The Founding Myth

by Andrew L Seidel

  One of the starkest conflicts between biblical and American principles is how each treats the guilty. The Eighth Amendment provides that “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” Yes, legislators are “tough on crime,” and America executes more prisoners than any other first-world country, landing on a list with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Pakistan for most citizens executed.2 But that is nothing compared to the bible, which overflows with barbaric, violent punishment and blood. Outside of the religious context, it would not be entirely fair to compare a modern justice system with the punishment norms of a tribe of Bronze Age herdsmen. Interpreting history using modern values, known as presentism, is frowned upon by historians. Our society is less primitive than the one that produced the bible, so how can we fairly judge history by the morality of today? Perhaps we shouldn’t; but the history is not the issue. The issue is biblical religion and morality. Christian nationalists are claiming not only that archaic standards influenced the thought and actions of the founders many centuries later, but also that Judeo-Christianity is the final authority on an absolute, universal morality. Therefore, we should judge Judeo-Christianity and its moral claims by the highest moral code of any time. Stephen Fry made this point nicely: “What is the point of the Catholic church if it says ‘oh, well we couldn’t know better because nobody else did.’ Then what are you for?”3 “Presentism” is beside the point when dealing with a theology that claims to be timeless, absolute, and perfect.

  The framers of the Constitution understood that social norms shift and accounted for those shifts using flexible language such as “cruel and unusual,” which defines a category of prohibited punishment in the Eighth Amendment. The “words of the Amendment are not precise, and…their scope is not static. The Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,” according to the Supreme Court.4 By building a standard that can mature, the founders recognized that morality and society inevitably progress. The evolving standard is itself antithetical to the Judeo-Christian idea that morality was perfected millennia ago. Indeed, the shifting standard indicts religion’s moral absolutes. The god-given inflexibility of biblical punishments is fundamentally opposed to the progressive standard in the Eighth Amendment.

  Judeo-Christianity’s claim to the moral high ground makes it perfectly fair to point out its atrocities—for instance, that the bible advocates burning people to death as punishment:5

  “When the daughter of a priest profanes herself through prostitution, she profanes her father; she shall be burned to death.” ~Leviticus 21:9.

  [The Lord said to Joshua] “And the one who is taken as having the devoted things shall be burned with fire, together with all that he has, for having transgressed the covenant of the LORD, and for having done an outrageous thing in Israel…. And all Israel stoned him to death; they burned them with fire, cast stones on them.” ~Joshua 7:10, 7:15, 7:25. “Devoted things” were the people and possessions of Canaan which the Lord commanded the Israelites to destroy, as in “devoted to the Lord for destruction.” ~Joshua 6:17.

  The first example treats a daughter’s actions as a crime against her father. In the second, an entire family is burned for not giving a bit of gold and silver to Yahweh’s treasury after the sack of Jericho.

  The New Testament also advocates this brutal punishment. In John 15:6, Jesus says, “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” So promiscuous women, sabbath-breakers, idol-worshippers, Jews, and non-Christians should be gathered and burned. Those who do not willingly kill and steal at their god’s command should be stoned, burned, and stoned again.

  Death by stoning—a punishment still used by extremist groups and in some parts of the Muslim world, typically as a sentence for adultery—is also mandated in the bible. Unlike modern execution methods, stoning requires the entire community to take part, ensuring all are responsible. This biblical punishment is imposed for relatively minor crimes. The tribe of Israel was required to bludgeon their family and friends with rocks for the following infractions—some as trivial as picking up a stick on the sabbath:

  1. Working—specifically, collecting sticks—on the sabbath. Numbers 15:32–36. “The Israelites…found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. Those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses, Aaron, and to the whole congregation. They put him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him outside the camp.’ The whole congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him to death.”

  2. Blasphemy. Leviticus 24:16. “One who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death; the whole congregation shall stone the blasphemer. Aliens as well as citizens, when they blaspheme the Name, shall be put to death.” Notice that god’s law differentiates between members of the tribe—neighbors or “citizens”—and aliens. Here, they receive the same punishment, but elsewhere, as we’ll see, they are treated very differently. The penalty is reiterated in 1 Kings 21:10: “Seat two scoundrels opposite him, and have them bring a charge against him, saying, ‘You have cursed God and the king.’ Then take him out, and stone him to death.”

  3. Suggesting another religion or god. Deuteronomy 13:5–10. “If anyone secretly entices you—even if it is your brother, your father’s son or your mother’s son, or your own son or daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your most intimate friend—saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods,’…you must not yield to or heed any such persons. Show them no pity or compassion and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be first against them to execute them, and afterwards the hand of all the people. Stone them to death for trying to turn you away from the Lord your God.”

  4. Being a stubborn child. Deuteronomy 21:18–21. “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother…then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death.”

  5. Being a medium or wizard. Look out, Harry Potter. Leviticus 20:27. “A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death; they shall be stoned to death, their blood is upon them.”

  6. Having premarital sex—if you are a woman. Deuteronomy 22:20–21. “[If] evidence of the young woman’s virginity was not found, then they shall bring the young woman out to the entrance of her father’s house and the men of her town shall stone her to death, because she committed a disgraceful act in Israel by prostituting herself in her father’s house.” Incidentally, if a man falsely accuses his new wife of premarital promiscuity, he is only fined.6

  7. A woman failing to cry out for help when she is raped. Deuteronomy 22:23–24. “If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife.”

  Numbers one through four are crimes against god—a supposedly all-powerful god. Number five is punished because it is a threat to god’s priests, who couldn’t have magicians stealing some of the awe that is due to their god. The final two crimes are threats to the patriarchy, so the women must be killed.

  Worshipping another god, suggesting that someone worship another god, and even proselytizing are protected by the Constitution. But they are capital crimes under biblical principles—as are the other so-called crimes for which the bible commands death: breaking the sabbath, blasphemy, promiscuity, obstinacy, being raped, and witchcraft—a crime with a unique history on t
he North American continent. It’s hard to quantify the misery caused by the biblical command “you shall not permit a witch to live.”7 Mark Twain tried:

  The Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.8

  Churches have since abandoned burning and stoning those accused of witchcraft. But Christian churches today still terrify parishioners and children with the prospect of being burned alive for eternity: hell.9 While almost every culture and religion has an afterlife, Jesus was the first to preach about it as a place of eternal punishment. The place of torment is mentioned 162 times in the New Testament and not once in the Old Testament.10 The Hebrew bible mentions an unseen world of the dead, Sheol. But Sheol has little in common with Jesus’s hell. It was not a place of punishment, but a silent shadow world. Literary heroes of the Hebrew bible such as Jacob,11 David,12 and even Jesus13 supposedly visited Sheol. Job longed to get there.14 Hell, on the other hand, is most certainly a place of punishment. According to the Book of Mark, Jesus taught that it is better to cut off your hand or foot or put out your eye than risk being “thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.”15 We are told to “fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.”16 The Christian bible describes hell as a “furnace of fire”;17 a place where the unworthy “will burn with unquenchable fire”;18 “the eternal fire” and “the hell of fire”;19 “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”;20 “eternal punishment”21 where everyone is “salted with fire”;22 a “place of torment” where residents are in constant “agony in these flames”;23 “a punishment of eternal fire”;24 and “the lake that burns with fire and sulfur,25 and “the lake of fire,”26 where those who worship other gods will “drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured unmixed into the cup of his anger, and they will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever. There is no rest day or night.”27

  Leading Christian writers from the first to the fifth centuries, taking their cues from the bible, were just as unflinching in their descriptions of hell. Ignatius of Antioch thought that the “defiled shall go into unquenchable fire.”28 Irenaeus wrote of “The eternal fire for those who should transgress.”29 Cyprian specifically tied eternal torture to people’s innate fear of death, “Let him fear to die, on whom, at his going away from life an eternal flame will lay pains that never cease.”30

  Augustine of Hippo devoted all twenty-seven chapters of the twenty-first book of his The City of God (426 CE) to an exposition on eternal torment, deeming it “absurd to suppose that either body or soul will escape pain in the future punishment.”31 After quoting many of the biblical passages cited above, Augustine pointed out that both body and soul are tortured, the body by everlasting fire, and that “in a body thus tormented, the soul also is tortured with a fruitless repentance.”32

  These Christian fathers favor a grisly place, but it is nothing compared to what a truly macabre imagination can do with the heat, torture, and eternity. The colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) sermonized about the “great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God.”33 In a particularly foul metaphor, Edwards likened humans to insects subject to his vicious god: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire;…you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”

  Edwards also spoke admiringly of a future state where he, one of the saved, could watch the damned burn: “When you shall be in this state of suffering, the glorious inhabitants of heaven shall go forth and look on the awful spectacle, that they may see what the wrath and fierceness of the Almighty is, and when they have seen it, they will fall down and adore that great power and majesty.”34 Many Christian thinkers appear to take a perverse pleasure in the idea of hell. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the eternal torture of the unworthy will be “delightful” entertainment for the saints: “In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.”35 The third-century Carthaginian author Tertullian was even more joyful at the prospect: “What sight shall wake my wonder, what my laughter, my joy and exultation? as I see all those kings…groaning in the depths of darkness! And the magistrates who persecuted the name of Jesus, liquefying in fiercer flames than they kindled in their rage against the Christians!”36 This hellish delight was alive at America’s founding. The Congregationalist minister and president of Yale, Ezra Stiles, smugly recorded Ethan Allen’s death in his diary: “Died in Vermont the profane and impious Deist Gen Ethan Allen, Author of the Oracles of Reason [sic], a Book replete with scurrilous Reflexions on Revelation.—‘And in Hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments,’” quoting Luke 16:23.37

  This outlook is thriving among today’s Christians. While revising this chapter, I received a voicemail at the Freedom From Religion Foundation office, laced with this selfsame joy: “You all are gonna burn in Hell—goody, goody, goody…. I’m a Christian…I hope y’all burn in Hell. You deserve it!”38

  THE EIGHTH AMENDMENT TO THE US CONSTITUTION could have been written with hell in mind: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” The exact scope of “cruel and unusual” has not been fully explored by the Supreme Court, partly because of the standard’s inherent changeability.39 But the court has declared that the “basic concept underlying the Eighth Amendment is nothing less than the dignity of man.”40 Relatively few cases involve this clause, and “in an enlightened democracy such as ours,” pointed out the high court, “this is not surprising.”41 The court also noted that the “State has the power to punish, [but] the Amendment stands to assure that this power be exercised within the limits of civilized standards. Fines, imprisonment, and even execution may be imposed depending upon the enormity of the crime, but any technique outside the bounds of these traditional penalties is constitutionally suspect.”42

  Techniques such as crucifixion, which is simply death by torture, exceed those bounds. The Supreme Court has explicitly said so. “If the punishment prescribed for an offense against the laws of the State were manifestly cruel and unusual as burning at the stake, crucifixion, breaking on the wheel, or the like,” wrote the court in 1890, “it would be the duty of the courts to adjudge such penalties to be within the constitutional prohibition.”43 Christians venerate the crucifixion; the evidence hangs around their necks and in their churches. Revering another person’s torture and murder is disturbing. Although crucifixion is not itself a Judeo-Christian principle, the idea that sins can be forgiven on the sacrifice of another is a Christian principle, one that we’ll explore in the next chapter.

  Other cruel and unusual punishments, according to the court, include physical penalties, such as fifteen years of “hard and painful labor” in irons for falsifying records.44 So is nonphysical punishment such as denationalization for deserting an army post45 or “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners.”46 Even being jailed with a five-pack-a-day smoker is cruel and unusual.47 One would think that if being locked up with a smoker is cruel, the “everlasting sulphur” in hell is too.

  The eternity of hell alone would raise serious issues under any standard of cruel or unusual punishment. Unlike the hell in Dante’s Infer
no, the bible does not mention varying levels. Hell is one-size-fits-all, and the punishment is eternal. That sinners are punished eternally for a finite crime is arguably hell’s greatest offense to justice; yet this did not concern St. Augustine. He scorned “those tender-hearted Christians who decline to believe that any, or that all of those whom the infallibly just Judge may pronounce worthy of the punishment of hell, shall suffer eternally, and who suppose that they shall be delivered after a fixed term of punishment, longer or shorter according to the amount of each man’s sin.”48 Aquinas made this same point, though in a slightly different manner: “The higher the person against whom it is committed, the graver the sin—it is more criminal to strike a head of state than a private citizen—and God is of infinite greatness. Therefore an infinite punishment is deserved for a sin committed against Him.”49 In Christianity, the punishment does not fit the crime. Every crime rates the same, eternal punishment.

  Fifteenth-century Italian engraving depicting Satan and demons torturing sinners in hell.

  Some modern liberal Christians simply describe hell as an eternal separation from Jesus and ignore the persistent, graphic descriptions offered by their forebears and the bible. This interpretation is based on a single quote from Second Thessalonians. On Judgment Day, “those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus…will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, separated from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.”50 But this separation “from the presence” is an addition to the torture, not a substitute for it. Even liberally construed, this interpretation does not end the conflict with the Eighth Amendment. Creative interpretation might limit the agony of the hell-bound, but not the infinity of the punishment. Christopher Hitchens convincingly compared Christianity to a “celestial North Korea,” and he was careful to add that “at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea. Does the Koran or the Bible offer you that liberty? No. The tyranny, the misery, the utter ownership of your entire personality, the smashing of your individuality only begins at the point of death. This is evil. This is a wicked preachment.” No matter what the crime, hell is forever. An infinite punishment for a finite crime is antithetical to the Eighth Amendment.51