If you listen to right-wing Christian radio long enough, you expect to hear some pretty bizarre things. A textbook example came on today’s edition of “Focal Point” on American Family Radio. Host Bryan Fischer, who also doubles as the chief policy analyst for the American Family Association, offered one of the strangest arguments for the death penalty I’ve heard in a long time. He thinks that the death penalty is the ultimate tool for getting people saved and won over to Jesus. No, I’m not kidding — watch it here.
Fischer was speaking with “Calissa,” a caller from Sherman, Texas who was asking about what the Bible says about the death penalty. He claimed that when someone faces the prospect of being sent to death, they have no choice but to “consider eternal questions.” He claimed that any society that doesn’t send someone to death who deserves it is acting out of a “misguided sense of compassion.” If we give such criminals a reprieve, Fischer says, we’re putting off their consideration of these “eternal issues” and make it “easier for them to go to hell than to heaven.”
If Fischer is so concerned about criminal’s eternal well-being, then why hasn’t he considered that there may be more humane ways to get them to think about those “eternal issues” than the death penalty? You would think that sitting in prison for the rest of your natural life would give you enough time to think about the consequences of what you’ve done. And apparently he hasn’t considered that for a lot of criminals, the death penalty really isn’t a punishment at all. For instance, if Dzokhar Tsarnaev is as radicalized as I suspect he is, he probably thinks that he’ll be on an express route to heaven in the event of his execution. Hmmm… sounds to me like he’s already thought about those “eternal issues.”
But then again, such uninformed statements are to be expected from someone who views anything and everything as a chance to get another notch in his Bible.
Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
Edited by D.H.
