The last widely recognized public execution in the United States took place on Aug. 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Ky. Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old Black man, was hanged before an estimated crowd of 20,000 people.
Bethea had been accused of raping and killing Lischia Edwards, a 70-year-old white woman. The case against him rested on a potentially coerced confession and not much else, but long before the official verdict, Bethea’s guilty sentence already was a surety.
While Kentucky had largely stopped public executions in the 1880s, there was an exception in the law for those convicted of capital rape. To take advantage and ensure Bethea’s death was a public spectacle, prosecutors pursed only the rape charge. The county built a gallows near the riverfront and prepared for a crowd to witness what would become the last public execution in America.
Bill Shelton was just a boy in 1936, but he recalls the execution vividly. Speaking to Daviess County Public Library in 2013 about the experience, he said: “It was like a sea of people. I mean, they came from everywhere. … They really thought it was like a big picnic or something.”
The news of the hanging went nationwide, with the San Francisco Examiner reporting: “As the red sun rose from the Kentucky hills, a hulking Negro youth of 22 spun to his death at the end of a rope today. Twenty-thousand men, women and children cheered. Feeling good on hot dogs, lemonade and good Kentucky whiskey, they cheered and whooped as a woman sheriff — from a distance — took an ‘eye for an eye’ in the name of the law.”
This is the tradition Pete Hegseth wants to revive.
A return to public executions
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Hegseth announced that Americans will be able to watch the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 others in a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas.
In the months preceding the shooting, Hasan appeared mentally unstable and began to express radically militant Islamic views alongside deep opposition to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to eyewitnesses, Hasan bowed his head as if in prayer, then shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire. Investigations after the shooting would reveal a connection to radical American- emeni Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
“Hegseth has spent years framing America’s political and cultural struggles using the imagery of the Crusades.”
It is this religious radical Islamic connection that has led Hegseth and the larger Trump administration to take such a public stance. Hegseth has spent years framing America’s political and cultural struggles using the imagery of the Crusades — the Medieval Christan wars meant to reclaim the Holy Land from Islam. He even has the Crusades’ rallying cry of “Deus Vult” (Latin for “God wills it” tattooed on his arm and a Crusader cross tattooed across his chest.
In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth describes Islam as a threat to Western civilization and argues America must defend its “Judeo-Christian” heritage against what he sees as an advancing cultural invasion. In his time as the self-styled secretary of war, he has explicitly fought for an increased “Christianization” of the military and sought to justify American warfare on spiritual grounds. For instance, just last month, he announced the creation of an Office of Religious Affairs, declaring that “while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual.”
In Nidal Hasan, Pete Hegseth has the kind of enemy he believes all Muslims are — an enemy who fits neatly into his broader vision of Islam as a threat to Christian civilization. Hegseth can’t win the war in Iran, can’t open the Strait of Hormuz and is rapidly losing support within his own party, but he can offer a public demonstration of power by murdering a mentally disturbed partially paralyzed enemy who can be made to represent an entire religion. Nidal Hasan’s upcoming execution is not just the state’s punishment of a mass murderer. It is a symbol of the religious conflict through which Hegseth interprets the world.
Hegseth has carefully planned Hasan’s execution to model the eye for an eye mentality of conservative Christian judicial philosophy. He has purposefully set up the execution to mirror Hasan’s own carnage.
Speaking to Real America’s Voice, Hegseth said: “No-brainer. Execution by firing squad. … Of course we’re doing it at Fort Hood. We’re going to do it at 1 o’clock — which is when he did it. It’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad.”
Same place. Same time. Same method. Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth. Hand for hand. Foot for foot. Life for life.
“This execution is to satisfy Hegseth’s bloodlust and the bloodlust of all those like him.”
Hegseth said the execution would be public because “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” But that language of deterrence belies the undercurrent of retribution. This execution is not to show the American people terrorism is bad, it’s to satisfy Hegseth’s bloodlust and the bloodlust of all those like him who see Nadal Hasan as a symbol for an entire religion.
Becoming like the enemy
With this move, the United States moves ever closer to being like the religious militant regimes they claim are their enemy, joining Afghanistan and Iran as the only countries to openly and publicly execute convicted criminals in the modern day. In 2025, Amnesty International reported 17 known public executions — six in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and 11 in Shiite-run Iran.
In December 2025, the Taliban executed an unnamed man convicted of killing 13 members of a single family. Tens of thousands of people gathered at a sports stadium in the city of Khost to witness the killing. According to the Afghani Supreme Court, the state left the decision of life in prison or the death penalty up to the family, who chose to enact the death penalty. His state-approved executioner was a relative of the family he had killed.
Earlier that year, in February, Iranian authorities hanged a man from a bridge in the city of Esfarayen after he was convicted of stabbing another man to death. Authorities cited the Islamic law of qisas — meaning “retaliation in kind” — that is rooted in the Qur’an’s own legal system of retribution which itself cites the Old Testament “life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth.”
Notice what these regimes share. In both countries, the public execution is religiously ordained message to everyone else about who holds religious and political power and what happens to those who defy it. That is the same logic behind Hegseth’s statement that people “need to understand there are consequences.” But while this is the logic of Christian nationalism and radical Islam, it is not the logic of Jesus.
“While this is the logic of Christian nationalism and radical Islam, it is not the logic of Jesus.”
‘But I say unto you…’
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus directly confronted the “eye for an eye” mentality that sought to maximize retribution. N.T. Wright translates Matthew 5:38-39 this way: “You heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you: don’t use violence to resist evil!”
Jesus explicitly condemns the interpretation of retributive justice that simply responds to violence with violence and instead calls his followers down a different and more difficult path. If we follow the crucified Christ, the one who absorbed state violence rather than inflict it, then we cannot remain content with systems that disguise vengeance and the wielding of power over life and death as “justice” — especially when done in the name of Jesus.
America once decided public executions were incompatible with the kind of society it wanted to be. After the execution of Rainey Bethea and its celebration, America reacted in disgust.
The Louisville Courier-Journal called it an “unedifying spectacle,” while the Boston Daily Record decried its “callous, carnival spirit.” John Lowe Fort, secretary of the Louisville Council of Churches, wrote an op-ed stating that only banning such “morbid entertainment” would “redeem Kentucky from public and national disgrace.”
Two years later, Kentucky voted to ban public executions.
We have seen where public executions lead. We have seen how governments use them to demonstrate power, how crowds can turn death into entertainment and how the public display of violence can reinforce a society’s deepest injustices. We have seen how the public threat of death at the hands of the state is a tool wielded by religious extremists, totalitarian regimes and evil despots.
The Trump administration continues to tell us what it is. The folks who cheer continue to tell us who they are. A nation that turns execution into entertainment has not defeated the violence it condemns; it has simply decided that this time the bloodshed is righteous.
Josh Olds
Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.
Related:
Justice does not require spectators | Opinion by Brian Henderson
Go ahead and livestream that firing squad execution! | Opinion by Mark Wingfield