Donald Trump announced on Thursday he was cancelling Pete Hegseth’s recently announced plans to livestream a military execution – because “many very good and well-meaning people would rather not watch him die”. But there were some fans of Hegseth’s now-scotched idea: the rightwing religious figures who have long backed his career. Hegseth announced last week that the US public would be able to see the execution of Nidal Hasan, which is set for 3 December at Fort Hood, Texas.
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. Wilson, the Idaho pastor who co-founded CREC, has promoted capital punishment as biblically authorized for decades.
Last Friday he 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 that “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 did stipulate that “the Pentagon has the responsibility to head off ghoulish behavior by some means”, but admitted: “That will be challenging with a live stream.” Wilson wrote that he had not spoken to Hegseth nor anyone in his department about the issue.
Wilson and his religious allies are at odds with some other religious leaders, including Pope Leo and the archbishop to the US military, Timothy Broglio, both of whom have condemned Hegseth’s plans. But CREC pastors, whose church in Washington DC Hegseth attends, have for years advocated the death penalty for many perceived moral infractions including adultery, abortion and homosexuality, and a podcaster from Hegseth’s former church has repeatedly called for executions to be public. Several have expressed hostility to Muslims and Islam, with one calling Allah a “demon God”.
Ingersoll added: “I do think this is where Hegseth is getting this and, no, Wilson isn’t saying anything new.” The Guardian contacted the White House and the Pentagon for comment. An unidentified Department of Defense spokesperson wrote in an email response: “The secretary is correct. Details will follow.” Hegseth belongs to the CREC, and its senior pastors preach to his Washington congregation, Christ Kirk DC, as the Guardian reported in April.
In a 2 March post on his blog, under the heading “A Proposal”, Wilson 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 against letting modern governments execute blasphemers: “When you give the state power to punish a blasphemer, you are giving the state the power to blaspheme with impunity.” Wilson wrote about Hasan in the weeks after the shooting. In a 17 January 2010 post, he took up a military commentator’s view that Hasan’s statement that the Qur’an outranked the constitution was treason.
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