Not Fit to Live?

Davidson Loehr

October 15, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Before moving to Texas, I never gave much thought to the death penalty. Here, in a state that executes more criminals than almost all countries, it’s hard not to think about it. As I read and listen to the standard religious arguments against the death penalty, I’m not convinced that there are any problems as simple as those religious prescriptions. The best I’ll be able to do in this sermon is to expand the horizons of thinking, and explore a variety of arguments of varying persuasiveness. But for now, I’ll confess that my guiding thought is that the quality of human lives follows a bell curve, with saints at one end, most of us in the middle, and some truly evil people at the other. Perhaps this will give us all the chance to re-examine our feelings and values on this complex and emotionally loaded issue of the death penalty.

PRAYER:

We pray to the angels of our better nature as we approach the subject of capital punishment, a subject on which we do not, and will not, agree. In our disagreements, we would seek to engage each other as moral equals. Moral equals. If we can know that much about each other, even our disagreements may be ennobling. We ask this depth of compassion from ourselves. Realistically, we can probably ask no more. As a people of faith, we can ask no less. Amen.

SERMON: “Not Fit To Live?”

Honest religion is supposed to develop our souls and expand our understanding of the world. The result is almost never a clear and unambiguous answer that all good people must follow like marching orders. Instead, it is a broadening and deepening of our understanding of the world so that our differences may be enriching and fertile, rather than divisive. That’s a noble goal, seldom achieved. It is my goal here this morning.

Those of us here today represent almost the entire range of opinions about capital punishment. Some here are deeply against it, considering it too barbaric to be defended. Some are strongly in favor of it and consider it a just and appropriate end for those who have committed the most heinous crimes. Most are somewhere in between. It is a complex, emotionally loaded issue on which intelligent people of good will can and do disagree.

Most religions, though not all, are against the death penalty. Their arguments are almost all variations on the same theme, which is that life is sacred, period. Western religions have this in spades; the creation story in the book of Genesis makes it clear that we were just dirt until God breathed life into us. So life, in Western religions, has been seen as a gift of God, not a byproduct of nature.

Of course, this idea that life is sacred has seldom been honored in the real world. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have never had much trouble killing others of God’s children, as all religious wars have witnessed to, and as we’re still seeing today in the Middle East. And the Christians have had a long list of scapegoats: Jews, Muslims, witches, native Americans, and anyone else who got in the way of their “Manifest Destiny” to rule the world have always been fair game for killing. So the reality has never matched the rhetoric. Still, the notion that life is a kind of sacred gift is in almost every religious argument against capital punishment. Also, it’s an emotionally appealing notion, even if it’s not historically common.

The most coherent — and my favorite — form of this argument is what the Roman Catholic Church calls its “seamless garment” argument for the sanctity of life. Catholics are officially opposed to killing life at any stage, whether in an abortion or a state-sanctioned execution. The reason, again, is that all life is a sacred gift from God, so beyond our authority to destroy.

We’re so used to hearing this that we tend to forget how ancient it is, this idea that all human life is sacred — and that it had historical origins. The reasons life was considered so sacred — especially the lives of males, we should add — are easy to discover. Children represented more workers for the farming or herding through which the family fed itself. Children were the “pension plan” for their parents, expected to take care of them in their old age. Infant and child mortality rates were higher, so more children increased the chances that some would live to adulthood. And we can’t forget how important it seems always to have been for men to have a boy to carry on their name. This was true in the ancient story of Abraham. It drove the English King Henry VIII, and many, many fathers today. I’m not demeaning this, just observing it as a persistent part of our human nature. And of course we think life is sacred because we want to think that something about us is deeply sacred, worthy of respect and protection.

All along, it seems that the sanctity of human life has been driven, in part, by a feeling of scarcity — the fact that life always seemed fragile, and we needed more people. The feeling made sense when the population of the world was less that 1/60th of the population today. Just a look at the population figures from the last three millennia can show us how much has changed.

In 1400 BCE, about the time traditionally assigned to Moses, the total population of the world is estimated to have been about a hundred million, a little over a third the size of the United States. (Daniel Quinn, The Story of B, p. 264. I hope and assume that Quinn did his homework on figures so easy to check, since I didn’t do my homework.) By the time of Jesus, the world’s population had doubled, to about two-thirds the population of the United States today. (Quinn, p. 267)

By 1200, in the Middle Ages, it had doubled again. So 800 years ago, the total population of the world was about the same as today’s population of the United States plus Canada. Wars, plagues, high infant mortality and early deaths still made life seem fragile, and high birth rates were still defenses against all kinds of both real and imagined extinctions. (Quinn, 269)

In just five hundred more years, by 1700, the population had again doubled, to about eight hundred million people — less that the present population of China. (Quinn, p. 270) The next doubling took only two centuries. And then, from 1900-1960, the population doubled again, in only sixty years, to three billion humans. (273) And in the thirty-six years from 1960-1996, the population doubled again, to more than six billion people. (Quinn, 274)

Human life, which must once have seemed as rare as diamonds, is now as common as pebbles. And today all over our country and all over the world, in ways both large and small, our behaviors show that in fact we do not think of life as sacred, or as something that automatically trumps all other considerations:

— Abortions. Whether or not life is regarded as even desirable, let alone sacred, depends on whether we are willing to support it, to give it the time, energy and money it would cost. I think these are the real arguments most women would make for abortions, and I think they are valid arguments. Furthermore, our society and the societies of almost all industrialized countries also treat life as something we can choose or not. Not only birth control, but also abortions, and now the growing availability of the RU-486 pill, the “abortion pill,” have let our actions speak for us. Life is natural, not supernatural, and it’s a choice, not a demand.

— Our wars, most of which have been for economic advantage, show that we regard money as more important than life.

— While many religious conservatives still argue that birth control and abortions are sins against God, Even Roman Catholic women have abortions at the same rate as non-Catholic women. Life isn’t that rare, and we say No to life every day. Like it or not, we have higher priorities.

— Nicotine causes nearly a half million deaths a year. If you’ve ever smoked, you know as I do that the alleged sanctity of life can’t hold a candle to a good smoke.

— We could even mention that we know every year about 50,000 Americans will be killed in traffic accidents. We also know that we could probably save 49,500 of those lives every year by reducing the national speed limit to 10 mph. Almost nobody would vote for it. We’ve got places to go and things to do that are a lot more important to us than 50,000 lives.

So the ancient religious insistence that the mere quantity of life, even the possibility of life is sacred, is no longer held by many people at all. We have shifted to valuing quality over quantity of life.

But a few romantic preachers aside, life has never been regarded as the ultimate value, sacred beyond compromise or cancellation. We have always believed that certain social behaviors are required of human beings, and that if you are dangerous to others, you may lose the right to live. Not just to live in society, but even to live. One of the costs of living in any society is that we must give up some control to the society. It sets the rules, and when we go over the line, all societies have the right to deprive us of our money, our freedom, our property, even our lives.

This idea that some anti-social behaviors make us unfit to live also has roots in one of the most misunderstood and mistaught stories in the Bible, the story of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The famous part of the story, which you probably know, is that a group of local men wanted to sodomize — as it’s now called — a visitor to town, and that his host (after offering his daughter to the mob) finally gave the man over to be sodomized and murdered.

When religious literalists say that God’s destruction of the city was because of homosexuality, they are mis-teaching the story, and every good biblical scholar knows it. The crime for which the city was destroyed was the crime of giving over a visitor to be murdered. The crime was uncivil and murderous behavior, not sodomy. The visitor wasn’t a heretic, wasn’t an enemy of the faith, he was just a human being with a right to expect civility and protection from other human beings.

This failure to provide the most basic of human protection and kindness, the ancient Hebrews taught, was so hated by God that those who transgressed it were no longer fit to live. You don’t have to agree with the story, but it does help make the point that for all of recorded history we have found some people unfit to live because of their behaviors — whether you choose to call those behaviors anti-social, psychopathic or evil.

There seems to be something deep inside of us that sees certain criminal or psychopathic behaviors as putting us beyond the pale, making us unfit to live.

When it’s said this way, the idea sounds so foreign it’s hard for me to relate to, and I imagine many of you also find it foreign. For some of you, the idea that someone can do something so heinous that they are not fit to live will never be an acceptable idea. For others — and apparently for quite a majority of Americans — it is a very acceptable idea.

I want to see if I can help us relate to this idea, even if we will never find it attractive. If we can’t relate to the idea, we will not be able to understand the position of a majority in our society. So I’ll use two stories, one strong but fictional, the other true but weak.

I suspect that many of you watched the award-winning television miniseries named “Lonesome Dove” a few years ago. I think it was one of the finest and most powerful dramas ever aired on television, partly because the actors were so powerful. Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall and Robert Urich are the three I’m thinking of, and they were involved in a very powerful scene that I want to remind you of.

Robert Urich’s character seemed to lack something essential — a moral center, a sense of right and wrong. He fell in with two psychopathic murderers, who tortured, killed and then burned a farmer. Urich didn’t help with the killing, he was just there with them, watching, and not stopping them — kind of like the host in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

When Robert Duvall’s and Tommy Lee Jones’s characters found the murdered and burned farmer, they became agents of retribution. They tracked down and caught the three men. They were surprised and saddened to find the Robert Urich character among them, for he was their friend. Urich’s character didn’t seem to understand what he had done wrong. As I remember it, Duvall said “You crossed over the line.” “I didn’t see the line,” said Urich. “I’m sorry,” was the answer, and the three men were hanged.

That scene has seemed to me very profound, with an insight into the nature of human nature and of justice that I can’t shake. There is a line, I believe, that we cannot cross, and when we do we are beyond the protection of society. We’re even beyond the love of God, according to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I think almost all of us know this line intuitively. What we do with people who cross that line is a political and legal decision. Is it worth spending money to keep murderers, rapists and other psychopaths alive for twenty to fifty years? We know prisons will not rehabilitate them. Is that how a society wants to spend its resources? I don’t think this is a question to which there is an obvious answer.

Still, it is so hard to put ourselves in the place of the two cowboys in “Lonesome Dove” who hanged the three men. This is where this whole subject feels most likely to slip away from my ability to grasp it, and perhaps from yours.

So I offer you a second story, from my own past. You may decide it is a weak analogy, and it is a weak analogy. But it’s all I have. Twenty five years ago my wife and I raised purebred dogs. It was a fairly rare breed called Briards, a French sheepdog. The males could stand 28″ at the shoulders and weigh over 110 lbs. My wife was obsessive about the breeding, and matched our females with the best-bred stud dogs in the country. Many of the puppies we sold later became champions. They were just wonderful dogs. But over a period of four years, two of the puppies we sold grew to become dangerous. One female was so protective that when her owner’s two-year-old daughter ran into the room in the middle of the night because she had had a nightmare, the dog attacked her. The animal shelter called us the next day when the recognized the breed, and we picked up the dog and brought it home. A couple years later, a big male dog simply had something wrong, he was like a dog version of a psychopath. My wife and I both felt completely safe around this 110 lb. dog. But he chased and bit two children, and then without any warning attacked a friend of ours during a bridge game in our home, tearing open his face so badly it required over thirty stitches. He was a professional photographer, and nearly lost an eye.

I don’t have to tell you these dogs crossed over that line. You know they did. And you probably know what happened next. Both times, I took the dogs to the vet and had them killed. I had to feed these dogs tranquilizer pills so they would not be a danger to the vets or the teenagers working in the clinics. I will tell you without shame that both times I cried all the way to the veterinarian’s office, and all the way home again.

We had had such high hopes for these animals! They had the best breeding, the best food, excellent obedience training. Anyone here who has owned a pet knows how much we can love animals, and both my wife and I loved all the dogs, even these two, named Mairzy Doats and George. We could have chosen to build on to the kennel, to keep them separate from our other dogs and from our friends, and kept them alive for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t worth it. We didn’t have that much money or space, which is to say there were many other ways we preferred to use what money and energy we had.

But we shed many tears, even over these animals that had done terrible things, had crossed over that line, and who we chose to — well, we use the euphemism “to put down,” but it means we chose to execute them. I don’t want to imply for even a second that I equate dogs with people. It is a different order of being. I tell you the story partly to say that I know what it is like to decide to kill a dangerous animal, even one I loved. Our reasons for killing the dogs were reasons of money, space and priorities.

The subject of executing human psychopaths, murderers, dangerous people who have crossed over that line is not this simple. And there are several dimensions of the capital punishment debate on which we would probably all agree. I need to mention some of these.

— First, the legal system that sentences and executes our prisoners is imperfect. Blacks and other minorities, but especially blacks, are both imprisoned and executed in disproportionate numbers. I don’t know if this is race or economics. I suspect that much of it reflects the fact that poor people die in disproportionate numbers both in and out of prisons. They can’t afford the best lawyers, the best doctors, the best education, the best health care. American children raised in poverty are up to five times more likely to die of various causes than the children of more privileged families, regardless of their race. The system isn’t adequate and we all know it.

— Some prisoners who are executed are innocent. In Illinois, in Texas, everywhere. The legal system is a human institution, so it will never be perfect. We don’t like to admit it, but innocent people die in almost every human endeavor. In war, some soldiers are killed by what we call “friendly fire,” meaning that our own troops mistakenly killed their comrades. Even when we do the best we can, some innocent people die. However, even if we can’t make the system perfect, it can and should be continually monitored and improved.

— It is also clear, I think, that capital punishment is no more a deterrent than prison time is a rehabilitation. It is retribution, punishment, the vengeance of society. If there is a persuasive argument that either imprisonment or capital punishment are any more than that, I haven’t heard it.

There are more areas besides these three that we could probably all agree need to be addressed and improved, no matter what our position is on the death penalty.

However, they don’t change the basic issue of whether the most proper and desirable punishment for those who have crossed over that line is life imprisonment or execution. And I don’t think many people on either side of this argument are likely to have their minds changed.

But in a society where so many of our laws and behaviors show that we do not consider the mere fact of life to be sacred, or even to trump all other considerations, I don’t think the “seamless garment” argument of the Catholic Church is adequate. It’s a seamless garment built on an assumption that doesn’t fit any enduring human society.

I do like the idea of a “seamless garment” argument, a consistent attitude toward life that we can use both for abortion and for the subject of capital punishment. I don’t find it a black-and-white picture, however. I find it filled with grays. The quality of human lives seems to be like a bell curve. Most are precious. Some few are exquisite, even saintly. We can all think of some people in that category. And some, at the other end, have crossed over a line that even some of our most ancient religious teachers have believed make us unfit to live. As ugly as that sounds to say, and perhaps to hear, I believe it is true.

And my personal opinion, I am somewhat surprised to discover, is that I can’t find any persuasive arguments against capital punishment, especially from religious writers. Yet the logic isn’t enough. It isn’t enough for me, and I hope it isn’t enough for you. The intellectual arguments, the mere logic, aren’t enough. At least two more things are needed.

First, since we will probably never agree on whether or not capital punishment is just, ethical or moral, we must strive to broaden and deepen our understanding of the issues involved so that our disagreements can be insightful rather than spiteful, informative and enlightening rather than merely divisive. We need to understand that intelligent people of good will — people just as intelligent and just as moral as we know we are — can and do disagree on all complex issues, from abortion at the beginning of life to capital punishment as an end of life.

But something is still missing. There is sometimes what seems like a hardness, even a smugness from some people on both sides of the capital punishment debate. I have heard Governor Bush’s attitude during the recent presidential debates described as smug, even taunting, when he bragged that in Texas murderers are killed. I hope he doesn’t feel that way, because that attitude will make us miss what I believe is the most important of all attitudes toward these prisoners who are condemned either to die or to rot away in hellish, inhumane prisons.

What’s missing are the tears.

Even with the two dogs I had executed, I cried like a baby. God, there were so many hopes and dreams that died with those two dogs.

Where are the tears for the failed humans? Where are the tears for all the hopes and dreams that die, die, every time we slam shut forever another prison door or kill another prisoner?

I believe it is possible for good and moral people to decide that capital punishment is appropriate and just. The voting majorities in 38 of our 50 states, and both of our major presidential candidates, apparently feel this way. But I do not believe that it should be possible for us to accept either the growing prison population or the growing number of prisoners we choose to execute, without hurting so badly that we have to cry. Unless we feel, and live with, the terrible sense of loss of dreams and hopes and all that we have always wished were sacred — unless we have the tears, I think we will lose more of our own humanity than we can afford to lose. And to lose that degree of humanity is finally to suffer the irony of having capital punishment execute a piece of our own soul, and the soul of our nation.