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"Texas’s refusal to allow a pastor to pray while holding a dying man’s hand is an offense to basic Christian values. ...Texas would permit Ramirez his pastor but draw the line at the minister laying hands on the man or praying aloud over him as the state kills him because, it argues, it has “a compelling interest in maintaining an orderly, safe, and effective process when carrying out an irrevocable, and emotionally charged, procedure.” A pastor praying aloud, holding a dying man’s hand, would bring too much flesh, too much humanity, into the thing. Execution theater is all about maintaining the illusion of mechanism.
...“The state of Texas is wrong,” says Russell Moore, the director of Christianity Today’s Public Theology Project and a longtime Christian ethicist with special expertise in Baptist and other American Low Church traditions. “The Book of James calls upon Christians … to lay hands on those who are sick, and quite often those who are dying … to be with them to help them to pray—which is one of the things that their pastors do, is to help people to pray in moments in which it is very difficult to pray. And the execution chamber would certainly be one of those moments.” In that sense, Texas’s limitations seem as much a restriction on the pastor’s religious practice as the inmate’s. I asked Moore if the prayer has to be audible, in his tradition, since the state has disputed as much.
Not that Texas seeks to ban such things, only to deny them to the condemned, leaving room solely for what the state would have the law consider satisfactory Christian practice. And there Texas would betray the faith, whittling it into something so distant from its original shape as to render it barely recognizable. Whatever this Christian religion was meant to be when it was first formed, a luxury for the sinless and pure it certainly was not.
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Brunig makes an excellent point. State-sanctioned killing relies on painting the accused as something less than human. It allows us, as a society and the execution to follow through with it with a clear conscience. How is that poor, God-fearing executioner supposed to feel if he's pulling the switch on someone being prayed over - a fellow Christian, a fellow human being? It can't be good.
...“The state of Texas is wrong,” says Russell Moore, the director of Christianity Today’s Public Theology Project and a longtime Christian ethicist with special expertise in Baptist and other American Low Church traditions. “The Book of James calls upon Christians … to lay hands on those who are sick, and quite often those who are dying … to be with them to help them to pray—which is one of the things that their pastors do, is to help people to pray in moments in which it is very difficult to pray. And the execution chamber would certainly be one of those moments.” In that sense, Texas’s limitations seem as much a restriction on the pastor’s religious practice as the inmate’s. I asked Moore if the prayer has to be audible, in his tradition, since the state has disputed as much.
Not that Texas seeks to ban such things, only to deny them to the condemned, leaving room solely for what the state would have the law consider satisfactory Christian practice. And there Texas would betray the faith, whittling it into something so distant from its original shape as to render it barely recognizable. Whatever this Christian religion was meant to be when it was first formed, a luxury for the sinless and pure it certainly was not.
Link
Brunig makes an excellent point. State-sanctioned killing relies on painting the accused as something less than human. It allows us, as a society and the execution to follow through with it with a clear conscience. How is that poor, God-fearing executioner supposed to feel if he's pulling the switch on someone being prayed over - a fellow Christian, a fellow human being? It can't be good.
