre”
Connect with Shane: http://executinggrace.com/
Transcript
Eric Huffman: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Maybe God podcast. I'm your host, Eric Huffman. Some of you may have found us recently through our partnership with the popular online community, Christians Who Curse Sometimes. Now, we're all huge fans of their work, and I encourage you all to look them up. You can find them on Instagram and other places. Their Instagram handle is @christianswhocursesometimes
Whether you're brand new to Maybe God or a longtime listener, I'm just thrilled to have you here with us today. Our goal at Maybe God is to investigate people's most intimidating faith questions through powerful storytelling. And to that end, we love engaging with all of you, our listeners.
So if what you hear today stirs anything up in you, just don't hesitate to share those thoughts with our team. Truly, this means the world to us. And you might just end up being featured in a future episode. You can connect with us via direct message on Instagram. Our handle is @maybegodpod, or you can always shoot us an email to [email protected].
Today's episode is the first of a two-part series on the death penalty. It's a series that we've been working on for quite some time now. So let's get right to it. Here's part one of Who Would Jesus Execute?.
Julie Mirlicourtois: On this episode of Maybe God, her mother was killed in the most publicized hate crime in recent U.S. history, the 2015 massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Sharon Risher: As a Black woman living in America, my mother's life, you know, trauma, violence, was thrust upon her in her early life. And here we go again.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, she was an innocent child when that happened to her. She was an innocent church staff worker when that happened to her.
Sharon Risher: Yes.
Julie Mirlicourtois: Sharon Risher shares little-known details about her mother's life and death, and why she decided, after months of anger, to forgive her mother's killer.
Sharon Risher: I started feeling sorry for him because I started to see him as a person. God said, Came way I can forgive you and have forgiven you for craziness, see, he get to get the same thing. And I really started to take that to heart and say, Wait a minute, you can't pick and choose for God.
Julie Mirlicourtois: Plus, he's one of the leading Christian voices against the death penalty.
We have an executed Savior at the center of everything, right? So, you know, I think how we interpret what Jesus did on the cross is absolutely central to our faith. And if we get that wrong, we get a lot of other things wrong, too.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Julie Mirlicourtois: Why activist and author Shane Claiborne believes pro-life Christians shouldn't stand for the death penalty. That's all today on Maybe God.
[00:02:46] <music>
Eric Huffman: You're listening to Maybe God. I'm Eric Huffman. Well, folks, it's an election year. You know what that means. Politics everywhere. I know it sounds extremely depressing. But I also think there might be a silver lining here. Because amidst all of our disagreements, there's one thing on which almost everyone agrees: human life is sacred.
Whenever we argue about issues like health care, abortion, gun control, or even Gaza, the heart of the matter is always the sanctity of life. We may disagree about the details, but most people, conservatives and liberals alike, are fundamentally pro-life.
What I mean is that almost everyone I know shares the same core conviction that there's something intrinsically sacred about each and every human being. And I think that's worth lifting up and celebrating, especially when talking about something as difficult and divisive as the death penalty.
Those who argue in favor of the death penalty often emphasize capital punishment as a means of justice for victims and their families. But what if those impacted by the crimes in question desire a different kind of justice?
Reverend Sharon Risher is one of those people. Sharon was raised in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Charleston, South Carolina.
Sharon Risher: I was born in 1958, so of course I was born in the midst of, you know, civil rights and still segregation, and a part of that was to be biracial. Biracial in the color of my skin but Black in my upbringing, because my mother is Black. My sisters and brothers... so I grew up identifying as Black. Went to public elementary school, which was right across the street from Emanuel Church is where I went to elementary school.
I didn't grow up thinking I was poor or anything, but of course we didn't have a lot of money. But I don't ever remember being hungry. My stepdad who raised me, you know, hard workers. Daddy was a brick mason and then he started to be a long Sherman and mama got the job with the city and we were able to move into bigger quarters and, you know, have a little bit more things. We grew up on the east side of Charleston, and we were able to roam that city and play in the museums. I mean, it wasn't all idyllic, but it was.
Eric Huffman: It sounds idyllic in many ways. Your mother sounds like a beautiful woman, a beautiful person to be raised by. Were you her first child and oldest child?
Sharon Risher: I was. The circumstances behind my birth is not a good story. It was a story that I really didn't learn until I was 56 years old. It was a secret that my mother held. She was raped while working, trying to make extra money. They were Caucasian men that did this. I was a result of that, which the story I was told all my life was different.
And then I had to realize too a 14-year-old, having a baby in 1958 in Charleston, South Carolina, where Black people were the housekeepers and the cooks and the maids.
Eric Huffman: How did you first react when...? Was it your mother that told you the story of what really happened?
Sharon Risher: Yes.
Eric Huffman: How did you react?
Sharon Risher: It was a long pregnant pause, and she said, "I thought I would take this to my grave." And I'm telling you, I didn't talk to my moms for a couple of days, almost a week. And that was not like us.
Eric Huffman: Were you upset with her? Were you mad at her?
Sharon Risher: I wasn't mad. I just didn't understand why she would never have said that to me. It was after my mother died, her best friend, Ms. Agnes, said, "Sharon, your mama didn't tell you about that because that was her burden to carry and not yours."
Eric Huffman: Wow. What did that mean to you? How would it have been a burden for you to have known that, do you think, from your mother's perspective?
Sharon Risher: You know, with her being so young, all of that turmoil and all of that had to come onto me. So she figured for me to carry that knowing that I was a product of rape and question everything about myself and you know. So she carried that. She carried that so I could have an opportunity to do the things that she didn't even dream that I would be able to accomplish. And she wanted to give me that chance for what it was worth, not to have to worry about that, too.
Eric Huffman: Earlier you mentioned that that was not the story you had been told about.
Sharon Risher: No. I had been told she had met an 18-year-old worker on one of the boats that came through Charleston, and he stayed for a while, and they met. She got pregnant.
Eric Huffman: Got it.
Sharon Risher: He wanted to take her to New York because that's where his family was from. He was Puerto Rican. And my grandmother, my mother was her only child, and she was like, "No, she's not doing that." So that was the story that I was told because of my light skin, my long hair, and all of these things, that that made sense. You know?
Eric Huffman: She gave you a narrative to survive as best that she thought you could. I hope now you've been able to sort of process that and make some sense of it. I'm sure there was...
Sharon Risher: And you know what I have? All that it does is make me grieve for her more because of the love she had for me. She could have aborted me. She didn't. 14 years old in the segregated South with a biracial child.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Sharon Risher: Yeah.
Eric Huffman: Well, Reverend Sharon, I'm sorry to put you through telling that story again and reliving it, but it's such a blessing to so many to hear a testimony like yours.
Sharon Risher: You know, God has been taking care of us a long time. Even during the times we weren't paying attention, God was like, I'm going to have to help these people right here because they need Me, and I know there is more than a mustard seed of faith in them.
Eric Huffman: Religion was always central to Sharon's childhood, even before she and her family began attending Emanuel Church in her teenage years. Sharon left for college at 18 and married her first love, Howard, three years later. Sharon and Howard soon became parents to two children and the stress of being young parents began to take its toll. They both fell into deep drug addiction and eventually, they divorced.
In the midst of her grief, Sharon visited a small Black Presbyterian church where she rediscovered her childhood enthusiasm for God. She began singing at the church, then teaching. Before she knew it, she had enrolled in seminary. At age 49, Sharon graduated with a master's in theology and began working as a hospital chaplain.
So you were working as a chaplain, if I understand it, in 2015 when everything changed, the day your life and many other lives were changed. June the 17th of 2015. Again, I'm sorry to walk you through it. I just think it's so important for people to hear your story. Just tell us where you were and how you heard the news that day.
Sharon Risher: I was at work. There was an older gentleman that had died. I was the chaplain on call. I did the ER. I handled death calls, whatever it was. I was with the family. For some reason, I did not have the paperwork I needed the family to fill out.
Usually, I never not have my paperwork. But anyway, I excused myself. I said, "Excuse me, I've got to go get this paperwork. I will be right back." So I had had my phone plugged up charging in my office. I checked my phone and realized I had several missed calls from my daughter. And I'm like, "What? I got to get out of here? What? What?"
In my office, you couldn't get a good signal. So I ran into our little conference room and got in that corner that I know I could get a signal with and call my daughter. It's like, "What's going on?" "Ma, my nephew been calling and said something happened at the church, and they don't know what's going on." And I'm like, "What church you talking about?" She's like, "Granny's church, Mama." I'm like, "Asia, let me call and see what's going on." Started making phone calls. Well, the first call was to my mama.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Sharon Risher: She didn't know how to get her voice messages from her cell phone, didn't want to learn. So if you called her on her cell phone, if she didn't answer, you just out of luck. Then I called my nephew. "Auntie, something going down in the city and we don't know what's going on." They're saying on the news it's been some kind of shooting or something. We don't know." So all of this is happening in Charleston and I'm in Dallas.
Eric Huffman: How long did it take for you to actually find out what was going on?
Sharon Risher: It was 3.30 central time that I got an actual phone call.
Eric Huffman: In the middle of the night?
Sharon Risher: Yes. I'd fallen asleep on the couch with the doll on my lap. And then I got the phone call.
Eric Huffman: Who was it? You know what? I don't even remember who. It was a lady she was chaplain. She confirmed what I knew in my gut that Ethel Lance is confirmed dead.
[00:14:28] <music>
[News clips about the shooting]
Woman: Breaking news in that deadly church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. A young man walked in, took a seat, and waited for up to an hour. And then police say Dylann Roof stood up and started shooting. In the end, there were nine dead, one injured.
Man: Nine Black worshipers were killed in that attack. Roof's goal was to start a race war.
Woman: A stunning act of mass murder in a predominantly African-American house of worship.
[00:14:50] <music>
Eric Huffman: The 21-year-old white supremacist drove 250 miles away from the scene of the crime, resulting in a 13-hour manhunt. Police received a tip of Roof's whereabouts and apprehended him at a traffic stop.
Woman: Dylann Roof has been caught in North Carolina.
Man: That awful person who would go into a place of worship when people were praying and kill them is now in custody, where he will always remain.
Eric Huffman: In his chilling, recorded confession to police, Dylann Roof laughed as he detailed how he walked into that particular church on a mission to kill Black people.
Dylann Roof: I did it.
Man: You did what? I mean, did you shoot them?
Dylann Roof: Yes, I killed them.
Eric Huffman: Sharon's mother, Ethel Lance, had recently begun working at Emmanuel in order to help fund her granddaughter's education. Every Wednesday evening, Ethel was responsible for opening the church doors and preparing the space for Bible study. So that was his first time actually going in the doors of the church?
Sharon Risher: In the doors of the church, yes.
Eric Huffman: And he sat through the Bible study and then at some point in the evening just began-
Sharon Risher: When it was over, they were all standing in a circle with their eyes closed and their heads bowed and he pulled out his gun. That's what happened. Mm-hmm. Yeah
Eric Huffman: And your mother-
Sharon Risher: One thing out of all of that, my mother died in a place that she loved in a place that was holy ground to her. And whatever people think about heaven and hell and who goes and whatever I knew that Jesus was waiting and with His arms open for my mom.
Eric Huffman: So the timeline of those first couple days, it all moved really quickly. And I can only imagine in your world it moved extremely quickly. You lost your mother, but not just your mother either. There were others that were taken.
Sharon Risher: Yeah, two cousins. Cousin Susie was the oldest lady. She was 87. And then my distant cousin Tywanza, he was only 26. And then Myra Thompson, who got killed also, was somebody I grew up with in Charleston, playing softball and running track with the recreational center that we all... you know, that's what we did in the summers.
So Myra was that. Growing up with her, we went to the same high school and all of these things. My mom started going to that church when I was in the 10th grade, and that was 1974.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, lots of memories.
Sharon Risher: Right. So Emanuel's definitely more part of my life than not.
Eric Huffman: Sure, sure. Now in the 48 hours between hearing the news, being devastated, 48 hours later, Dylann Roof had been arrested, was being arraigned, and you were watching this happen. It was televised. So you were watching this happen from Dallas, is that right?
Sharon Risher: Yes.
Man: Mr. Roof, you're charged with nine counts of murder and one count of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.
Sharon Risher: I was in my bedroom mixing around with the TV on, because you know, during those first couple of days I was in a fog. I hadn't had a shower. I was just crazy. And I heard my sister's voice. And I went into the living room and there she was talking about, I forgive you. I screamed like the scream when the chaplain told me my mama had died. The whole of my heart could not understand that.
Woman: You've hurt me. You've hurt a lot of people but God forgive you. And I forgive you.
Eric Huffman: Forgiveness sounds like the right thing. It sounds like a nice thing. Objectively, it just seems like an ideal response. Why did that upset you so much? I think I understand it, but I just...
Sharon Risher: Because, no, who was trying to forgive him? I mean, it just forgives you... Forgiveness for me, and in that context, that was some deep-faith stuff right there. I'm not ready to go there. I'm asking God now, how in the hell all of this happened? Forgiveness is not anything in my brain, because I'm still in a fog.
Eric Huffman: How did you feel about Dylann Roof at that particular moment? As your sister is saying, she forgave him, how did you feel in your heart toward him?
Sharon Risher: If I could have had some instrument that would puff smoke and he would disappear. At that time, that's what I thought I would do to him. He would just vaporize and it would be no more. We wouldn't have to see any more pictures, that dead eyes on the TV, and all the articles about him every time he turned around.
Eric Huffman: I mean, I can't imagine it. No one can until you're in the position you were in. But I can certainly empathize with the feeling of wanting to vaporize Dylann Roof, the killer of my mother and other close friends and family and several others. The pastor of the Emanuel Church was killed as well.
Sharon Risher: Reverend Clementa, yeah.
Eric Huffman: That's right. At least one other reverend, if I remember, was...
Sharon Risher: Oh, a couple. There was Reverend Depayne Middleton-Doctor, and then there was Reverend Simmons, Daniel Simmons, and then there was Reverend Sharonda Coleman.
Eric Huffman: That's right.
Sharon Risher: So almost a whole ministry staff of the church.
Eric Huffman: High school track teacher, I think, as well, was one of the victims.
Sharon Risher: Yeah, she was a reverend.
Eric Huffman: Was she?
Sharon Risher: She was a licensed minister. Sharonda Coleman.
Eric Huffman: So I can understand the instinct and impulse to just want to punish him or just do away with him. And I think that's the impulse that drives the capital punishment movement in our culture is it's not necessarily always just an evil thought. It's sometimes one that comes from a desire for justice, right? And I think it's natural to feel that way. Do you think that part of your bitterness that you felt toward Dylann Roof was further exacerbated or complicated by what you had just learned pretty much about your own conception and how...
Sharon Risher: Tell me about White men. As a Black woman living in America, my mother's life, you know, trauma, violence was thrust upon her in her early life. And here we go again.
Eric Huffman: She was an innocent child when that happened to her. She was an innocent church staff worker when that happened to her.
Sharon Risher: 70-year-old spy, loved to go to the casino with usher board number three and grandchildren. Ethel was grooving. She was at a space in her life where things weren't that bad.
Eric Huffman: Tell me how your heart began to change in terms of your feelings about what should happen to Dylann Roof.
Sharon Risher: See, what got me is I started feeling sorry for him because I started to see him as a person. God said, This little boy, he's a person. And the same way I can forgive you and have forgiven you for craziness, see, he get to get the same thing. And I really started to take that to heart and say, Wait a minute, you can't pick and choose for God.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Sharon Risher: He's a person. And that was like, wow. It was like, Whoa. Oh, man.
Eric Huffman: It's inconvenient, right? Because it doesn't fit with how we want to feel.
Sharon Risher: Exactly.
Eric Huffman: I remember following the story from a distance and seeing Dylann Roof on the news and feeling real, gosh, hatred is a strong word, but I think I felt hatred for him. Just the look on his face, the smugness.
Sharon Risher: Right, those deadpan eyes he had and that bald haircut. I would see that picture and it was like evil. It was like laser ray eyes every time I saw his picture, you know, and them cart marvel thing when the eyes knew you. Oh my God.
Eric Huffman: It seems like some people make forgiveness harder than others and that was... I can only imagine that must have been a hard case.
Sharon Risher: I have met so many people in Ubers and my travels and just people that say, I don't know how you're able to do this because I will never ever forgive him. And I tell people, you know what, that's your choice And I'm not here to make you change your mind. I'm just telling you what I went through, how this came for me.
We learned too that the forgiveness is not about that person. And then you can't forgive unless you have a relationship with God and be authentic about what you say you're doing. There's got to be some action behind some things.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, interesting. Let's talk about that for just a second because I think it's important. When we say forgive, average people hear forgiveness and they just think, well, it's a feeling or it's something that just anyone can do if you just feel the right way or make a simple choice.
Sharon Risher: Forgiveness is hard.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. What is forgiveness?
Sharon Risher: Forgiveness is I'm gonna give you a pass because I believe in Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ would want me to forgive you like He has forgiven me.
Eric Huffman: There it is.
Sharon Risher: Forgiveness means I won't forget, but it's not gonna affect my whole life anymore and I'm gonna go on with my life the best way I have with the resources God has allowed me to have and go on with my life. That's what forgiveness is. And it's hard.
Eric Huffman: Have you ever had a chance to express forgiveness directly to Dylann Roof?
Sharon Risher: You know, people have asked me that. I have given Dylann Roof as much as I can give him. I don't have to look in his eyes. I don't want to look in. I have given you, Dylann Roof, the best I can give you because of my faith. That's all I'm owed to you. I don't need to look at you. I don't want to look at you.
Eric Huffman: I think that's the power of forgiveness, Reverend. I think that's what you're describing. A lot of people say, well, how do I forgive someone who's done this horrible thing to me? Or how do I forgive someone who's actually already passed away and they're dead and I'm still carrying this around?
The misunderstanding is you have to express that forgiveness to the one who hurt you. And that's not the case. You can forgive them without them knowing. I think that's a key that could unlock a lot for a lot of people if we were to understand that. Forgiveness is letting go of the burden, giving it to Jesus, and not letting them hold power over you anymore, whether they ever know about it or not.
Sharon Risher: Exactly. Exactly.
Eric Huffman: Seven years ago, Dylann Roof became the first person in U.S. history to be sentenced to death for federal hate crimes. Alongside his death sentence, Dylann also faces nine consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole in the state of South Carolina. He now awaits execution at the Federal Correctional Institution in Indiana.
Meanwhile, to the surprise of many, Sharon has become an outspoken advocate against the death penalty, serving on the board of a non-profit called Death Penalty Action that's working to stop executions. Sharon is also writing op-eds for the likes of the New York Times and USA Today. In all of her work, Sharon's message is clear: the death penalty does not and cannot offer healing or hope to anyone.
Objectively speaking, you would seem to be the least likely spokeswoman for abolishing the death penalty. You would, in my mind, be a pretty good candidate for the other side, objectively, because you had so much taken from you.
Sharon Risher: Right.
Eric Huffman: Are you here today saying that you wish Dylann Roof and all like him were not sitting on death row and would never be executed? Is that where your heart is today?
Sharon Risher: Yeah, that's where my heart lies.
Eric Huffman: Why?
Sharon Risher: Our judicial system has life without parole. That's punishment. A person doesn't have to die because of something that they did. The only judge of that is God. So, if punishment is what you seek, fine, because in my understanding, no matter what a person do, no matter what a person does, we might not understand, might be horrible, horrendous, how could a person... But that's not for us, I believe. That comes from a higher place in that judgment.
Eric Huffman: Do you feel as though he's beyond redemption?
Sharon Risher: No, not at all. Let me tell you, if Dylann Roof wake up one night in Jesus and see, I would always say that those nine angels gonna have Bible study with him every night. Every night he gonna dream and lay there because they gonna just wear him out with the Bible study.
One day, maybe he can ask God to forgive him and call on the name of Jesus, and I will be happy for him as a person of faith that believe in the same God you believe in. Do I want you out of jail? No. But I'm happy for anybody that accepts Jesus Christ.
Eric Huffman: Will you be happy, truly happy, if let's say you get there first, you're chilling in heaven, enjoying your palace and streets of gold, and walk in Dylann Roof?
Sharon Risher: You know what? I don't have to talk to Dylann Roof. We're in heaven and we can do what we want to do. So I can see Dylann Roof and go around the other way. How about that?
Eric Huffman: That's the funniest thing ever.
Sharon Risher: I don't have to put myself and be like, Ooh." You know, like one of them old boyfriends, and be like, Ooh, let me go around this way.
Eric Huffman: He has his own palace. You can have your own palace.
Sharon Risher: I ain't going down that street. Mm-mm.
Eric Huffman: Reverend Sharon. That's an all-time answer right there. Happy you're here, but be over there here.
Sharon Risher: Yeah, exactly. All right then, you made it. God sure did give you a whole lot of grace.
Eric Huffman: Oh, I love it. That's the joy we have to hope in, right, it's just that one day maybe we'll find out that God's love is bigger than ours and that it's true what the Word of God says, that you can't sin your way out of His grace.
Sharon Risher: Right.
[00:31:51] <music>
Shane Claiborne: My friend Sharon Risher, she talks about the process of forgiveness. And it wasn't just a miracle that God did in a moment, but how important it was for her not to forgive and forget, as the cliché goes, but to remember what He did, but also to realize that more killing only makes monsters out of us. And she says, this is not just about who Dylann Roof is but it's who Sharon Risher is. And I'm not going to allow him to make me hate and to make me call for violence to kill him or else I end up looking a lot more like him than like Jesus.
The man who introduced us to Sharon Risher is activist and author Shane Claiborne. He's the co-founder of a group called the Red Letter Christians, and he wrote the best-selling book called Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It's Killing Us.
If you've been part of the Maybe God community for some time now, you probably have listened to or watched our full interview with Shane from a few months back. I encourage you to listen to it again in light of Sharon's story. Has Dylann Roof... has he shown any remorse or offered any sort of nice sentiments to the family members of the victims?
Shane Claiborne: I've reached out to him. I believe that at this point he is unrepentant and has not shown any signs of remorse. In fact, he almost laughed it off, and he said, "The people were so nice in Emanuel AME Church that he considered not killing them." I mean, the more you listen to him, the more sick I got in my stomach. And yet, you know, at the end of the day, I think Dylann Roof is eminently dangerous, and people need to be protected from him. We have ways of protecting people from Him without ending his life.
Ending His life, it robs Him of even the possibility of redemption, the possibility of five years from now, ten years from now of realizing that he's more than the worst thing that he ever did. I want to believe that Jesus' grace is bigger than Dylann Roof's hatred and that even someone that's done something as atrocious and evil as Dylann Roof is not beyond redemption.
Eric Huffman: Much like Sharon, Shane is an unlikely person to be advocating against the death penalty, given his upbringing.
Shane Claiborne: I'm a Tennessee boy through and through. If I was home in Tennessee, Eric, I would have right next to me on my right a picture of Dolly Parton that says, to Shane, love Dolly. And we grew up in the same hills, literally. My great grandparents, her grandparents grew up on the same kind of mountainside. That's where I fell in love with Jesus, you know, and I also began to see some of the complicated contradictions in society and the church.
I still lived... I mean, this is not that long ago, man, but it is the 1900s, you know, that I grew up. We still had a segregated town. We were the Maryville High School rebels where I grew up in my high school. So the Confederate flag was literally on our lunchroom trays, you know, it was on football fields.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Shane Claiborne: I painted on walls. So fell in love with Jesus, but saw that a lot of us loved God and guns and the death penalty and things that now strike me as not even subtle contradictions to the heart of the gospel.
Eric Huffman: After high school, Shane left his small Tennessee hometown for college in Philadelphia. In 1997, he and five other Eastern University graduates founded an intentional Christian community in the poorest area of that city. Today, their organization, called The Simple Way, continues to support their inner-city neighbors by planting gardens and securing resources to help people thrive. Shane espouses a life of simplicity, nonviolence, community, and prayer.
Shane Claiborne: I've always liked that there's a passage, you know, that talks about salvation as something we're working at. We're working out our salvation with fear and trembling. And that feels like true to me, that this is less of a moment and more of a movement and a continual process.
On so many of these things, like the death penalty and gun violence, I felt very differently for probably about as much of my life as I've been passionate in the way that I am now. One of my friends says I'm always passionate even when I'm wrong. So I've always had that fire in my bones.
I had kind of convinced myself that Scripture defended the death penalty and a number of other things. So over time, I think the better I did at reading the Bible and also relationships change us, and the more I got to know people who are on death row, it began to really change me.
Same with gun violence. I grew up with guns, hunting with my grandfather. But we've seen so many lives lost on the streets of Philadelphia that that begins to feel personal. You begin to think, we've got to do something about this. So I've always liked that saying, where we sit determines what we see. And that's certainly been true for me.
Eric Huffman: Well, you have talked about the death penalty as sort of a seminal central issue, like it is a defining issue for our culture in your view and you have discussed it being you know on par with like abortion in terms of a pro-life ethic. We can't stand for the death penalty and call ourselves pro-life. Why is the death penalty and capital punishment such a centerpiece to your social sort of living out of your theology?
Shane Claiborne: Well, a starting point for me would be we have an executed Savior at the center of everything, right? I mean, literally. I didn't think a lot about that growing up, but I mean, crucifixion was the means of execution 2,000 years ago. And the fact that Jesus was hung on a cross, as James Cohen and so many other great theologians have said, He was lynched from a tree as a public service announcement. They don't do what they did or you will die like they do.
I think how we interpret what Jesus did on the cross is absolutely central to our faith. And if we get that wrong, we get a lot of other things wrong, too. Because there are some versions of our faith that the theology lends us to think God had a gun pointed at humanity. We all deserve to die because of our sin, and God took the gun off of us and pointed it at Jesus, and killed Jesus in order to save us.
That's theology that I think can create a God that's really easy to fear, but really hard to love and hard to reconcile with the love that we see in Jesus, that even when He's dying, He says, Father, forgive them for they don't know what we're doing.
So when we get this wrong, it has major implications, which is why we see so many Christians who are defending the death penalty because I think we've gotten our reading of the Bible wrong and our understanding of Jesus wrong.
I kind of go through a few things that I think Jesus did on the cross, and I think Jesus absorbed and He exposed our sin and our violence. He put violence on display in order to subvert it with love and forgiveness in an empty tomb. In Executing Grace, I talk about it as Jesus is like water poured on the electric chair to short-circuit the whole system of death.
That makes a really big difference, you know, how we think of that and what we do with it, or even more importantly, what Jesus' death does to us. Does it make us more merciful? Does it make us more gracious? Or are we quick to crucify other people?
Eric Huffman: One thing that I have in recent years sort of struggled with with your teachings and others like you, and I just say this just to sort of have a better conversation than just the two of us agreeing on everything, is the sort of what I see as conflation between your problem was substitutionary penal atonement, which is God put Jesus on the cross and to punish Him instead of us. And that's how we got saved. Which to me is at least part of what happened at the cross. Biblically speaking, like that has to be one of the lenses through which we understand the gospel.
But in my view, maybe the arguments you make against capital punishment lose some weight whenever you lump it together with a critique of substitutionary penal atonement. How do you think that through?
Shane Claiborne: Man, we're going deep quick.
Eric Huffman: Sorry. It came to mind. It's not in my script. It's you and me talking here.
Shane Claiborne: I love it. Well, I think these are exactly the conversations we need to have. One of my friends says that the cure to bad theology isn't no theology, but it's good theology. But I think, for instance, René Girard is a great scholar on atonement theory, which essentially is saying, why did Jesus die? Right? What happened in that? There's lots of different ways that we've understood that.
But I've come to really believe that the whole sacrificial system of atonement, that humans began to sin, and we needed a way to atone for our sins, so we created this sacrificial system, God's rolling with us in all of this, right? But we began with like child sacrifice, human sacrifice, and we moved to animal sacrifice. And then we kind of move towards the offerings of first fruits of our crops and grains and ties and all that. So all of this is a way that we're trying to pay off our... atone for our sins.
In a sense, the vaccine doesn't last. We continue to get sick. And the answer is not more blood. But I think that's what we see in Jesus is literally, This is a sacrifice to end all sacrifices, or even the sacrifice to blow up the whole sacrificial system. So Jesus as the Lamb of God, as the one who dies so that we don't have to die, this becomes a really pinnacle part of our theology. So now, in light of Jesus, we don't need more blood.
I think literally when we try to defend the death penalty, we are undermining the very thing that Jesus died for. One of the best statements on this is the Methodists have a great statement, which is essentially that the death penalty, capital punishment undermines and betrays Jesus' ability-
Eric Huffman: Power.
Shane Claiborne: ...power to restore, redeem, and transform every human being. So what Jesus did on the cross is we see a God that so loved the world that Jesus comes not to condemn the world, but to save the world. The world is worth saving. And that makes all the difference to us, I think.
So now what I would also say is that it wasn't that God needed blood, but God was willing to die. That's the difference between some of this penal atonement work. But I would say that you're so right in saying sometimes we think of these theologies as puzzles to be solved rather than a mystery to be pondered and celebrated. That God is, you know, bigger than our words and our theologies.
And that's part of why these fall short when we say, you know, Jesus was a ransom to paying off our credit card bill. That becomes so transactional and so cheap, right? Is there a part of that that's true, that Jesus is wiping our slate clean? Absolutely. But when we use these kind of metaphors, they all cast shadows, right? And they all have holes in them a little bit, too.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Shane Claiborne: So what we can definitively say is that God is love, and God looks like Jesus. As Scripture says, Jesus is a full revelation of God's love. And we see Jesus so powerfully saying it's not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick. I've come not for the righteous, but for the sinners. Where sin abounds, grace abounds.
And that's why I think this is such a core issue that it is about the death penalty and stopping executions. But it's also about a Christianity and a faith where mercy triumphs over judgment, as Scripture says. And when we have so many Christians that are defending punitive forms of justice and pointing fingers and saying that people should even die by execution, I think it does exactly that: it undermines and betrays the gospel of Jesus.
Eric Huffman: Interesting. I just raised the question. I just have this concern about losing support for an argument that I think you and I probably at the end of the day land on the same side about Capital punishment in particular. Maybe not other issues, but this one a hundred percent.
And I think if we start lumping in, you know, substitutionary penal atonement as part of our critique of pro-capitalist punishment argument, I just think we start to muddy the waters a little bit. In fact, I could make an argument that a strong theology of substitutionary penal atonement should lead one to the same conclusion that you and I have reached, because there's no need for any more blood to be shed because of what Jesus has done and the power of His blood and things like that. Nevertheless, we're probably wading into waters that most people don't think about or care about, but I just think it's a really important thing to discuss.
Shane Claiborne: Yeah. I think we've got to talk about those things, right? Some of these are so fundamental that I want to say we don't have to all agree on the same systematic theology to begin to express alternatives to the death penalty. There's entire movements of Calvinists, Catholics, and folks that wouldn't necessarily agree on all the fine points of theology. But we do see that when it comes to the centrality of Jesus and the message of the gospel, blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy, the death penalty stands in stark contrast and contradiction to that.
Eric Huffman: I love that you brought up the United Methodist statement on capital punishment, the death penalty. I'll just read it verbatim. It says, "The death penalty denies the power of Christ to redeem, restore, and transform all human beings." That to me is a core argument against the death penalty.
However, I'm also keenly aware that great people like John Wesley, who founded the Methodist movement, didn't seem to have a problem with the death penalty. It was the norm in his day. He never spoke out against it. He seemed to tacitly speak out in favor of a government's right to deal with people with the death penalty and things like that. So there must be good arguments, biblically, theologically, in favor of the death penalty. I just wondered if we could do a thought exercise and you could walk through some of the best arguments on the other side that you've encountered and help our listeners understand.
Shane Claiborne: Yeah, absolutely. Because I made these arguments myself, which is why I have a whole lot of patience when I listen to other folks that have those same arguments, you know. A couple of things is you're exactly right. I mean, we have a number of Christians who have had an inconsistent ethic of life. That's why the book I wrote after this one, Rethinking Life, kind of pieced some of these issues together under a bigger framework for the image of God in every person, the sacredness of every life.
But John Wesley didn't speak out enough against the death penalty. Martin Luther is known as a celebrity endorsement for the death penalty, because what he said is essentially the hand of the executioner is not just the hand of the state, but the hand of God.
Eric Huffman: Wow.
Shane Claiborne: You can use scripture to back that up. Verses like Romans 13, that all authority is established by God as if God endorses every president and king and ruler. I remember joking when I was in Iraq, I went to Iraq to stand against the war-
Eric Huffman: Which war?
Shane Claiborne: This is in 2003 that I was there. But you read this as an Iraqi Christian, and you're like, Wait, all authority is established by God? Does that mean God put Saddam Hussein in power? So I think we always got to realize that certainly all of us can think of authority that was not endorsed or blessed by God and that there's things that the state does that are not at all God's most perfect will. But if you use Scripture a certain way, you can justify nearly anything.
The bigger framework that I would like to throw out there, too, is that this idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth or a life for a life. We see this in Scripture. So this is one of the most ancient frameworks of justice that there ever was. It predated Jesus, obviously, and Scripture. The idea is called the law of retaliation, lex talionis. And it's where we get the idea that you can hurt someone back to level the scales.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Shane Claiborne: It's often called reciprocal harm. So you could reciprocate the harm done to you, and that was one version of justice. So, I think that certainly has some roots in Scripture that if we use Scripture a certain way, you could justify the death penalty.
Eric Huffman: At the root of it, is there anything redeeming or right about that worldview?
Shane Claiborne: Well, there's convictions that people share, which is that life is precious and God takes it personally if you kill someone. I think that's a beautiful conviction.
Eric Huffman: It's a good instinct, right?
Shane Claiborne: Yeah. We also see violence used in Scripture as arguably a form of justice or of setting things right or ridding the world of evil or taking care of dangerous people. So all those things, I think, can be used to justify the death penalty.
Eric Huffman: I think that is probably, maybe to me, the most compelling Christian argument in favor of the death penalty, which is just, from a biblical perspective, divine justice requires criminals to, or offenders, to compensate for their crimes. And to suggest there can be mercy without justice is to offer an empty form of mercy that does nothing to protect the most vulnerable among us.
Shane Claiborne: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's other things like people, both Christians and folks outside the Christian faith, use just, you know, we need this for the worst of the worst. There are some people that are just so dangerous or so filled with violence or evil that the only solution is to take them out. And a lot of that's done with a sense of compassion for victims and a concern for innocent people.
Eric Huffman: I really appreciate Shane's heartfelt compassion for people who disagree with him on an issue that he feels so strongly about. It's refreshing in a climate where most people just seem to want to eviscerate and cancel each other. We need to have more respectful conversations across ideological lines, even if it makes us uncomfortable. And that's something we strive for on this podcast.
As we prepared to release Part 1 of this episode, news broke that after a failed attempt at lethal injection, the state of Alabama elected to execute a man using nitrogen gas. We'll talk about that decision in Part 2 of this episode. We'll also hear from a wrongfully accused man who spent 20 years on death row and a prison chaplain who stood next to a man as he was being put to death.
Before we close, I want to applaud and encourage you, our Maybe God listeners, for having the courage to engage in such a heavy conversation like this one. You are what makes this podcast special, and we are so thankful for your tenacity to tackle the toughest topics. Thank you, as always, for listening. We'll be back very soon with part two of Who Would Jesus Execute?
Adira Polite: This episode of Maybe God was produced by Adira Polite, Julie Mirlicourtois, and Eric and Geovanna Huffman. Our talented editors are Shannon Stefan and Justin Mayer, and the director of all of our full-length YouTube interviews is Donald Kilgore. We'd be so grateful if you'd rate and review Maybe God wherever you're listening to this, and engage with us on social media by heading to at Maybe God on Instagram and Facebook.