As with many other issues, evangelicals hold to contradictory ideas with respect to capital punishment. On one hand, evangelicals who endorse the death penalty for murder say that they wish to implement Biblical justice. On the other hand, they loudly celebrate the mistaken notion that Christians are somehow freed from the obligation to enforce other Biblical examples of capital punishment laws (which Jesus affirms in passages like Matthew 15:3-9), all while denying that their conception of ethics reduces down to a religious version of cultural relativism.
There are many levels to the irony of this, one of them being that the wording of Deuteronomy 22:25-27 necessitates that rape always deserves the same penalty as murder, even if all other capital punishment requirements in the Bible were not obligatory in the present day. If this was the only problem with the common evangelical position on the death penalty, it alone would expose the ignorance and illogicality of many evangelical minds. However, it is far from the only flaw.
It does not matter how strongly a Christian dislikes the thought of someone being executed for offenses like adultery (Deuteronomy 22:22), sorcery (Exodus 22:18), bestiality (Leviticus 20:15-16), blasphemy (Leviticus 24:16), or false accusations of sins that merit the death penalty (Deuteronomy 19:16-21); the Bible plainly prescribes capital punishment for each of these behaviors, clarifying that God's nature, and thus morality, does not change (Malachi 3:6). Justice does not depend upon anyone's conscience, but on God's moral character. How many Christians who cry out for Western culture to embrace "Biblical morality" truly mean that they want each of these actions, as well as several others, to be legally punishable by death upon the testimony of two or three honest witnesses? Not many!
It quickly becomes apparent upon serious conversation that many evangelicals either do not know what the Bible actually teaches or they are only concerned with their subjective preferences. They often focus disproportionately on a select handful of moral issues like abortion and homosexual behaviors and even demonize nonsinful things like erotic media, thinking they have upheld the bulk of Biblical morality simply by opposing them. There is much more to living out Biblical morality than merely condemning a given culture's acceptance of two immoral practices.
There is no place for conscience when evaluating the morality of various legal penalties. Believing themselves to be making the Biblical choice when it comes to moral epistemology, evangelicals are forced to resort to relying on the subjective whims of conscience when arguing for or against practically any criminal punishment, as well as when arguing for or against the criminalization of almost any sin, instead of admitting that the Bible demands the death penalty for more than just murder. Fortunately, their hypocrisy is not difficult to detect. The facade of Biblicality when it comes to evangelical positions on capital punishment can be refuted by someone with only minimal understanding of reason and Biblical ethics.
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