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 ۳ December at Fort Hood, Texas. Hasan, a former army major and psychiatrist, killed ۱۳ people and wounded ۳۲ at Fort Hood in ۲۰۰۹. A military court sentenced him to death in August ۲۰۱۳.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said. “It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers – as it should be.”
The de facto leader of Hegseth’s theocratic Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), Douglas Wilson, welcomed the announcement.
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”.
“There was a consensus among the early Christian reconstructionists that the death penalty for certain crimes was part of the Old Testament that is still applicable, and that executions should be public,” said Julie Ingersoll, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of North Florida, and the author of Building God’s Kingdom, a study of Christian reconstructionism, a movement with which Wilson has repeatedly identified.
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. It will be livestreamed. Details will follow.”
A ‘biblical republic’
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 ۲ March post on his blog, under the heading “A Proposal”, Wilson wrote: “The death penalty should be applied to violent criminals – murderers (Ex. ۲۱:۱۲), rapists and kidnappers (Ex. ۲۱:۱۶), abortionists (Ex. ۲۱:۲۲), and so on.”
In his ۲۰۲۳ 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 ۱۷ January ۲۰۱۰ post, he took up a military commentator’s view that Hasan’s statement that the Qur’an outranked the constitution was treason.
The post affirmed that religious commands supersede the law of the state, but asserted that Hasan’s religion was mistaken. “Now of course, Hasan was mistaken, but this was a question of fact, not of principle,” Wilson wrote. “The word of God outranks Madison, et al, and if the Qur’an were the word of God, then the constitution should just sit down and listen for a minute.”
CREC support
Joshua Haymes hosts the Reformation Red Pill podcast, on which Hegseth has appeared, and was a pastoral intern at Hegseth’s former church in Tennessee. The Guardian reported in August ۲۰۲۵ that Haymes had proposed “death by a public firing squad wherein the accuser and witnesses partake in the firing”.
He has returned to the subject since. In an episode dated ۲۸ March, Haymes said of pornography producers: “Hang them in the streets. And I mean that. We need to bring back public executions.” In an episode uploaded last week, he said that “if we would just reinstitute public executions”, the number of killings in what he called high-density Black areas of major cities would “fall to the floor”.
In an email response to a request for comment, Haymes reaffirmed all of these positions, saying that he supported the execution of Hasan, that “I do believe that child pornographers (those who produce and distribute child pornography) should be executed”, but that he “would stop short of capital punishment” for other pornographers.
Asked about his comments on crime in “Black areas”, he wrote: “Right now, over ۵۰% of homicides in America are committed by around ۶% of the population. That is an astoundingly devastating statistic. And most of the violent crime is being done by a small subset of black Americans who are continually reoffending.”
The Anti-Defamation League lists a similar claim in its hate symbols database, under the numeric codes “۱۳/۵۲” and “۱۳/۹۰”, which it calls “a shorthand reference to racist propaganda claims by white supremacists against African Americans to depict them as savage and criminal in nature”. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, white supremacists “manipulate crime statistics in order to claim that nonwhite minorities, particularly African Americans, are far more crime-prone”, naming Jared Taylor of American Renaissance among the “white nationalist ideologues” who had “made considerable hay” from such figures.
The Guardian reported in August ۲۰۲۵ that Haymes had endorsed Taylor’s views in a post on X.
Taylor has long denied that he is a white supremacist, preferring to describe himself as a “race realist” or “white advocate”.
In an emailed comment for prior Guardian reporting on his views, Haymes said: “I am not a white nationalist or white supremacist. My cousin is black, and my brother-in-law is Chinese, and I’m glad they’re here. I have no idea who that white nationalist is.”
Hegseth’s announcement has stirred the wider Christian nationalist community. Last Friday, David Shannon, who as “Chocolate Knox” co-hosts CrossPolitic, a podcast the Guardian reported on in September ۲۰۲۵, reposted another user’s request for “all the Bible verses supporting public executions for capital crimes”.
Ben Zornes told the Guardian that he is a pastor at Living Stones Reformed church, a church planted, or founded, by Christ Church Moscow.
He wrote on ۱۸ October ۲۰۱۸: “Rebellious sons, and unchaste daughters were a danger to covenantal faithfulness and thus were to be executed for the sake of the purity of the whole congregation.” He called efforts to abolish the death penalty “an example of us thinking we know better than God does”.
Asked about the planned firing-squad execution of Hasan, Zornes wrote: “I do support the execution. I have concerns about making it a public spectacle, as I think public executions are for sober and mature societies, and ours is like a toddler.”
He added: “A public execution should be solemn, and livestreaming it would compromise the gravity of the event, which is also why I am opposed to livestreaming church services.”
But asked if he agreed with Douglas Wilson’s preference for public executions over private ones, Zornes replied: “I do.”
Hegseth described Hasan as a “radical Islamist” when he announced the public execution, and CREC figures have frequently targeted the Islamic faith in their writings. Toby Sumpter, a CREC pastor in Moscow, Idaho, another co-host of CrossPolitic, wrote on ۱۳ March ۲۰۲۵: “We can certainly begin by prohibiting public worship of false gods, legally suppressing Islam, Hinduism, etc.”
On a ۲۶ June ۲۰۲۵ episode of CrossPolitic titled “From ۹/۱۱ To a Muslim Mayor in NYC? The Rise of Islam in America”, Sumpter said Allah “is a real demon God”. On a ۲۱ November ۲۰۲۵ episode he said Christians should “ask civil magistrates to outlaw mosques”.
Haymes gave a ۷ August episode the title “Christians MUST Support Banning Islam & Deporting Muslims”. In a ۱۷ April debate with a Muslim man, he said: “No mosques, no calls to prayer, nothing like that.”
Brooks Potteiger, the pastor of Christ Kirk DC and previously of Hegseth’s Tennessee church, said in a ۳۰ August sermon that “the idols of Hinduism and Islam have rushed in to fill the void”.
Sumpter, Shannon and Potteiger did not respond to requests for comment.
‘Turn death into a spectacle’
Experts say that, historically, executions were banned at least in part because they gave a platform for the executed to deliver any message they wanted.
Michael Trotti is a professor of history at Ithaca College and the author of The End of Public Execution, a history of public executions in the American south.
In an email, he said that in the north, executions were mostly moved inside prison walls from the mid-۱۹th century due to “growing middle-class discomfort with the spectacles of death”, which “coarsened those who watched them” and “might event attract criminals rather that being something that would curb crime”.
In the south, however, they remained popular until the end of the century. Eventually authorities “became convinced that these events were actually giving too much prominent, public authority to black condemned when they were asked if they had final words in front of massive mixed-race crowds, and to their pastors who were there to give final religious guidance and prayers/hymns”.
“Public execution ended up being somewhat out of the control of any authority trying to enact it, for once the images are out there, they can serve many purposes. They can serve conservative purposes the state wants, but also radical purposes like the victims might want like being on a stage before a massive audience.”
On Saturday, Pope Leo wrote on X that “the common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment”. Leo did not mention Hasan, but the remarks were widely interpreted as being a response to Hegseth’s announcement. The previous evening the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, had said of the planned broadcast that it was “certainly unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle”.
Archbishop Paul Coakley, the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, reportedly called the plan “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death”. Walter Kim, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said a livestreamed execution “risks turning one of the state’s most solemn responsibilities into a public spectacle”.
