Pete Hegseth Church Allies Backed Public Execution Plan

Left-leaning outlets treated CREC support as evidence of a theocratic project reaching the Pentagon, not an isolated opinion. The Guardian reported that Wilson has long called capital punishment biblically authorized, prefers “the older forms, like a firing squad, as opposed to attempts to ‘medicalize’ it,” and that CREC pastors have advocated the death penalty for adultery, abortion, and homosexuality; a Hegseth-linked podcaster, Joshua Haymes, has said “Hang them in the streets” of pornography producers and that public executions would make killings in “high-density Black areas” “fall to the floor”—language the paper tied to white-supremacist crime-statistic tropes Haymes denied sharing. Religion scholar Julie Ingersoll said early Christian reconstructionists agreed “the death penalty… is still applicable, and that executions should be public,” adding, “I do think this is where Hegseth is getting this.” The Intercept argued that calling a government livestream nearly unprecedented and associating such footage mainly with the Islamic State overlooks a U.S. tradition of execution films from 1897’s “The Hanging of William Carr” through Edison electrocution reenactments, lynching pictures, and later shockumentaries such as “Faces of Death.” Historian Michael Trotti said public executions historically “coarsened those who watched them” and “ended up being somewhat out of the control of any authority,” able to serve “radical purposes” for the condemned; Vatican officials called it “unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle,” and Pope Leo wrote that justice can be met “without recourse to capital punishment.”