Personal belief versus universal truth: Religion rhetoric in death penalty policy debates in the United States

ABSTRACT

What role do religious themes play when state legislators in the United States debate the death penalty? We analyze floor speeches delivered during debate on death penalty repeal bills in three states to systematically consider who speaks of religion and what they say. We find religion is discussed in about one in seven death penalty speeches, with advocates and opponents of capital punishment referencing religion roughly proportionally. Catholic legislators do speak of religion somewhat more frequently in their death penalty remarks than members with no public religious affiliation. Most notable though is the orientation of the religion remarks. Those who invoke religion in opposition to the death penalty are much more likely to cite religion as a personal source of guidance. Those who invoke religion in support of the death penalty are much more likely to cite religion as a universal, immutable truth applicable to all. We argue that this difference in religious rhetoric has important implications for democratic representation.

KEYWORDS:

• Death penalty
• Religion
• State legislatures

1. Introduction

“Do you think the people we put to death can go to Heaven, or are they headed straight to Hell? In your religious beliefs, do you think that any human being is beyond redemption?” asked Nebraska State Senator Roy Baker during a floor debate on a death penalty repeal bill. Like many legislators, Baker framed the death penalty question on religious terms that put the moral questions at issue in rather stark relief and directly challenged his colleagues on what he saw as a central point of contention.

Here we study the floor speeches of state legislators in the United States debating the death penalty to consider how often they speak of religion. We ask whether discussion of the death penalty in religious terms is related to such matters as member religion, occupation, party, and race. We then delve into the nature of those religious comments by differentiating between those who speak of religion as a source of personal belief versus those who refer to religious values as immutable and universal. At stake is both an avenue to understand how members see, think, and talk about an important issue and a means to understand how religion may serve to include or exclude diverse and divergent views and constituent input.

2. Religion in governing

The appropriate role of religion in the governing process has been the subject of impassioned debate. Rawls (1996) and Habermas (2006) give voice to a line of theoretical reasoning which supports limitations, some would say exclusions, on faith’s place in the public sphere. Rawls argues that citizens “should be ready to explain the basis of their actions to one another in terms each could reasonably expect that others might endorse as consistent with their freedom and equality” (Rawls, 1996, p. 218). This “duty of civility,” he argues, requires us to confine ourselves to non-religious justifications in deliberating over how to use our “common coercive force” (Rawls, 1996, p. 217) because to do otherwise would dilute the otherwise equal status of nonbelievers in public debate.

By contrast, Neuhaus (1986) suggests governing without faith would be devoid of order and purpose. Neuhaus (1986, p. 130) writes of religion as a “comprehensive belief system” that “speaks to the human condition in all its aspects, including the right ordering of public life.” While Rawls depicts faith in governing as a threat to equality, Neuhaus sees faith as a source of equality. “Religion is the singular institution that both keeps the state under transcendent judgement and affirms the divinely given nature of the rights of persons, especially the most vulnerable in society,” Neuhaus (1986, p. 118) asserts.

2.1. Religion in the legislature

Regardless of one’s position in the debate on whether religion should be a force in the public sphere, there is a dawning scholarly awareness that religion clearly is a force in the public sphere. For one, religion has influenced the behavior, thinking and rhetoric of many legislators (Guth, 2014). The evidence on this point has grown of late, even as much of the quantitative legislative analysis produced by scholars has traditionally overlooked religion entirely. Wald (2014, p. 157), for example, writes, “It is remarkable to discover how little attention has been devoted to the study of the religious factor in congressional behavior.” Guth (2014, p. 300) seconds the notion, adding, “despite the pervasive influence of religion on U.S. electoral politics, there has been little analysis of its role in legislative institutions.” This, Guth (2014, p. 300) deems, is nothing short of “neglect.” This neglect manifests itself in major works of legislative analysis simply ignoring religion, as if religious beliefs, practices, and identities have played no role in a legislator’s decisions and behavior. For example, Kingdon’s (1989) seminal 346-page work on voting decisions in Congress makes precisely zero mentions of religion as an influence on how members vote, think, or speak about policy.¹

While the typical study of legislative roll call voting may not include any acknowledgement of the influence of religion, several studies have systematically pursued the question. In the main, these studies find that religion exerts a considerable effect on legislative roll calls and member ideology (Arnon, 2018; Fastnow et al., 1999; Guth, 2014). While studies find evidence of a religious influence on legislators’ stances on moral issues like abortion (Karol & Thurston, 2020), research similarly has found considerable effects of member religion on their policy preferences even on issues like the environment that are not typically cast in religious terms (Newman et al., 2016). The religion of constituents has also been found to exert an influence on legislative position taking (Edwards Smith et al., 2010). Overall, McTague and Pearson-Merkowitz (2013) make the case that the hardening of ties between evangelical Christians and the Republican Party has effectively contributed to the policy polarization that defines the modern Congress.

Of course, it is an oversimplification to suggest there is a religion effect on legislative behavior when, in reality, there are clearly gradations of effects dependent on both the religion in question (McTague & Pearson-Merkowitz, 2015) and the member’s intensity of religious connection (Yamane & Oldmixon, 2006). And even as members may strongly subscribe to certain tenets of their faith, they may entirely dismiss others. As Oldmixon and Hudson (2008) show in their study of Catholic members of Congress, many Republican Catholics diverge from their church’s social responsibility message arguing the church’s teachings are not authoritative on the subject.

Beyond influencing legislators’ policy positions, religion has also been linked to what policies members talk about and how they present issues. Marchetti and O’Connell (2018) find a relationship between member and constituent religion and use of religious frames when U.S. House members discuss abortion. Blackstone and Oldmixon (2015) identify a relationship between member religion and the subjects chosen by U.S. House members during open-subject one-minute speeches. Dreier et al. (2021) note that U.S. Senators appear to employ more religious references in relatively more fraught/uncertain moments.

2.2. Religion as personal or universal

Acknowledging that religion plays a role in the modern U.S. policy debate naturally suggests the need to address whether a religious-infused politics can accommodate a full range of opinion and dissent. While Rawls (1996) sees religious reasoning in the public sphere as an attempt to dominate the public conversation—and effectively exclude non-members—Greenawalt (1994) argues that there is a place for legislators who treat religious beliefs like any personal moral conviction. Which is to say, Greenawalt believes such arguments should be presented as personal conclusions rather than immutable, universal truths. “The dangers of conflict and alienation are considerable if officials commonly speak the language of religious truth in support of their policy judgements,” Greenawalt concludes (Greenawalt, 1994, p. 554).

Greenawalt’s distinction between personal beliefs and immutable religious truths aligns with the work of scholars who make a case that religious beliefs can be presented and seen as inclusive or exclusive. Berger (2017) sees the potential for religious pluralism in the public sphere when such beliefs can be considered voluntary. Karpov (2002) uses public opinion data to show that Americans who are actively religious but not seeking a politics dominated by religion tend to demonstrate respect for the relevance and value of others’ beliefs. By contrast, Karpov finds that Americans who prefer a government dominated by religion are largely intolerant of diverging views.

Considering the debate on the role of religion in the public square in terms of universal, directive truths with immutable implications versus something more personal, limited, and informative helps move the larger question into a more realistic realm. As Yates (2007) and Walhof (2013) adroitly argue, the relationship between religion and politics is too complex to meaningfully confine itself to the diametrically opposed notions that religion must be banished from politics or should reign supreme. Indeed, taking Rawls (1996) a step further, when he calls for a politics justified on mutually acceptable terms, a personal, informative view of religion seems to fit within that constraint. A religious belief presented as personal, limited, and informative rather than universal and immutable would hold the potential to achieve mutual acceptability in Rawls’ or Greenawalt’s view because personal conclusions can be answered, can be met with arguments and alternatives. Neither legislators with other beliefs nor constituents would be excluded from such a discussion. Universal, immutable truths, however, are essentially exclusionary—no alternate argument from a colleague, no entreaty from a constituent can possibly be given meaningful consideration when a legislator asserts their faith and its implications to be unassailable. Indeed, such a mindset would serve to frustrate the core tenets of a deliberative democracy (for example, Stanley, 2022).

Consider the contrast between the comments from Nebraska State Senator Mark Christensen and his colleague Heath Mello. Christensen said on the floor of the Nebraska senate that constituents of his had promised to show him passages of the Bible that stood in opposition to the death penalty. After meeting with them, he said he told the constituents that they had failed to cite sufficient biblical passages to justify their view, and their visit had hardened his support for the death penalty:

You’ve actually convinced me to support the death penalty, in coming in here. Your group says you’re here to oppose it, but you didn’t come in and tell me what you said you was going to.

I’m going to share a scripture out of Genesis 9: 5–6: “Surely I will require your lifeblood; from every beast I will require it; from every man, from every man’s brother, I will require the life of man; whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed; for in the image of God he’s made man.” You know, in the Ten Commandments, too, if you go back to the original Hebrew on it, it says: “Thou shall not murder.” Not kill. Kill is justice.

This is the power of an immutable view. It cannot be debated. It cannot be defeated. In fact, to debate Senator Christensen on the point only reinforced the legislator’s belief in his position.

A personal, limited view, by contrast, invokes religion without exclusion. Senator Mello openly acknowledged that his faith-based values were his but that his colleagues justly brought their own such values to the debate:

Colleagues, the reality is we make these decisions based on our own faith, our own morals, and our own personal views. And I will, for one, not spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to convince you to accept what I view as my moral compass in my faith.

Based on studies that attempt to parse the relationship between religion, religiosity, specific belief tenets, and views on the death penalty, we hypothesize that use of personal and universal religious rhetoric will be related to support for the death penalty. Specifically, we expect that members who oppose the death penalty will be more likely to speak of religion in personal terms while those who support the death penalty will be more likely to speak of religion in universal terms.

Bones and Sabriseilabi (2018) find that while prayer and attendance at religious services is associated with lower support for the death penalty in the United States, those with a belief in hell tend to support the death penalty. They conclude that a “fundamentalist,” more absolute view of afterlife, feeds support for not only divine punishment but for the death penalty on Earth. Those who are more “spiritual” but less fundamentalist see faith on more personal terms and are more open to alternative views of punishment.

Similarly, Unnever et al. (2005) found that followers of fundamentalist sects see God as a dispassionate figure who acts as an emotionally detached moral judge, whereas those who perceive a loving image of God see a forgiving figure (see also Unnever et al., 2006). This feeds a gap between those who must weigh the merits of forgiveness in a conditional, individualized circumstance, and those who see condemnation as an absolute duty. Wessling (2017) adds that Christians who see conflict between a loving God and a vengeful God must wrestle with inconsistency or contradiction. Those who see wrath as an expression of love, on the other hand, have no conflict to reconcile and thus are more comfortable with expressions of absolute beliefs.

This line of work suggests a connection between those who hold more absolutist views and support for vengeance. Those who take a more conditional view of punishment are also apt to take a more conditional view of their religion’s teaching. This is not to suggest a complete absence of absolutists in opposition to the death penalty or conditional religious thinkers who support the death penalty in certain circumstances. However, the sum of previous research on religious beliefs and the death penalty suggests a relationship between absolutist certainty and death penalty support and conditional views and death penalty opposition. Thus we expect death penalty supporters to speak of their religion in more absolutist terms and death penalty opponents to speak of their religion in more personal terms.

3. Methods

After first examining who employs religious rhetoric in their death penalty speeches, our examination of legislators’ death penalty rhetoric explores this distinction between a universal, immutable, directive view of faith in politics versus a personal, limited, informative presentation of faith-based beliefs. To analyze the role of religion in the death penalty debate in the United States, we studied the entirety of floor debate on death penalty bills in the Connecticut legislature in 2009 and 2012, the Illinois legislature in 2011, and the Nebraska State Senate in the 2012–2013 and 2015 sessions. These three states comprise the contemporary universe of states that (1) have debated the death penalty and (2) maintain full transcript records of state legislative floor debate. Fortuitously, these three states are distinct in political culture (see, for example, Elazar, 1966) as well as in legislative structure, as Nebraska features the nation’s only unicameral legislature while Connecticut and Illinois have a traditional bicameral House of Representatives and Senate. The death penalty repeal vote passed in all three states, though the effect of the vote was overturned in Nebraska by a voter referendum.²

Across the three states, legislators gave 442 floor speeches on the death penalty in the years under study, amounting to 344,318 words in total. With the help of trained coders, we analyzed the entirety of each speech to categorize it for the direction of the speech (in support or opposition to the death penalty) and for arguments made in favor or against the death penalty. Coders read each speech word for word and were instructed to flag as religious content any comment that refers to religious texts, religious teachings, religious leaders, a deity, or any assertion that religion was related to the member’s position or the member’s underlying philosophy. Because humans were reading these speeches—rather than a machine-coding protocol often used in content analysis and prone to errors inherent in failing to understand words in context (See, for example, Grimmer & Stewart, 2013 on machine coding and Woodrum, 1984 on the difficulty using machine techniques on religious subject matter)—we can reliably distinguish between instances in which the very same word has a different meaning.

Consider the word faith, a word that one might reasonably expect to connote religious meaning. Nebraska State Senator Brad Ashford said:

We need only look at the crime stats that were presented in the committee to see that crime goes up and down based on factors unrelated totally to the death penalty. So I cannot, members, in good faith, present to you any other option than to get rid of this punishment.

We code the comment as non-religious since here the word faith clearly does not refer to spiritual beliefs but rather to logic and integrity. When Nebraska State Senator Kathy Campbell said:

My mother would always say, “Do not wear your faith on your sleeve.” And so it will have to suffice to tell you that this time I listened to my faith and all the information I had been given and changed my position to support the repeal of the death penalty,

we code the comment as religious since it does refer to her spiritual beliefs. Connecticut State Representative Stephen Dargan said, “And it’s very difficult to stand here with Father Peter Dargan, Sister Mary Faith Dargan, and the arguments they’ve given over the years to me that we’re the only Western civilized country that has the death penalty.” Here the word faith itself does not refer to religion but to a person’s name, but the larger context around the word of course does refer to religion. An intercoder reliability check was conducted with 50 randomly chosen speeches assigned to multiple coders. There was 100% agreement on which speeches included religious content.

Following the line of argument in Greenawalt (1994), Berger (2017), and Karpov (2002), speeches identified with religious content were further analyzed to code for expressions of personal values or immutable truths. We follow the work of linguists and communications scholars like Su et al. (2017) who, in a very different context, measure what they call the “level of certitude.” Specifically, we ask whether the religious reference was presented as personal, limited, or informative (this is how I think about this issue) or universal, immutable, and directive (this is how you should/must think about this issue). We seek to distinguish between religious sentiments that suggest limits on their applicability from those that are presented in terms suggesting they cannot be reasonably questioned or must be obeyed by others.

“My faith teaches me to respect the dignity of every single life, not the ones that are politically popular, not to go with the majority, but to respect every single life. That’s my moral compass,” said State Senator Steve Lathrop of Nebraska, a death penalty opponent. We label Lathrop’s religious language as personal/limited. He specifically indicates that he is explaining the origin of his view and does not suggest it must be obeyed by others. When Illinois State Senator Kwame Raoul of Illinois discussed his death penalty views, he explicitly said he could not impose his faith on his colleagues:

As a child I was raised in the Catholic Church and many of the values that are instilled in me arise from that upbringing. ... I cannot, in this chamber, make any such imposition as to what your values should be, what your faith should be. I will let you reconcile—make the reconciliation yourself. I will simply tell you that we cannot afford to continue to have a death penalty in Illinois.

Those espousing a universal, immutable view do not speak in terms of the limits of their personal faith. “God has given civil governments the sword and he expects us to use it in capital cases” said State Senator Bill Kintner of Nebraska, a death penalty proponent. Kintner directly states to his fellow legislators that God has an expectation for their behavior. In another speech, Kintner avers that there must be no change in any faithful person’s position on the death penalty. “Justice is what the Bible calls us to do, and when we look at the Bible our morals and true justice do not evolve, because they are rooted in the eternal immutable God who created us.”

As a test of intercoder reliability, multiple readers analyzed 25 speeches with religious content. The personal/limited versus universal/immutable measurement achieved recognized standards of reliability (Krippendorff’s alpha > 0.67). A third coder was used to resolve any instances in which there was a disagreement. For further detail on the process, an appendix offers a look at two randomly chosen religious comments and the logic of how they were coded. In addition to coding death penalty speeches, we collected various data points on the legislators themselves, including their party, race, education, margin of victory, and religion.

To determine religious affiliation, we first examined official legislative biographies. If the information was not included in an official biography, we expanded our search to include campaign websites, media coverage and political aggregator websites (such as Ballotpedia.org) that include personal details about legislators. If no public source listed a member’s religion, we took this as an indication that the member presents themselves as “not publicly affiliated.” Of course it is possible that members could have religious beliefs that have not made their way into the public record. However, given the ease with which they could do so, we take it as meaningful when they choose not to list a religious affiliation in their official biography and otherwise do not communicate their religion in public settings.³ Catholic, Christian, and “not publicly affiliated” comprise the three largest classifications found, but other religious affiliations found include Baptist, Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Greek Orthodox, Jewish, Lutheran, Methodist, Mormon, Presbyterian, Protestant, Unitarian, and United Methodist.

4. Results

Consistent with the eventual outcome of the votes, across the three states 51.7% of the speeches given were anti-death penalty, 45.3% favored the death penalty, and 3.1% did not argue a position. Both those speaking in favor of the death penalty (13.5%) and those speaking against (14.5%) employed religious frames in roughly one in seven speeches.

As one might expect, use of religious frames was more frequent among members with a public religious affiliation (15.4%) than among members who are not publicly affiliated (10.1%), a difference that is statistically significant (p > .05, T-test). Scholars have noted the effect of Catholic faith on death penalty positions (Mooney & Lee, 2000), but the bivariate data do not suggest a large difference in use of religious frames between those members who are Catholic (15.9%) and those with a religion other than Catholic (15.1%).

Religious argumentation in support or opposition to the death penalty can provide a way for elected officials to communicate their ideals and virtues to their constituents, specifically their constituents who share a similar religious identity. Even unreligious legislators may also use religious argumentation and reasoning to connect with the values of their constituents. In his floor speech, Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers, who identifies as an agnostic, for example, cited the chairman of the Nebraska Catholic Conference to buttress his anti-death penalty stance. Politicians are generally rational actors who recognize that catering to religious groups with substantial voting blocs improves re-election chances (Robinson, 2014). Beyond an effect of member religion, there was a large difference between the political parties. Republicans were more than twice as likely (19.3%) to employ religious frames as Democrats (7.6%), a difference that is statistically significant (p > .05, T-test).

While the bivariate results support the conclusion that party and religion affect the likelihood of using religious frames in death penalty speeches, we further test their influence in a logistic regression (dependent variable is religious frame use: yes = 1, no = 0). Based on previous work on legislative decision making (Poole & Rosenthal, 2017; Shor & McCarty, 2011) and legislative rhetoric (Gring‐Pemble, 2001), we also include variables on member race, their state, their margin of victory in their last election, and whether they have a law degree. With regard to the latter variable, research has not surprisingly found that lawyer-legislators tend to talk about the death penalty differently, being far more likely to invoke arguments that center on the Constitution and applicable law and being considerably less likely to discuss their position in terms of religion (Niven & Plener Cover, 2018).

As shown in Table 1, the logistic regression model shows three variables—state (Nebraska), religion (Catholic), and profession (lawyer)—have statistically significant effects on the likelihood of invoking a religious argument. Odds ratios are provided for the statistically significant variables and show that, holding all other variables constant, legislators who identified themselves as Catholic were slightly more than twice as likely to utilize a religious frame in their speeches on the death penalty. Legislators from Nebraska were about 1.6 times more likely to discuss religion. Meanwhile, legislators who are also lawyers were 72% less likely to discuss religion in their death penalty remarks. While the bivariate results did not show a marked difference between Catholic legislators and members of other religions with respect to use of religious themes, the logistic regression results suggest that after controlling for factors including party and issue position that Catholic faith is a powerful force here.

Table 1. Religious theme use logistic regression.

	B	S.E.	Wald	Odds Ratio
Position on Death Penalty (Support)	.58	.38	1.03
Party (Republican)	.78	.57	.01
Race (White)	.77		.01
Lawyer	−1.27*	.521	6.41	.28
State (Connecticut)	.49	1.13	.25
State (Nebraska)	2.70*	1.11	5.91	1.61
Religion (Catholic)	.79*	.39	3.51	2.20
Religion (No Public Religion)	.26	.49	.40
Margin of Victory	.01	.01	1.67
Constant	−7.20*	1.79	9.52

N = 442.

Chi-Square 43.0.

Psuedo-r2 = .120.

*p < .05.

Indeed, some Catholic members explicitly note that both their personal religious experience and the expectations of their religious constituents are central to their death penalty thinking. As death penalty opponent Nebraska State Senator Bob Krist put it:

But let me also tell you that I stand here today having been educated as a Catholic my whole life: Our Lady of Lourdes grade school, Creighton Prep high school, and St. Thomas ... now I have a responsibility to myself and to my constituents. I represent a district that has an incredible amount of Catholic parishes, Christian parishes, Christian churches. And I have canvassed my district, and I know what they want. Preponderantly, they are looking for me to make a statement and support LB543. That is, support the repeal of the death penalty here in Nebraska. I intend to do that.

Conversely, the party effect found in the bivariate data does not hold up in the regression analysis. While the bivariate data showed a gap such that Republicans were more likely to invoke religion than Democrats, some combination of religion and profession (there are more Democratic lawyers than Republican lawyers) apparently has a greater independent effect than the party itself.

The higher rate of religious rhetoric in Nebraska could be a result of the slightly higher rates of religious participation in Nebraska than Connecticut or Illinois.⁴ There is also the possibility that the mirroring effect in persuasive rhetoric (for example, Peterson & Limbu, 2009) took hold in in which the use of religious rhetoric in debate invited further religious rhetoric to facilitate connecting with previous speakers or in aid of trying to refute them within the same context. Neither position on the death penalty nor race independently affected the use of religious themes. Similarly, margin of victory was unrelated to use of religious themes suggesting that religious rhetoric is not shaped by how popular or politically strong a member might be.

4.1. Personal versus immutable religious rhetoric

Examining the nature of the religious comments made reveals a massive difference in the use of personal/limited/informative versus universal/immutable/directive language. This difference was most consistently apparent not on the basis of religion or party, but on the position taken on the death penalty. Consistent with our hypothesis, opponents of the death penalty favored personal religious messages by a margin of 6 to 1, while supporters of the death penalty employed universal religious messages by a margin of almost 5 to 1 (p < .05, T-test). We further test the strength of this relationship in a logistic regression (dependent variable is religious frame: immutable = 1, personal = 0) using the same variables from the previous model. (Speakers who did not use religious themes are not included in this analysis). The results shown in Table 2 strongly support the conclusion that one’s position on the death penalty shapes the frame of religious rhetoric. In fact, position on the death penalty was the only variable to reach statistical significance. Applying the odds ratio here suggests that supporters of the death penalty were 5.2 times more likely to employ universal/immutable frames than were opponents of the death penalty.

Table 2. Use of universal/immutable religious frames logistic regression.

	B	S.E.	Wald	Odds Ratio
Position on Death Penalty (Support)	40.50**	13.38	8.89	5.21
Party (Republican)	17.47	22.81	.54
Race (White)	16.52	22.02	.54
Lawyer	−15.92	9.23	1.96
State (Connecticut)	20.22	24.86	.17
State (Nebraska)	−.73	.74	.88
Religion (Catholic)	−18.27	11.69	2.42
Religion (No Public Religion)	−17.36	18.54	.87
Margin of Victory	−.04	.04	1.42
Constant	−96.78	115.18

N = 50.

Chi-Square = 38.3.

Psuedo-r2 = .661.

**p < .01.

The difference in language is nearly as stark as the difference in the data. Among those opposed to the death penalty, Connecticut State Senator Len Suzio presented his religious position in personal, limited terms:

I try to be a good, serious Catholic, and when my church teaches up on an issue like this, and the Bishops speak out, I listen. I listen carefully, and I think. And in the last year, I’ve done more reflection and thinking about this issue that I’ve ever done in my life knowing that it might very well come to a vote in this chamber. ... One of the things that I was taught in my moral teaching, as a Catholic, is that the end doesn’t justify the means. No matter what good you want to do in life, you can’t achieve that good using morally illicit means. ... I think we should overwhelmingly reject it. I think it fails on the most important reason, morally, it’s deficient.

I try.

I listen.

I listen.

I think.

I was taught.

I think.

I think.

In the passage, Senator Suzio makes plain, again and again, that he is referring to his thoughts, his reflections, his conclusions. Rather than suggesting the answer was obvious, he says it required reflection. Rather than suggesting that he has identified immutable truths, in effect he invites his colleagues to give their own deep thought to the issue. Senator Suzio and others who spoke in personal/limited religious frames are clear in their beliefs and issue positions, but apt to acknowledge that others too have well-considered views. Nebraska State Senator Laura Ebke, a death penalty opponent, directly acknowledged her faith provided an answer “for me, and perhaps only for me.” State Senator David Schnoor of Nebraska, a death penalty supporter, illustrates the nature of presenting religious views in universal/immutable/directive terms:

But that’s not what the Bible tells us. You know, we all, we talk about Christianity and our Christianity beliefs. Well, I want to read some Bible verses for you that talk about this. Exodus 21 talks about an eye for an eye. Numbers 35: Who so killeth any person, the murderer shall be put to death by mouth of the witness. That’s how we live. That’s how our Constitution was formed, based on these beliefs.

In another speech, Senator Schnoor sounded much the same universal/immutable note:

It is our duty to seek justice and the Bible tells us that. From the beginning, it tells us that. Genesis 9:6 says, whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed for in the image of God has God made man. So that’s one area. Romans 13: For the governing authority is God’s servant to do you good; but if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing; he is God’s servant, an agent of wrath for bringing punishment onto the wrongdoer.

In these passages, Senator Schnoor repeatedly speaks of beliefs he presents as both immutable and universal. Our Christianity beliefs. Our duty. He presents religious conclusions not as personal but as the very basis for governing and the Constitution. That’s how we live. That’s how our Constitution was formed, based on these beliefs These are not, to be clear, ideas that he views as being his personal, limited conclusions, nor does he present these beliefs as being subject for debate.

Nebraska State Senator Mike Groene, also a death penalty supporter, directed his colleagues to “read the Bible” to correct their misconceptions:

I’ve heard how we evolved. Read the Bible, folks. That was 2,000 years ago. Some of that stuff was in there for 6,000 years. Has the human condition changed? Has it evolved? No, it hasn’t. There’s evil in the world and civilized societies have always handled it. The death penalty is a moral right of a civil society.

Schnoor and Groene’s colleague and fellow death penalty supporter Senator Bill Kintner similarly speaks in universal/immutable terms proclaiming that the United States stands apart from its peer nations on the death penalty precisely because the U.S. has better Christians:

We’re doing exactly as God has asked us to do in this. And I would submit to you that we’re the only western country that still executes people because we’re the only country that still has vestiges left of Christianity. Europe has pretty much moved from God. Less than 10% of the people in Europe even go to church. And we’re the last country where still 40–50% go to church every Sunday. And it’s a fact that we still have laws based upon our Christian heritage and values.

When voices advancing immutable/universal religious truths identify gaps between government and religion they do so to assert the superiority and supremacy of God’s law relative to the lamentable shortcomings of current public policy. Nebraska State Senator Tom Carlson specifically called for efforts to resist the government and advance God’s law:

But what I really struggle with is eliminating the death penalty on the worst in our society but allowing the death penalty to continue on the innocent, defenseless unborn. Continuing that practice is just not acceptable in our Creator’s plan. There’s a time to resist the government, to go against the government, to fight the government when the policy is against God’s law. If we eliminated the death penalty for the unborn in all cases, it would be more plausible, in my opinion, to seriously further consider the elimination of the death penalty for the worst of the worst.

To be sure, there are anti-death penalty voices who used universal/immutable language and pro-death penalty voices who used personal/limited language. But in the vast majority of cases, the religious dialogue saw opponents of the death penalty use personal/limited language when speaking of religion while supporters of the death penalty asserted their universal truths. The import of this distinction, following the line of reasoning from Greenawalt (1994) and Berger (2017) and the data from Karpov (2002), is that assertions of universal religious truths are not likely to be productive of pluralistic, inclusive policy debate.

Several examples in these death penalty debates point to the potential for universal/immutable beliefs to give rise to something close to religion-based taunting. Lydia Brasch, a Nebraska state senator who supports the death penalty and spoke in universal terms, mocked a colleague by asserting there is no reason for anyone who does not share her religious beliefs to care about human life:

We have heard Senator Chambers tell us several times ... that he does not believe in God. So, I don’t understand why [death penalty] repeal is a priority to him.

In a separate exchange, the target of Brasch’s barbed comments, Senator Chambers, engaged in a colloquy with his colleague Senator Kintner over Kintner’s assertion that the government must follow God’s will.

Chambers: Senator Kintner, you said God established the government to do various things. Did you say that?

Kintner: Yes.

Chambers: Did God put me in the legislature?

Kintner: Yes.

Chambers: You ought to listen to me then.

Even those not given to mocking colleagues were at times left to question how a government body could function while subservient to religion. State Senator John McKinney of Connecticut, a death penalty supporter, asked his colleagues to set aside their faith and focus on governing:

For those of you who are motivated by religious, philosophical, moral reasons, God bless you. But we are establishing public policy for the people of the State of Connecticut, and we need to be forthright with them.

Similarly, Representative Brendan Sharkey of Connecticut, a death penalty opponent, reminded his colleagues of their Earthly responsibilities:

These are human laws, not God’s. God—in whatever form that we believe—has his/her own means of retribution against evil.

5. Discussion and conclusion

We find, overall, that legislators supporting and opposing the death penalty referenced religion at similar rates in their speeches. Member religion and member occupation were among the major factors influencing the use of religious themes, such that Catholic members were notably more likely to employ religious themes and members who work as lawyers were notably less likely to do so. The orientation of those religious references varied widely by the direction of a member’s comments, however, with supporters of the death penalty predominantly presenting their religious beliefs as universal and immutable while opponents typically presented their religious beliefs as personal and limited.

Given that the data suggest that religion is an important part of the death penalty debate in the state legislatures under study, the distinction between advancing personal religious views versus immutable views may serve to advance the debate on religion in the public sphere past blanket rejection (Rawls, 1996) or acceptance (Neuhaus, 1986) and toward understanding that injections of religion into policy debates may not be inherently exclusionary nor inherently sympathetic.

Even before the United States became a country, the intersection of religion and justice was a controversial and confounding part of American history (see for example, King & Mixon, 2010). Here, assertions of the universal and immutable applicability of religious values may well threaten basic precepts of deliberative democracy (for example, Lester, 2006) and threaten to exclude those with differing beliefs from full status in public debate (Rawls, 1996). The notion that through debate and the exchange of ideas our political process can produce superior public-spirited outcomes depends on the existence of freedom, openness to diverse thoughts, and respectful deliberation (Lester, 2006). Assertions of universal truths, by contrast, suggest exclusion, narrowness, and dismissal of alternatives. Lafont (2009, 2014) makes the case that a healthy democratic debate is threatened when religion morphs from a source of ideas to a source of truth because such assertions are incompatible with consensus building. Ultimately, the pluralism of ideas that is at the heart of deliberative democracy (Stanley, 2022) requires that we value and incorporate many views rather than accept only one way of thinking about issues.

Robinson (2014) and others have asked how effective is religious rhetoric politically. This work suggests the need for further study on the relative political merits of religious rhetoric that distinguishes between personal and universal beliefs. The slow but steady decline of the death penalty in the United States (for example, Garrett et al., 2017) invites speculation that personal, more open rhetoric is advantageous. Death penalty proponents, on the other hand, currently find themselves in the odd position of defending what was once a seemingly unassailable policy preference (for example, Wallace, 1989) with what they assert are unassailable truths, and in the process losing ground.

Religious beliefs are entwined in numerous other issue stances including abortion (Wiecko & Gau, 2008). We see the findings here as a clear call to further investigate the place of religion and the personal/universal distinction with regard to other policy debates. There is also merit in considering whether individual legislators strike a different tone on religion based on the issue at hand, a possibility suggested in the comments of Illinois Senator William Haine that are included in the appendix. Further, research on the public response to religious policy messages would also be invaluable especially with respect to Karpov’s (2002) data showing a gap in tolerance of religious messages related to support for theocratic notions of governing.

Ultimately, we believe there is significant value in understanding how legislators think about and talk about religion when dealing with issues like the death penalty—because the issue cannot be fully understood outside the context of religion. That is apparent both in how often religion comes up when state legislators debate the death penalty and also in what they say. “I don’t like to, and don’t agree with oftentimes, legislators bringing religion into the chamber and kind of going down that road,” said State Representative Jason Bartlett of Connecticut in his remarks on the death penalty bill, “But I do think that we have to.”

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to Quin Monson for comments on a previous draft and to Elizabeth Law for research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The one reference to religion in Kingdon (1989) comes in a quote from a member of Congress describing his political support back home. This comment goes unremarked upon by the author.

² We can make no claim that these states are representative of the 50 states or of roughly one dozen states that have debated the death penalty in the last 15 years. Rather, we assert that Connecticut, Illinois, and Nebraska are quite distinct states shaped by quite distinct death penalty realities. The issue in Illinois was powerfully influenced by a spate of exonerations from death row. The issue in Connecticut was powerfully influenced by a particularly heinous and prominent murder case that occurred in Cheshire, Connecticut. The issue in Nebraska, by contrast, largely played out without a central animating example (For more discussion on the context of the death penalty in the three states, see Niven & Plener Cover, 2018). Given differences between these three states, we assert that they offer a meaningful window into how the death penalty has been debated in the contemporary United States.

³ Of course, with the fragmentation of religious traditions and individualization of doctrines (Jennings, 2016), as well as the general decline in religious membership over the years (“Gallup Historical Trends: Religion,” n.d.), it may well be the case that some elected officials who are publicly unaffiliated may consider themselves to be religious and most likely believe in a divinity (Newport, 2011). Note, for purposes of analysis, members who labeled themselves agnostic were combined with those with no public affiliation.

⁴ For state by state data, see https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/attendance-at-religious-services/by/state/ and https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-religious-states.

APPENDIX

Examples of Personal/Limited Coding

Table

Speaker	Connecticut State Senator John McKinney	Illinois State Senator William Haine
Quote	So these are very difficult issues. I happen to believe as a person of faith that someone upstairs is going to sort all those things out and I’m just here to do the best I can. But I think, on balance, and I certainly would say it’s an extremely close call, Mr. President, on balance, I think our death penalty works in the State of Connecticut.	I have just a few points to make. One concerns the reference to the clerics, one of which is my own ordinary, who’ve signed a letter against the death penalty. That is their considered opinion. It is not now and it never has been, so far as I know as a communicant of the Catholic faith, the teaching of the church that capital punishment is immoral per se. Euthanasia, abortion, contraception, that’s immoral per se—not the imposition of the penalty of death in certain circumstances. That is reserved to the prudential judgement of the officers of the State, assuming the State is lawfully constituted and is not lawless in itself, such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and others.
Coder’s Logic	McKinney says this is a difficult issue (not clear cut) McKinney suggests that he can offer just one person’s view of what to do, and does not suggest that religion offers a direct answer to the death penalty question.	Haine directly states that religious thinking on the death penalty is a matter of personal opinion not settled religious doctrine. He further adds that the issue should be decided by the individual judgement of office holders.

Examples of Universal/Immutable Coding

Table

Speaker	Nebraska State Senator Lydia Brasch	Nebraska State Senator Mike Groene
Quote	We need to talk to God. Faith is just. There are scriptures that give government the authority to execute those who would commit horrific unquestionable crimes … There is no joy. There is no glory. It’s protection of innocent life, innocent from conception to innocent upon natural death.	I must inject in this decision the word of God because that is how I lead my life for the short time, the wink of an eye of time that I live here. Eternity is important to me. In Exodus Chapter 20, we are given the laws which we are to obey as individuals. Do not kill is one of those. Even the atheists among us know those ten rules to be good rules. But the very next chapter gives us rules for society, for a civilized society, for the collective. As an elected official, my duty is not to represent myself but the collective, the collective of the citizens of a civilized society. If one protects one’s life, it is self-defense. If one takes a life, it is murder. If one kills for retribution, it is vengeance. But when the collective society takes a life in the punishment of evil behavior, it is called justice.
Coder’s Logic	Brasch speaks in directives—We need to talk to God. Brasch directly states that scriptures support the death penalty and promulgates an absolute overarching policy based on scripture.	Groene suggest policy comes from God —I must inject the word of God. Groene directly ties scripture to establishing a need for the death penalty and leaves no room for those of other faiths to disagree—even the Atheists know.