The Tree of Life shooting horrified the nation: Is that a good reason for the death penalty?

This coming week, the jury in the trial of Robert Bowers will begin hearing evidence about whether he should receive a death sentence for killing 11 worshippers and wounding six others at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. Bowers was found guilty last month of a variety of federal crimes, including “obstruction of the exercise of religious belief resulting in death.”  

As horrible as his crimes were, mass killing in houses of worship sadly are not uncommon events in the United States. Those sacred places have gone from being sanctuaries for the poor, the political dissident and even the heretic to killing fields for mass murderers who see them as soft targets for their rage and hatred.

The loss of lives among parishioners in churches, synagogues and mosques is grotesque and shocking. Is there nothing holy? What kind of depravity would lead anyone to do such a thing?

Given these understandable feelings and questions, it is not surprising that they would provoke anger and disgust at the perpetrators of church killings. 

But the fact that they occur where people of faith gather should neither fuel the desire for vengeance nor become the grounds for putting those who carry them out to death. 

A Voice of America report notes that, like other mass murderers, the people who commit murders in houses of worship are “overwhelmingly white and male.” Most, it continues, “had criminal records, a violent history, and almost all of them had experienced serious childhood trauma.”

The report notes: “The first mass shooting at a house of worship in the modern era occurred in 1980 during Sunday services at First Baptist Church in Daingerfield, Texas. Five people were killed and 10 others were injured. The shooting was prompted by revenge involving a criminal domestic issue.”

Since then, Americans have become all too familiar with reports of killings in houses of worship. 

For example, in May of 2006, 25-year-old Anthony Bell made headlines when he went to the Ministry of Jesus Christ Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he shot and killed four people as the service was nearing its end. He also abducted his wife and three of his children, including an infant, who had all been at the church. He killed his wife later, at a different location. The children were found unharmed.

Bell was arrested within hours of the church shooting at a nearby apartment complex.

Louisiana charged him with five counts of first-degree murder and argued that he was death-eligible because two of the people murdered were over 65 years old, because he killed one of his victims in the course of a second-degree kidnapping and another because she was a witness to the other shootings, and because Bell had specific intent to kill multiple persons.

Throughout Bell’s trial and the sentencing hearing, the prosecutor referred repeatedly to the fact that the killings occurred in a church. He did so in the hope of arousing the jury’s revulsion and horror about the crime.

Bell was convicted and subsequently sentenced to death on Sept. 12, 2008.

In 2015, nine years after Bell carried out his mass killing, Dylann Roof murdered nine Black people and injured a tenth person during a Bible study group at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charlestown, South Carolina. He was 21 at the time.

Roof was a white supremacist and neo-Nazi. He hoped his crime would precipitate a race war in this country.

Roof was prosecuted by the federal government and convicted of crimes resulting in death and obstruction of exercise of religion resulting in death.

He was sentenced to death on Jan. 10, 2017, the first time a death penalty verdict was rendered in a federal hate crimes case. 

During Roof’s trial the prosecution made sure to remind the jury that he had defiled a famous church. As then-U.S. Attorney Beth Drake of South Carolina put it, “Motivated by racist hatred, Dylann Roof murdered and attempted to murder innocent African-American parishioners as they worshiped in the historic Mother Emanuel church…. Instead of agitating racial tensions as he had hoped, Roof’s deadly attack inside Mother Emanuel became an attack on all of us.” 

Attorney General Loretta Lynch also emphasized the fact that Roof had murdered people in a church in a statement made after the death sentence was passed: “Roof sought out and opened fire on African-American parishioners engaged in worship. … He did so because of their race. And he did so to interfere with their peaceful exercise of religion.”

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On Nov. 5, 2017, less than six months after Roof was sentenced, a 26-year-old man named Devin Kelley, “clad in all black, with a ballistic vest strapped to his chest and a military-style rifle in his hands,” opened fire at First Baptist Church in the small town of Sutherland Springs, Texas. Kelley killed 26 people, including an unborn child, and wounded 22 others. 

At the time, the Sutherland Springs church shooting was the deadliest mass murder ever to occur in Texas, and was deadlier than any previous mass shooting in an American house of worship. 

Like many of the other people who commit murder in houses of worship, Kelley killed himself at the scene of his crime. So there was no trial and no need for anyone to decide whether the fact that he had slaughtered people in a church justified a death sentence. 

The worst such killing in Texas before Sutherland Springs had been in September of 1999, when Larry Gene Ashbrook murdered seven people and wounded eight others at Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth. Ashbrook chose the day of a “See You at the Pole” rally at the church, an annual event for Christian youth who gather to pray together. The popular Christian rock group Forty Days was scheduled to perform at Wedgwood that day.

The Wedgwood congregation did not have to endure a death penalty trial because Ashbrook, like Kelley, committed suicide at the scene.

In 2019, 20 years after the Wedgwood Baptist Church murders, the minister who was pastor there at the time said, “We, to this day, don’t know why he was led to this church.”

As in the Bell and Roof cases, the prosecution team in the trial of Tree of Life shooter Robert Bowers chose to focus on the fact that he committed these brutal murders at a house of worship. They talked at length about the congregants who died as they arrived at the synagogue and offered evidence about the many antisemitic comments that Bowers had made online before he showed up at a synagogue and began killing Jews.

As the jury begins to consider what punishment Bowers deserves, it should remember that while hatred may explain why people like Bowers kill in houses of worship, the congregations who assemble in such places are often told about the dangers of responding to hate with more hate. Perhaps the jurors should consider this verse from the Book of Ezekiel: “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”