An execution in the US is to be live streamed. This has kept the death penalty on public profile following another recent botched execution.
Personally, I don’t favour the death penalty for various reasons, not least because I do not see it as required by a Biblical worldview.
Setting that aside, I’ve been intrigued by the arguments made by Christians for public live streamed executions. After all the debates over disembodied worship during COVID, I hope we won’t turn out to be less squeamish about live streamed firing squads than we were about live streamed communion.
The primary argument seems to be that executions were public in Scripture. However, my inclination is to say that they were “communal”. The whole village were involved in the execution and perhaps we see an element of honour/shame at work. They took part because they shared in the suffering as victims but they also took part because they shared in the culpability too. This was no individualistic society.
Live streams move us away from the event as participatory responsibility to a consumer event for individual satisfaction and pleasure. What kind of society does that make us?
Jesus of course was publicly executed and for many that brought a sense of entertainment. However it also makes us all both culpable and beneficiaries as we died with him so that we might be raised with him.
