American culture works too hard to hide the effects of death. Trained professionals conceal dead bodies in large bags. Morgues chill corpses to prevent decay. Popular media almost always celebrates youth and health to the exclusion of death (unless it is postulating some version of animated “undeath,” such as ghosts, mummies, vampires, or zombies. Except for the rare occasions when loved ones die — made rarer by the success of modern medicine at preserving life — most people never encounter human death or its effects. This inexperience with death creates the conditions wherein such an oxymoron as “euthanasia” can seem plausible to many.

Obscuring Death

The efforts to mitigate the effects of death are not all bad. For instance, decaying bodies breed disease, so preventing decay helps to keep the living safe. But much of the culture’s instinct to obscure death and its effects are motivated by a non-religious utilitarianism that seeks to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. Death and grief bring pain, so the culture hides these in order to live for pleasure in this life.

But, by obscuring death, the culture obscures essential truths about human nature. Having jettisoned the Christian worldview that affirms them, the culture would rather forget these inconvenient truths:

• Scripture teaches that man is fallen and therefore mortal. “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins” (Ecclesiastes 7:20), and “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).
• At the same time, Scripture teaches that fallen human beings still have value by virtue of being created in the image of God, and thus anyone who takes human life deserves death. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:6).
• Furthermore, Scripture teaches us not to judge our lives by this world only but by the judgment that comes after. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:20).

Although the young and carefree may dismiss these truths, they do so only at their peril. “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart,” warned the preacher. “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth” (Ecclesiastes 7:2, 4).

“I’m convinced we do a disservice to our young people in the evangelical church,” insisted Brooks Buser, who now serves as president of Radius International after spending 13 years translating the Bible and establishing churches among the Yembi Yembi tribe in Papua New Guinea. “We don’t let them see the grotesqueness of death. Death is grotesque in the tropics. A body does really nasty things after about a day and a half. And this is meant to be a vivid reminder of our sin.”

Our post-Christian culture’s utilitarian ethic would rather reject any reminder of sin on the grounds that such reminders can cause painful pricks of conscience, and pain must be avoided. Better to be an ostrich than to confront painful truths.

Gentle Punishment

This utilitarian approach has even reprogrammed the American approach to punishment. Gone are the days when teachers wielded rulers, when dads sent disobedient children into the backyard to cut their own switch. In their place is a “gentle parenting” approach that eschews the very idea of corporate punishment. The result: a generation of spoiled, unruly, and even unhappy children who learned violence all the same.

Gentler punishments have swept America’s criminal justice system, too. It’s not just far-left prosecutors seeking to get criminals off the hook. Across the nation, nearly every criminal sentence comes down to jail time or a fine, and most convicted criminals can get out of at least half their jail sentence if they play their cards right.

Even for the few instances where capital punishment is still employed, the punishments have grown excessively gentle. As of 2025, 23 states have abolished the death penalty, and four more have suspended its execution by executive action. Most other states practice lethal injection, while only a few still retain electrocution, hanging, firing squad, or lethal gas as options. The last judicial hanging took place in Delaware in 1996.

Keep in mind that capital sentences are only reserved for the worst crimes. For instance, Crista Pike, the woman who survived a lethal injection attempt in Tennessee last week, murdered Collen Slemmer in 1995. She beat the girl as she begged her to stop, cut her throat and back repeatedly, carved a pentagram into her forehead, then took part of her skull as a souvenir. The grounds worker who found the body “testified that the body was so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal.”

Is it just or proportional to repay such horrific crimes by putting the criminal to death with a heavy anesthetic? That is what lethal injection is, after all: a bloodless, painless way to die, the perfect fit for a utilitarian culture.

“When the state kills, how it does so should not look like an outpatient procedure,” argued Christian ethicist Dr. Andrew Walker. “The more the state attempts to medicalize killing, the more it risks unsuccessful and inefficient executions, and the more it obscures the full weight of what retributive wrath is meant to accomplish and signify.”

There ought to be limits on judicial punishments. In a nation ruled by law, judges cannot impose whatever punishment fits their mood that day. The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution recognizes this fact by prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishments.” But some courts have expanded the scope of what counts as “cruel and unusual” to fit the cultural trend toward gentler, less grotesque methods.

Euthanasia

This trend nudges the culture down the slope toward euthanasia. Euthanasia means “good death,” and the only way to make it plausible is when death no longer seems to be bad. Lethal injection is the perfect bridge because it takes all the horror out of death.

Death should be horrible. God created human beings for life, and he created governments to protect life. This almost always means that the government should act to preserve life. Capital punishment for murder is the one exception, where the government takes the life of one guilty of taking life as a way to recognize life’s value — not to mention the deterrent effect. When governments get into the business of routinely taking innocent life, the government has moved from doing good to doing evil.

Whatever euphemism the practitioners employ (“euthanasia,” “assisted suicide,” “MAiD”), lethal injection of anyone not on death row is morally wrong. The apparent peacefulness of the act merely disguises its true nature. It does not change it.

Reacting to these developments — specifically the botched execution of Crista Pike, who is now reportedly unconscious on a ventilator — the Trump administration has decided to lean into less gentle methods of execution.

“Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009,” War Department spokesman Sean Parnell announced this week. “He killed 13 people and wounded 32 others while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the attack.”

Being shot to death for the crime of shooting people is a far more poetic retribution of justice. It does justice to the memory of the victims. It also does justice to the criminal by subjecting him not to tortures (e.g., the rack, burning at the stake, impalement) but to a fair method of execution. It also leaps the U.S. military off the slippery slope toward euthanasia, down which our culture is currently sliding.