What should be the Christian attitude towards the death penalty? The Church has never ruled it out as immoral. However, contemporary Liberalism tends to view it as the barbaric vestige of an unenlightened age, and many Christians esteem that Christianity should be at least as compassionate as Liberalism. This is contested, however, because Christianity has never considered life in this world as the highest value. As self-seeking narcissism becomes the accepted default ethic of our time, however, the one place Liberalism seems to concede that the death penalty may be permitted and even necessary is when narcissism grows beyond civilized bounds and tolerates murder as a violation of the earlier 'human right' to life, unapologetically viewing other people reductively as either instruments for or obstacles to a subject's personal advancement. When they develop into the latter, they may conveniently but unobtrusively be gotten 'out of the way'.