Like coming across someone who still propagates Victorian race theory, there is a certain picturesque quality to coming across someone who still tries to construct a theological rationale for capital punishment.
Only in America, kids. Where the strikingly similar arguments for slavery also continued to be widely held and circulated for two generations after they had been dismissed everywhere else. The same process is now underway on this issue.
The Catholic Church was certainly against capital punishment when I joined, 23 years ago. And when I was at a Catholic school, anything up to 31 years ago. The then Pope was known the world over for his campaign against it. Do look him up. Catholics have of course been among its most numerous victims historically.
As with the race thing, unlike in America, British Evangelicals are opposed to it as if that were simply not a question at all. Much like Catholics, in fact. At no point in my lifetime has it been possible to imagine the ordination of an avowed supporter by any church in these Islands that had not been founded by Ian Paisley.
Even Peter Hitchens has constructed an argument that usefully lets him off having to advocate restoration in practice; to be honest, I doubt that he was ever really in favour of it. But then, Enoch Powell was always against it. As, in my experience, are a surprising number of American paleoconservatives.
If that is surprising at all. How well do traditional conservatives think that they would fare against the capital power of the liberal State? They do seem to have worked it out.
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