By Mark Osler*
This post originally appeared in the Huffington Post.
A troubled loner with a gun decided to kill his Democratic Congresswoman outside a Tucson grocery store, and now six people are dead. As a former prosecutor who now trains future prosecutors, I grieve with a heavy heart. As a Christian, I am troubled. The blood in the desert will re-open two debates in which we Christians have strayed too far from the very teachings of Christ.
First, I am troubled because I know that this will re-open the discussion over whether incendiary political rhetoric, mere words, can inspire such violent acts. For Christians, there should be no debate on this subject. Our faith, like so many others, is built on the thesis that words do inspire action.
As I carry a Bible into church I am testifying that words are important, that they imbue our lives with meaning, that they damn well do inspire action. The Gospels, words in a book, are at the heart of my beliefs about God and human relationships. I certainly do hope that they inspire action. So do most Christians. Christ had no army, he had no formal power — all he had were words. And if we believe that those words of love can change the world, why do we doubt that words of contempt and anger can inspire violence in the weakest among us?
As Christians, we accept that words shape lives. With that comes a moral duty to use them carefully and gently for what is just. Too many among our faith have forgotten that. Civil discourse is not just a civic duty; to those of us who follow Christ, it is a Christian duty.
The second debate re-opened by Jared Loughner is that over the death penalty. Most Americans, including most Christians, support the death penalty. This support too often is unchallenged by the fact that an unjust execution is at the center of our faith, and that Christ himself came upon a legal execution and stopped it (in John 8).
There will be a riotous cry to kill the killer, as is so often the case with high-profile murders. The basis for this cry will be nothing more than an urge to exact retribution, since there is no deterrent value in killing someone who wants to be a martyr — if anything, it has the opposite effect. What we will achieve is nothing more or less than a satisfaction of our bloodlust.
How can we justify, as Christians, a killing that is nothing more than bloodlust? Doesn’t Christ call us the other way? Yes, it is against our essential desire for retribution, but so much that Christ taught was restraint against our base instincts.
Like so many of Christ’s teachings, his moral challenge to a legal execution, when examined closely, makes sense. After all, what we revile in the killer is that he has killed. How, exactly, does killing him break that chain? We can argue that he killed innocents and he is guilty, but in this case we should remember that Loughner probably thought his Congresswoman was guilty of outrageous crimes against our country. He wanted to smite this enemy. Our smiting him in turn solves no problem. Rather, it only exacerbates the problem as others like him see his execution as martyrdom.
Timothy McVeigh was similarly motivated to strike out at a government he was taught to hate. A large part of his anger built on legal killing by the government (in the Branch Davidian episode). We executed McVeigh. It apparently did nothing to deter Jared Loughner.
Perhaps we should have listened to Bud Welch. His young daughter, Julie, was killed by McVeigh and his bomb. Welch felt the hatred and fierce hunger for retribution we might expect, but he came to see the uselessness of executing McVeigh. As Welch put it, “It was hatred and revenge that made me want to see him dead and those two things were the very reason that Julie and 167 others were dead.”
As people who get angry (we all do), it is hard to accept that hateful words can inspire horrible actions, and that our urge to retribution in blood might be wrong. Yet, Christ so often calls us to do the hard thing, not the easy one. This is one of those times.
* A former federal prosecutor, Mark Osler teaches Law at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. Mark is currently serving on the board of Friends of Justice.
Friends of Justice 
There is no anger in the excution of a killer under law. And it is important to remember that when a man is found to be guilty of a crime worthy of the death penalty, it is to God that he is sent. I won’t enter the arguments of life in prison or death by any means legal. But I remind us all that death is a door way to eternity. We all take that door. Some will take it without consent. But then their victims took that door without consent.
By His Grace.
It should be a no-brainer that words (and symbols like cross-hairs) matter. But apparently it is not. I follow the Solourners God’s Politics blog, where yesterday (1/11) Jim Wallis had a post about the Arizona shootings (“An Attack on the Soul of the Nation”). He did not accuse Ssarah Palin or Glenn Beck or Republicans or anybody else of “causing” the shooting. Actually it was a plea for prayer and reflection, a prayer for the healing of the nation. Yet it brought out comments that it is stupid to think that political climate had anything to do with the shooting. “Methinks thou dost protest too much.” One even hinted that there was something going on between the shooter and the congresswoman.
I doubt that a direct cause and effect relaltionship can be established between an angry political climate and the events in Tucson, anymore than between the permissive promiscuous attitudes of prime time sitcoms and specific instances of sexual immorality. But I doubt that American Family Radio would want to deny that there is a relationship between public attitudes and what is daily portrayed as normal and acceptable on TV.
Thank you Mark, for this post.
Mark, you are another person who misuses the word “Christian” to describe followers of Jesus of Nazareth.
The only reason that I am not a devil worshiper is that I am an atheist. However I consider, you, Alan and the other people who run and post this site to be honorary atheists and honorary extremely wicked people as you and they take seriously the forbidden words from the new testament that true Christians keep firmly closed and probably bound in iron chains like the dangerous magic books in Terry Pratchett’s Disc World novels.
Jesus Christ and Jesus of Nazareth are a pair of good and evil identical twins. Jesus of Nazareth was extremelywicked, he consorted with all the wrong people, disrespected his betters and spread ideas so dangerous and subversive that no properly run state can tolerate them. Quite rightly was he nailed to a tree. Were he around today he would be in solitary in a supermax prison awaiting trial for something related to terrorism. Before this he would have consorted with felonius ex-prisoners not allowed to vote, drug addicts, prostitutes, gays and Black people. One fears to think what he would have done if he got access to Wall street.
Jesus Kerist on the other hand, the post death and resurrection twin is eminently respectable and would be welcome at Nazi party meetings, in the White House and at parties thrown by South American death squad leaders.