“We have a criminal justice system in which the courtroom and the sentence is so far removed from the lived experience of the condemned,” says Jeff Hood, a national death row spiritual adviser.Courtesy of Jeff Hood

About 2,100 people are on death row in America. Some have been there for decades, in part because executions have been on the decline in the US. But that’s changing. So far this year, 41 people have been executed, up from 25 last year, and six more executions are scheduled. 

Early in his second term, President Donald Trump—a longtime proponent of the death penalty—signed an executive order reinstating federal executions while encouraging states to expand the use of capital punishment. One man has seen many of these executions up close. 

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

The Reverend Jeff Hood is an Old Catholic Church priest, an ordained Baptist minister, a racial justice activist, and something of a go-to spiritual adviser for many currently on death row. Hood often tells people that his job is to become death row inmates’ best friend “so that their best friend will be with them when they’re executed.” On the day of the execution, he goes inside the chamber for the final moments of their lives. This kind of work, he says, is a natural outgrowth of his longtime activism for racial equality and the Black Lives Matter movement.

On this week’s More To The Story, Hood sits down with host Al Letson to describe his work as an advocate for death row inmates, what it’s like being a white Southern reverend vocally advocating for racial justice, and how capital punishment in the US today illustrates American society’s increasing movement in a more violent direction.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: Tell me, Jeff, right now the thing that I am the most curious about is how did Jeff Hood become Jeff Hood?

Jeff Hood: Man, I thought you was going to say, “How do I keep this head shaved?” Man, that’s what you was going to ask. I grew up in South Atlanta and that had a tremendous effect on me growing up. I mean, I was constantly influenced by all of these great civil rights heroes, Andy Young, Joe Lowery. I don’t think you can be around that without it getting in your bones.

Yeah.

I guess as I got older, I looked at Atlanta and I said, “They got enough help.” And so they got a lot of people working up there, and so I needed to go somewhere that was terrible and Little Rock, Arkansas fit the bill.

See, I ain’t going to talk bad about Little Rock like that. I can say some things, but I ain’t going to do it.

I’ll tell you, this is the ultimate nowhere place, which has its pluses and minuses.

When did you join the ministry?

Man, I was a young man. So I grew up in a southern Baptist congregation that was sort of this bastion of white evangelicalism and a world of sort of black middle-class folks on the South side of Atlanta. I always tell people, man, that one of the defining characteristics of where I lived is that a couple streets over, Tiny had her nail shop. So that tells you everything you need to know.

So growing up, we had a very conservative theology, but I was also again, very influenced by the civil rights culture that somehow faith can achieve change and faith can mean more than just sitting in the church praying, that you can actually make the world a better place. I came through my undergrad and was interested in the ministry and I had this mentor that matters so much to me.

I mean, he was in a conservative religious environment, but he was very open-minded, poured into me, encouraged me to think widely and deeply, and I go to seminary and I’m right there in the middle of seminary again preparing for ministry, and I get a phone call from him and he revealed that he had lung cancer.

I go down to Atlanta and he brings me into next to his bedside. They had the hospital bed set up. I mean, just a classic sort of, he was dying with his wife and kids in the next room over. He reveals to me that he had lived his life as a closeted gay man.

Wow.

And he had pastored all of these churches as this-

Wow.

… southern Baptist minister. And so all of a sudden I’m sitting here with this sort of epiphany and it’s like, “I love Jesus, but here’s this person that had really been Jesus to me and poured into me so much, and all of a sudden Jesus is gay.” And that sort of blew up all that theology that I had had prior. And I think that that pushed me deeper into this sort of search. And I felt like if I could push into the liberal and I’ll keep “Liberal.” Now, tell everybody I’m doing my fingers with the liberal in the air quotes.

Yeah.

But I thought I’m going to pour, push into the liberal crowd and see what they can teach me. So I went to Emory. I did a graduate degree there in Atlanta at Emory in theology. And man, I began to find these liberal folks just as backwards as a lot of these conservative folks, I’m going to put up the flag but don’t expect me to march. I had been so influenced by again, those civil rights leaders that I knew I was supposed to go all the way. I was supposed to give my body.

I began to find a lot of the sort of black gay culture in Atlanta and was ready to push into these spaces of injustice in a way that I had never seen before. And so I was so affected by this sort of courage that these folks were showing. I mean, they was going into the black church and saying, “Y’all can talk about social justice all the time, but y’all are treating us like shit.”

And then going into white spaces and saying, “Y’all ain’t just racist, you’re homophobic, you’re transphobic” and on down the line. But I was brought into the ministry in a conservative environment, 22, 23, and then sort of baptized in this sort of queer culture that in many ways led me to this sort of radicalization that continued to come through the years that’s led me to Black Lives Matter work, work in queer liberation and eventually to death row. Most people, they’re their radicalists when they get first ordained. I feel like I-

It seems like you-

I went the opposite direction.

Right. You kept getting more radical after the........

© Mother Jones