The Trump administration’s plan to livestream a state-sponsored execution is facing fierce pushback from some prominent faith leaders.

Even some of President Donald Trump’s most sycophantic loyalists, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have expressed reservations about the macabre idea for Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s execution. Johnson and Vice President JD Vance both said they don’t plan to watch the livestream, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week.

That’s revealing of how deranged this is. Trump said he “absolutely” approved the plan, though reporting suggests that he has been getting bad feedback on it and is considering abandoning the idea.

It’s also notable that prominent Christians are effectively rebuking the plan as ungodly.

Baptist News Global highlighted denunciations from Catholic and Methodist leaders, including the archbishop for the U.S. military:

Any Catholics assigned to the firing squad are “obliged” to request to be excused from this action, which is “contrary to the teaching of the church,” said Timothy Broglio, Catholic archbishop for the United States Military Services.

Ruben Saenz, president of the Council of United Methodist Bishops, issued a statement saying: “Turning the death of a human being into a public broadcast does not honor the victims. It coarsens the conscience of a people and contradicts the gospel we proclaim.”

The Methodist bishops, he said, “urge U.S. leaders to end plans for a livestreamed execution.”

The report also cited comments from the Vatican’s secretary of state, who denounced the livestream plan. The head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called the plan “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” And a social media post from Pope Leo last weekend rebuked the death penalty, which some people interpreted as a thinly veiled shot at the Trump administration.

The denunciations have created a face-off between the conservative Christians who support and those who oppose the idea of an execution being broadcast to the masses. The essential context here is that Hegseth is a far-right Christian zealot who has openly peddled Islamophobia and tried to wrap the military’s deadly actions in Scripture — and fake Scripture.

This push has coincided with a movement among MAGA conservatives to promote “muscular Christianity,” which is basically a belief among hypermasculine evangelicals that the Christian God has become too weak or “feminine” in the modern interpretation. Such proselytizers often portray their God as violent, vengeful or intolerant, which you may have noticed after a Fox News guest went viral for saying he met Jesus — whom he described as an angry, testosterone-fueled “mustang” — during a coma.

All this is to say: There are indeed some Trump-aligned Christians misusing their platforms to boost this Trump-approved execution plan, and framing it as though it’s God’s will. That includes MAGA pastor Robert Jeffress, who recently said that “capital punishment is God’s idea for showing the value of human life.”

But Jeffress’ derangement isn’t shared universally among the right-wing Christian influencer class. A prime example is staunch anti-abortion activist Lila Rose:

“Our appetite for and habituation to violence will be our society’s downfall,” Rose wrote on X.

She added, “Public executions don’t teach respect for human dignity and God’s image; they make violence a spectacle for public entertainment, and they corrupt the young and innocent. In modern America, there is no need for executions — they only breed vengeance, violence and dehumanization.

“Satan loves this.”

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