Parolin, Kim called plan a ‘spectacle’
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that the U.S. public would be able to watch the December 3 firing-squad execution of Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said. He called the 2009 attack “a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks” and said Hasan would face “a firing squad of soldiers — as it should be.” President Trump said Thursday he was cancelling the livestream plan, citing the view that “many very good and well-meaning people would rather not watch him die.” An unidentified Department of Defense spokesperson wrote in an email to The Guardian that “the secretary is correct. It will be livestreamed. Details will follow.”
Hasan, a former Army major and psychiatrist, killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood in 2009. A military court sentenced him to death in August 2013.
The plan drew public support from leaders of Hegseth’s CREC, the denomination whose Washington, D.C., congregation, Christ Kirk DC, Hegseth attends. Douglas Wilson, the Idaho pastor who co-founded CREC, told Religion News that he “prefers public executions to those conducted in the recesses of a prison somewhere in the middle of the night,” adding that “executions in the scriptures were public.” Wilson told the outlet that public executions can “turn into a circus.” Wilson told The Guardian: “I support the execution of Hasan, and prefer public executions to private,” adding: “I prefer the older forms, like a firing squad, as opposed to attempts to ‘medicalize’ it, as with the recent botched execution by injection in Tennessee.” He said he had not spoken to Hegseth or anyone in his department about the livestream. He did stipulate that “the Pentagon has the responsibility to head off ghoulish behavior by some means,” while adding: “That will be challenging with a live stream.”
Julie Ingersoll, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of North Florida and the author of “Building God’s Kingdom,” a study of Christian reconstructionism, said: “There was a consensus among the early Christian reconstructionists that the death penalty for certain crimes was part of the Old Testament that is still applicable, and that executions should be public.” Ingersoll added: “I do think this is where Hegseth is getting this and, no, Wilson isn’t saying anything new.”
CREC pastors have for years publicly advocated the death penalty for what they describe as moral infractions including adultery, abortion, and homosexuality, and a podcaster from Hegseth’s former church has repeatedly called for executions to be public, The Guardian reported. Several CREC figures have expressed hostility to Muslims and Islam.
Wilson has promoted capital punishment as biblically authorized for decades. In a March 2 post on his blog, under the heading “A Proposal,” he wrote: “The death penalty should be applied to violent criminals — murderers (Ex. 21:12), rapists and kidnappers (Ex. 21:16), abortionists (Ex. 21:22), and so on.” In his 2023 book “Mere Christendom,” Wilson wrote that when Moses “commanded a man to be executed for picking up sticks on the sabbath, that too was holy, righteous, and good.” He argued in the same book that “when you give the state power to punish a blasphemer, you are giving the state the power to blaspheme with impunity.” In a January 17, 2010 post, Wilson took up a military commentator’s view that Hasan’s statement that the Qur’an outranked the Constitution was treason. “Now of course, Hasan was mistaken, but this was a question of fact, not of principle,” Wilson wrote. “The word of God outranks Madison, et al, and if the Qur’an were the word of God, then the constitution should just sit down and listen for a minute.”
Joshua Haymes, host of the Reformation Red Pill podcast on which Hegseth has appeared and a former pastoral intern at Hegseth’s Tennessee church, has gone further. In a March 28 episode he said of pornography producers: “Hang them in the streets. And I mean that. We need to bring back public executions.” In an episode uploaded last week, Haymes said that “if we would just reinstitute public executions,” the number of killings in what he called “high-density Black areas” of major cities would “fall to the floor.” Haymes wrote in an email to The Guardian: “Right now, over 50% of homicides in America are committed by around 6% of the population. That is an astoundingly devastating statistic. And most of the violent crime is being done by a small subset of black Americans who are continually reoffending.” He also said he “do believe that child pornographers (those who produce and distribute child pornography) should be executed” but “would stop short of capital punishment” for other pornographers.
The Anti-Defamation League lists a similar claim in its hate symbols database under the codes “13/52” and “13/90,” which it calls “a shorthand reference to racist propaganda claims by white supremacists against African Americans to depict them as savage and criminal in nature.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has said white supremacists “manipulate crime statistics in order to claim that nonwhite minorities, particularly African Americans, are far more crime-prone,” and identified Jared Taylor of American Renaissance among “white nationalist ideologues” who had “made considerable hay” from such figures. The Guardian reported in August 2025 that Haymes had endorsed Taylor’s views on X. Taylor has described himself as a “race realist” or “white advocate.” In a prior email, Haymes said: “I am not a white nationalist or white supremacist. My cousin is black, and my brother-in-law is Chinese, and I’m glad they’re here. I have no idea who that white nationalist is.”
According to The Guardian, Hegseth’s announcement also drew responses from figures associated with Christian nationalism. Last week, David Shannon, “Chocolate Knox” co-host of the CrossPolitic podcast, reposted another user’s request for “all the Bible verses supporting public executions for capital crimes.”
Ben Zornes, a pastor at Living Stones Reformed church in Moscow, Idaho, which was planted by Christ Church Moscow, said he supported the execution but had “concerns about making it a public spectacle, as I think public executions are for sober and mature societies, and ours is like a toddler.” He added: “A public execution should be solemn, and livestreaming it would compromise the gravity of the event, which is also why I am opposed to livestreaming church services.” Asked whether he agreed with Wilson’s preference for public over private executions, Zornes replied: “I do.” In an October 18, 2018 post, Zornes wrote that “rebellious sons, and unchaste daughters were a danger to covenantal faithfulness and thus were to be executed for the sake of the purity of the whole congregation,” and called efforts to abolish the death penalty “an example of us thinking we know better than God does.”
Sumpter, also a CrossPolitic co-host, wrote on March 13, 2025: “We can certainly begin by prohibiting public worship of false gods, legally suppressing Islam, Hinduism, etc.” On a June 26, 2025 episode of CrossPolitic titled “From 9/11 To a Muslim Mayor in NYC? The Rise of Islam in America,” Sumpter said Allah “is a real demon God.” On a November 21, 2025 episode he said Christians should “ask civil magistrates to outlaw mosques.” Haymes titled an August 7 episode “Christians MUST Support Banning Islam & Deporting Muslims,” and said in an April 17 debate: “No mosques, no calls to prayer, nothing like that.” Brooks Potteiger, pastor of Christ Kirk DC and previously of Hegseth’s Tennessee church, said in an August 30 sermon that “the idols of Hinduism and Islam have rushed in to fill the void.” Sumpter, Shannon, and Potteiger did not respond to requests for comment from The Guardian.
Religious leaders outside CREC publicly condemned the plan. On Saturday, Pope Leo wrote on X that “the common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment” — remarks that did not mention Hasan but were widely interpreted as a response to Hegseth’s announcement. The previous evening, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, had called the planned broadcast “certainly unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle.” Archbishop Paul Coakley, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, reportedly called the plan “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” Walter Kim, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said a livestreamed execution “risks turning one of the state’s most solemn responsibilities into a public spectacle.” The Guardian has also reported that Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the archbishop for the U.S. military, has condemned the plan.
Historians say public executions were common in the United States until they were moved indoors in part because they gave a platform for the executed to deliver any message they wanted. Michael Trotti, a professor of history at Ithaca College and the author of “The End of Public Execution,” said by email that in the North, executions were moved inside prison walls from the mid-19th century due to “growing middle-class discomfort with the spectacles of death,” which “coarsened those who watched them” and “might event attract criminals rather that being something that would curb crime.” In the South, public executions remained popular until the end of the century, Trotti said, until authorities “became convinced that these events were actually giving too much prominent, public authority to black condemned when they were asked if they had final words in front of massive mixed-race crowds, and to their pastors who were there to give final religious guidance and prayers/hymns.” “Public execution ended up being somewhat out of the control of any authority trying to enact it,” Trotti said, “for once the images are out there, they can serve many purposes. They can serve conservative purposes the state wants, but also radical purposes like the victims might want like being on a stage before a massive audience.”