The Sword in Vain

By David Crush | Politics & Religion | 12 min read

Colored-pencil illustration of a wide, empty field of dry grass under a pale afternoon sky. In the foreground, a smartphone sits on a black tripod with a small red recording light glowing. Beside it, a gray metal folding chair holds a closed black Bible with a red ribbon marker. In the distance, a single leafy tree and an old wooden telephone pole stand at the edge of the field. No one is there.

On December 3, at 1 p.m., a firing squad of soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, is scheduled to execute Nidal Hasan. This week Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution would be public. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he told Real America’s Voice. The Pentagon then confirmed it will be livestreamed. The hour was chosen to match the hour of the shooting.

Hasan was an Army psychiatrist. On November 5, 2009, he opened fire inside a processing center for soldiers about to deploy, killing 13 people and wounding 32. At his court-martial he represented himself, and his opening statement took about a minute: “The evidence will clearly show I am the shooter.” It did. There is no doubt about what he did, and the thirteen people he killed had families who have waited seventeen years.

So this is not an essay about whether Nidal Hasan is guilty. It is about the passage that will be used to bless what happens next. Romans 13 gives the state the sword: the authority to restrain people who do harm. It does not require the state to kill him, and it cannot make a broadcast of his death Christian.

Nothing Says Christian Nation

Nothing says Christian nation like airing an execution.

The United States has not held a public execution in nearly a century. The central event of the Christian faith is one. A state put a man to death in the open, outside the city, where anyone passing could see what happens to people who trouble the empire. Luke records the audience:

And the people stood by watching. (Luke 23:35)

The Sword

Here is the passage:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God… for it is God’s agent for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the agent of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. (Romans 13:1, 4)

Christians who support capital punishment read the sword as permission to kill. Some read it as more than permission.

Now read what Paul wrote a few sentences earlier, in the same letter, to the same church in Rome, the capital of the empire that by tradition would later execute him:

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” Instead, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink.” (Romans 12:19–20)

Paul did not write a chapter 13. Chapter numbers were added more than a thousand years later. He wrote a letter, and in that letter “wrath” passes from God to the governing authority within a few lines. The order matters. Christians are told not to take revenge, and the state’s sword is the reason they do not have to.

I will grant what the passage gives. It gives the state something a private person does not have: the authority to use force to stop harm. A court may lock up a man I may not lock up. That is real, and I am not going to pretend the sword is a metaphor.

But the passage carries its own limit. The authority is “God’s agent for your good.” The sword has a purpose, and the purpose is not the sword.

The other verse people reach for is older. After the flood, God tells Noah:

Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed, for in his own image God made humans. (Genesis 9:6)

This one comes before the law of Moses, before the Sabbath stonings and the rules about fabric that Christians stopped following long ago, and it is addressed to everyone. In a case as certain as Hasan’s, I will concede that it could apply. Then the question becomes: if we can hold him safely for the rest of his life, why take the chance? Neither verse says anything about cameras.

Notice how much work that took. Two passages, each read against its neighbors, to arrive at permission to kill a man who is already in a cell. Then there is the verse that needs no work at all: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35). I have written about the plain verses in An Open Book Test, and about how other causes crowded them out in How Churches Got Used.

How Much Room

Hasan has been in custody since the afternoon of the shooting. A police officer’s bullets left him paralyzed from the chest down. He has lived on military death row at Fort Leavenworth since 2013. Whatever the sword is for, restraining Nidal Hasan was finished seventeen years ago.

But the passage is not being used for Hasan alone. It is used to bless capital punishment as a system, and the system makes mistakes. Since 1973, 203 people sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated. A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that at least 4.1 percent of people sentenced to death are innocent, and its authors call that number conservative.

Genesis 9 opens its rule with a reckoning: “For your own lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning… from human beings, each one for the blood of another” (9:5). The law of Moses treats innocent blood as guilt on the whole community. Israel set aside cities of refuge “so that the blood of an innocent person may not be shed in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, thereby bringing bloodguilt upon you” (Deuteronomy 19:10).

Naboth owned a vineyard next to King Ahab’s palace and would not sell it. Queen Jezebel wrote letters in the king’s name to the elders of Naboth’s city. They proclaimed a fast, seated Naboth at the head of the assembly, and put two scoundrels across from him to testify that he had cursed God and the king. Two witnesses: what the law required. “So they took him outside the city and stoned him to death.” Every step was legal. Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah, with a question for the king:

Have you killed and also taken possession? (1 Kings 21:19)

Prison does the same restraining for less money. A 2003 Kansas audit put the median death-penalty case at $1.26 million, against $740,000 for a comparable case without it, counted through the end of incarceration. Kansas spends about twice as much a year to house a death-sentenced prisoner. In California, a 2011 study found the death penalty had cost $4 billion more since 1978 than a system with life without parole as its maximum. Ohio’s legislative research office reviewed studies from several states in 2021 and found capital cases cost two and a half to five times more. Most of that money goes to the longer trials and appeals required when a life is on the line, which is to say, to the only thing standing between the system and the next Naboth.

The Sentence Stands

What is left is that the families deserve it. They lost husbands, wives, sons, and daughters. Their grief is real, and nothing in this essay asks them to apologize for wanting him dead.

But justice in the legal sense has been done. In 2013 a military jury convicted Hasan on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder, and sentenced him to death. The President approved the sentence. None of that changes if there is no camera at Fort Hood on December 3. The sentence is the same either way.

The only thing a livestream adds is an audience.

Blessed Are the Merciful

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (Matthew 5:7). Later in the same sermon, Jesus takes up the old law of retaliation by name:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer… You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Matthew 5:38–39, 43–44)

When Peter asks how many times he has to forgive, Jesus says seventy-seven. Then he tells of a servant forgiven a debt he could never repay, who walks out and seizes a fellow servant by the throat over a small one. The master calls him back: “Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” (Matthew 18:33).

The prophet Ezekiel is told to deliver a message about people who are actually guilty:

As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked but that the wicked turn from their ways and live. (Ezekiel 33:11)

One of the two criminals crucified beside Jesus says he was “condemned justly,” asks to be remembered, and hears “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:41–43). He turned in the middle of his own execution. And the man who wrote Romans 13 was once Saul, the young man at whose feet the witnesses laid their coats while they stoned Stephen. “And Saul approved of their killing him” (Acts 8:1).

I will be honest about Hasan. Repentance looks unlikely. During his trial he released statements saying he saw a death sentence as the martyrdom that had eluded him. In 2014 he wrote from death row asking to join the Islamic State. Nothing in seventeen years suggests a man waiting to turn. But a cell leaves that door open, however narrowly. A firing squad closes it.

Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, Hegseth said: “Don’t care.” The execution is set for the hour of the shooting.

I keep reading those chapters next to that answer and asking whether we are measuring up.

Owensboro

Hegseth gave a reason for the cameras: “Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” That is the argument from deterrence. In 2012 the National Research Council reviewed more than three decades of studies and concluded that the research “is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates,” and that it should not be used to make policy. A 2009 survey of leading criminologists found that 88 percent did not believe the death penalty deters murder. States without it have consistently had lower murder rates than states with it. That proves nothing by itself, but it is not what a deterrent looks like.

The last time an American government held an execution in public, it was in Owensboro, Kentucky, at dawn on August 14, 1936. Rainey Bethea, a young Black man convicted of raping and killing a 70-year-old woman, was hanged in a lot near the Ohio River. Kentucky still reserved public hanging for rape. Before the execution, Time reported, the county’s sheriff consulted her priest, who found nothing in church law against it, and “Protestant churchmen concurred.”

Time ran the story under the headline “Crime: Party.” The night before, “‘Hanging parties’ were held in many a home.” One driver hurrying to the scene crashed and was killed. By 3 a.m. some 10,000 people filled the lot; later estimates ran to 20,000. “Hawkers squeezed their way through the crowd selling pop, hot dogs. Telephone poles and trees were festooned with spectators.” As dawn came on, the crowd grew impatient and began to shout, “Let’s go! Bring him out!” When the doctors pronounced Bethea dead, “the spectators charged from every side, eager hands clawed at the black death hood,” and the lucky ones went home with the scraps in their pockets.

Owensboro’s own papers said the national press exaggerated, and maybe some of it did. Kentucky’s legislature was embarrassed enough that in 1938 it moved executions behind prison walls, the last state to do so. It did not stop because the hanging failed to teach anyone a lesson. It stopped because of what the hanging showed about the people watching.

There will be no fence at Fort Hood to push through and no hood to tear. Nobody will have to climb a telephone pole. The stream puts every one of us in the trees.

Further Reading

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue).

More in Politics