Religious Discourse and Capital Punishment in Late Liberalism

• In Event: Theatres of Truth: Against Interpretive Hegemonies

Abstract

This paper interrogates the discursive appeals made by political and legal actors to religion while adjudicating matters of life and death. More precisely, this paper analyzes how, in recent months, the Supreme Court has refused to allow incarcerated death row inmates who practice minority faiths – like Islam and Buddhism – to have access to their spiritual advisors in the moments prior to their deaths. I argue that these refusals raise persistent questions about not only the rights of religious petitioners, but also the ability of legal language to inflict “cruel and unusual punishment” on the material and metaphysical bodies of vulnerable individuals. I suggest that these refusals represent a return to Protestantly-inflected, punitively-oriented spectacles of state power – a power that can be palpably felt in the discursive efforts made by the Court to “save” an individual’s soul through the public prescription, and subsequent infliction, of physical harm. I conclude by arguing that this nascent trend indicates that purely secular accounts of the law’s force fail to capture fully how late modern liberal courts operate as theaters of religious redemption and, in doing so, cultivate new facets of subjectivity.

Author

• Kathryn A. Heard, Dickinson College