Elizabeth Bruenig first began reporting on capital punishment in 2020 when she served as a witness to a state execution in Terre Haute, Indiana, for The New York Times. Since then, she’s served as a media and personal witness in several executions, reporting on abuses in US prison systems, racialized executions, and more broadly on Christianity and politics for The Atlantic.
In this conversation with Ashley Hales, CT’s editorial director for print, Bruenig discusses the death penalty, her Catholic faith, and the alien nature of mercy and forgiveness. This interview has been condensed for length and edited for clarity.
ASHLEY HALES: Your journalistic writing on capital punishment has been widely recognized. Tell us how it all began.
ELIZABETH BRUENIG: I always had an interest in capital punishment. Coming from a religion where the central event of the Gospels is an execution, that seemed significant to me, but I never gave it a lot of thought until I had the opportunity to start reporting on it for The New York Times. From there, I felt like this was something of a calling.
AH: How have you thought about the execution of Jesus and your own work of witnessing execution?
EB: There’s kind of two instances of executions in the New Testament. One is attempted and it fails: That is the stoning of the adulterer (John 8:1–11). That’s an execution according to law. Jesus stopped it and forgave the woman. That’s significant because under the law she was to be stoned. But what Christianity teaches us that’s so significant is mercy—the withholding of the most severe punishment may be dictated by an action in favor of something gentler. In the execution of Jesus, I think you get an excellent example of the sort of politics involved in executions, and it highlights the fact that innocent people are executed. It’s been happening since executions. It’s still happening now.
AH: I want to talk about your Atlantic cover story, titled “Witness” in print. As we think about our readers at Christianity Today, the word witness has some other connotations. We think about the Great Commission of Jesus after his death and resurrection, telling his disciples that they will be witnesses. To what extent do you feel your own witnessing of executions is a witness of your faith?
EB: I think that it’s important to be honest with the reader about my actual interest here and that my interest is not strictly as a news reporter who’s trying to contribute to democracy. That’s part of it. Connecting with these guys [on death row] has been very spiritually enriching. It’s more of a witness to faith to the reader. I hope that readers understand this is what Christianity is really about. Right? It’s about the infinite mercy of God expressed through the salvation of humankind. The reason that I’m so upfront about being Christian in the article is not just to be honest, but I hope this leaves an impression that Christianity has a lot to offer the world.
AH: As we think more generally about capital punishment, Christians are divided. Pew reported in 2021 that 66 percent of Protestants and 58 percent of Catholics in the US favored capital punishment. In an article in 2023, CT recorded a source who mentioned, “There’s an appetite for that form of punishment.” Why do you think that is—especially for those who are told to love their neighbor and pray for their enemies?
EB: I understand Christians who support capital punishment, and I don’t think they’re bad Christians. Executions have been carried out for centuries by Christian people and Christian nations. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, commands people to purge the evil from among you—that’s the language that’s in there. It quite readily prescribes execution for certain crimes. But in the New Testament, in my opinion, Jesus takes a different approach to sin and to wrongdoing. I think that’s beautiful. I think it’s what makes Christianity unique. So, for me, execution comes across as extremely wrong and extremely wrong for Christian reasons. That’s a case I have to make. I’m trying to do that not just for the public but for my fellow Christians.
AH: In your view, are there any conditions under which it would be permissible to execute the convicted?
EB: If you’re in a society that can’t contain people who are doing wrong (a society with not a lot of infrastructure and not a very good justice system) and there’s a person—let’s just imagine the worst possible person, a sexually motivated child killer or something—who cannot be stopped, will not stop, cannot be restrained. In that case, I guess you do what you have to do.
But in the United States, and I think now in a majority of countries worldwide, that’s not the case. The most reprobate and evil of offenders can be contained. There’s a lot of repentance, a lot of regret, and a lot of remorse on death row.
AH: What strikes me about your work is the radical strangeness of forgiveness and mercy you write about. It’s this idea that we—all of us—are human and bear the image of God, no matter how twisted we become with evil. That radical nature of grace, of forgiveness, of mercy, is highly offensive to us as people who are twisted by sin. I’m curious how you communicate some of that strangeness of forgiveness and mercy to a secular audience.
EB: One of my favorite things about Christianity is the utter alien weirdness of the Christian approach to evil and wrongdoing.
If you took someone who had never had any contact with Christianity and was a perfect blank slate with average, reasonable assumptions about reality and you said, “What should you do in response to someone who kills people, someone who kills a lot of
people?” the last thing someone would come up with is you recognize your shared humanity with this person and that there is something valuable about their unique life.
That that’s not what would come to mind reveals divinity to me, because it indicates how different the divine consciousness is from the human. Part of how you know that you’re dealing with the will of God is that it’s foreign to men.
AH: You also talk about forgiveness as not individual and not simply therapeutic—that its aim is for the restoration of community. Is our public life so broken, do you think, because of our lack of forgiveness? Help us think about some of these things in our day-to-day versus simply as we think about capital punishment.
EB: I think the way that forgiveness is thought about in society is a very therapeutic sense of forgiveness. You forgive someone so you can move on, and many people I’ve spoken to in this work, like victims’ families, have spoken quite movingly about how letting anger and hurt from these offenses go and instead embracing forgiveness does have therapeutic effects.
But for Christians, the reason that we’re told to forgive is not necessarily because it’ll be pleasurable or helpful to us; it’s because it’s the will of God. Forgiveness can be extremely uncomfortable. It can be a burden. You’re not only dealing with the unfairness of the fact that the crime was committed, but you’re also dealing with this second sort of indignity, which is that you have to forgive the person.
I think you can make the argument that forgiveness is important even to someone who does not come at it from a Christian point of view, because as you say, it allows us to reestablish community with someone who has done wrong. It allows people to change. It allows people the moral opportunity to reverse the way they were thinking or the way they were behaving.
In terms of embracing forgiveness as a wider cultural trend, it’s very hard to be forgiven or to ask forgiveness in public because everything is so highly recorded. Everything’s on the internet.
AH: You’re married with two daughters who are pretty young. How do you, or can you, metabolize the kind of evil that you witness in your work while raising a family? And conversely, how has motherhood or marriage informed your own reporting?
EB: My family is the bedrock of my life, and they’re the center of my emotional universe. In a lot of important senses, they make doing this work possible for me. It’s dark work. It’s difficult. Because I have my family to come home to after witnessing these executions—that I can lay down in my bed beside my husband, getting in really late, knowing that the next morning my children will be excited to see me again and that we’ll have a great day—it really makes it all possible.
Marriage and motherhood do teach you some things about forgiveness. Because these are your people in this world, and you can’t throw them away. You have to find ways to recover closeness and make peace between you, even when people do things that are really wrong. And you also need forgiveness as a mother and as a wife. The family is a training ground for these kinds of virtues.
AH: You opened your article for The Atlantic about having nightmares about your own execution. In those nightmares, what would your own last words be?
EB: I always think of the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus taught us that prayer. It’s something I pray three times a night, and it’s the most comforting thing in the world to me. It’s kind of always playing in the background of my mind. I pray it throughout the day. I know that would be it for me.
Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer for The Atlantic.
Ashley Hales is editorial director for print at Christianity Today.
This article appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Steadfast Witness".
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