*The American Spectator says that Georgia’s recent execution of convicted police-killer Troy Davis activated many religious death penalty opponents. But there was significant dissent from the claims that Christianity uniformly opposes capital punishment. The 16 million Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant communion, specifically affirms it. And its most prominent theologian defended it amid the Davis controversy.

“The death penalty is intended to affirm the value [and] sanctity of every single human life, and thus by the extremity of the penalty to make that visible and apparent to all,” declared Louisville-based Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler, who presides over his church’s largest seminary. “There is something within us that cries out for the fact that murder must be punished and that the lives of the innocent, in terms of being the victims of these crimes, must indeed be vindicated.”

Mohler warned that the “general trend of secularization and moral confusion has undermined the kind of moral and cultural consensus that makes the death penalty make sense.” And he observed: “We really do not now have the bedrock shared consensus that every single human life is a life made in the image of God and that every single human life at every stage of development is to be honored and protected and preserved.”

Read the full story in The American Spectator.

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