How one controversy taught me what religion can—and cannot—do in American public life.
Note: As we approach July 4, and the 250th anniversary of our nation’s official birthday, I will be posting reflections that I have developed during my career related to faith, public life, patriotism, and so on. The following was a speech offered at Piedmont College. I think its points still resonate. At least, I stand by them.
Introduction: Just an Ethicist Minding His Own Business…
In the Fall of 2005 I was just minding my own business, sitting at my desk at the conservative Southern Baptist college in Tennessee where I used to teach, when I got an email from the main editor at Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism. He had a little request. He was wondering if I would be willing to write a moral analysis of the issue of torture for their magazine. He said that they were getting a number of inquiries from evangelical Christians in the armed forces and intelligence services (there are lots of them) who were troubled by the treatment of prisoners that they were seeing or being asked to participate in. This was also not that long after the release of the horrifying pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, so the issue of prisoner abuse was on people’s minds. They wanted me to address it in their pages. I didn’t have much time, I hadn’t written about this before, but I felt I had to say yes to this invitation.
I Enter the Torture Fight
On February 1, 2006, the article came out. The editors called it ‘Five Reasons Why Torture Is Always Wrong.’ I made sure to say right from the beginning that the 9/11 attacks were heinous and that the US had every right to defend itself. After that I tried to confine the question to whether the repertoire of legitimate self-defense measures, from a Christian perspective, could include torture. I said “absolutely not.”
I offered five reasons. Listen for the way my particular religious tradition and its way of reasoning functioned in what follows:
1) Torture violates the dignity of the human being, made in the image of God.
Here is my actual language in the article:
“Every inch of the human body and every aspect of the human spirit come from God and bear witness to his handiwork. We are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–28). Human dignity, value, and worth come as a permanent and ineradicable endowment of the Creator to every person.
Christians, at least, should be trained to see in every person the imprint of God’s grandeur. This should create in us a sense of reverence. Here, we say—and we say it even of detainees in the war on terror—is a human being sacred in God’s sight, made in God’s image, someone for whom Christ died.”
2) Torture mistreats the vulnerable and violates the demands of justice.
I said: “In the Scriptures, God’s understanding of justice tilts toward the vulnerable. “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt. Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry” (Ex. 22:21–23). Primary forms of injustice include violent abuse and domination of the powerless… The 83,000 people who have been detained by our government and military in the last four years are, as prisoners, vulnerable to injustice. Those who have been tortured are victims of injustice.”
3) Authorizing torture trusts government too much.
I said: Human beings are sinful through and through (Rom. 3:10–18). We are not to be trusted, and we are especially dangerous when in possession of unchecked power. This applies to all of us…Given human sinfulness, not only must people be told not to torture, we must also strengthen the structures of due process, accountability, and transparency that buttress those standards and make them less likely to be violated…It is not enough for U.S. government officials to say they can be trusted to act “in keeping with our values”—not without due process, accountability, and transparency. No government is so virtuous as to overcome the laws of human nature, or to be beyond the need for democratic checks and balances.”
4) Torture dehumanizes the torturer.
I said: “Loosening longstanding restrictions on physical and mental cruelty risks the dehumanization not just of the tortured, but also of the torturers. What may be intended as carefully calibrated interrogation techniques could easily tempt their implementers toward sadism—the infliction of pain for the sheer fun of it, especially in the heat of military conflict, in a climate of fear and loathing of the enemy, and in the context of an endless war on terror. How many of us could be trusted to draw the line consistently between the permitted “grabbing, poking, and pushing” and the banned “punching, slapping, and kicking”? How much self-control can we reasonably expect people to exercise?”
5) Torture erodes the character of the nation that tortures.
I said: “A nation is a collective moral entity with a character, an identity that carries across time. Causes come and go, threats come and go, but the enduring question for any social entity is who we are as a people. This is true of a family, a church, a school, a civic club, or a town. It is certainly true of a nation. Sen. John McCain, who has led the Republican charge against torture, recently said, “This isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies.”
Then, in conclusion, I said: “It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians we care about moral values, and we seek to vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voices and say an unequivocal no to torture, a practice which has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.”
And then all hell broke loose.
My daughter got in a life-threatening car accident just before the CT article came out. While I was in the hospital with her over the next few weeks I began getting the pile of commendations and mainly condemnations I ought to have expected all along. While she lay unconscious I was attacked for my shrill partisanship, my lousy, overly emotive moral analysis, my betrayal of Christian values, etc. And those were the emails from my friends.
But meanwhile a community of like-minded new friends came and found me. Over the next several years I got catapulted into an anti-torture/pro-rule of law, pro-human rights community of Christians, Jews, Muslims, secularists, retired military, retired judges, and so on who deeply appreciated the article even where they did not share its religious premises. They asked me to work with them. A few asked me to do more in my own community to protest torture. I ended up leading an evangelical organization we called Evangelicals for Human Rights. We drafted a lengthy Evangelical Declaration Against Torture that gained a 39-1 vote of the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, which is kind of like the National Council of Churches of the evangelical world. This was big news because most white evangelicals supported George W. Bush unequivocally. But here a No was said. I submitted testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I met Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and got to ask the future president on CNN what his stance on torture was. The stance he articulated in response to my question became official government policy in January 2009. I was covered in all major media. Today I serve on a NGO panel about to release a major report and analysis of the entire issue of detainee treatment.
Why do I tell you this? So you will like me? Well, no, because public opinion polls show that an absolute rejection of the morality of torture is the minority view in the US population and especially among southern white evangelicals. I tell you this story because I think it illustrates certain fundamental truths related to the role of religion in the public square in the United States. This story offers an avenue in to the consideration of the theme of this conference. So let’s travel down that avenue and see what we find.
Truth 1: People who are serious about their religion cannot help but apply it to the whole of their lives.
That is how it all started for me on the issue of torture. I am a Christian ethicist who helps Christians apply their faith to the whole of their lives. That’s what I am, what I do. One day a magazine that helps evangelical Christians apply their faith to the whole of their lives discovered that Christians serving the US were asking for some help in figuring out how to square the demands of their faith with the demands (and actions) of their country.
So the “five reasons” article began as moral counsel to Christians. If it could have been offered as a private letter I would have been happy to do so. But this was public. It was public moral counsel to Christians. I told them they could not and must not participate in torture if they would seek to be faithful Christians. This confirmed what some were thinking already and clarified the matter for others. It had real consequences for a number of Christians seeking to apply their faith to the whole of their lives. But it didn’t stop there. Which leads to…
Truth 2: When people serious about their religion apply it to the whole of their lives this often has public, and policy, implications.
Precisely because this article was public moral counsel it had public implications. I wasn’t just saying that Christians shouldn’t torture. I was saying that no one should torture. By extension I was saying that our country shouldn’t torture. Ever. This meant that what began as moral counsel to a handful of concerned Christians became an entry in the raging public debate over whether our nation should torture, and if so, under what circumstances, with what authorization, with what checks and balances, etc.
This illustrates an uncomfortable but undeniable truth: it is more or less impossible for Christians or other believers who seek to apply their faith to the whole of their lives to somehow draw a line at their lives. If they believe they have found an obligation that applies to them, much of the time they come to believe that this same obligation applies to others, and if really serious ought to be enshrined in law as well. In this case, I believed that the obligation not to torture applies to anyone and everyone, and that the one who believes this has a sense of obligation to say so, and that our law (which already reflected this commitment—torture is banned by federal law) should be adhered to rigorously. In general: the more urgent the perceived issue, the more urgent will be that sense of obligation and the more venues in which it will be pursued, even to the level of government policy. (Whether my conviction should become everyone’s law is one of the most difficult judgments in this whole faith and public life arena. Certainly this can’t always or even most of the time be made the case. We can talk about this more later.)
This truth: When people serious about their religion apply it to the whole of their lives this often has public, and policy, implications, is often a very unhappy one if one does not share the conviction being advanced. Few of us appreciate being pounded with the force of someone else’s religiously motivated conviction if we do not agree with it. Sometimes when we resent such pounding we retreat into the claim that it is inappropriate for anyone to bring a religiously motivated conviction into the newspaper, city council meeting, State Capitol, or Senate floor. But such resisters immediately contradict their objections precisely at the time when they bring a very different religiously motivated conviction into public view. I resent your school prayer amendment but here I bring my green cities bill. Or I resent your death penalty reform bill but here I bring my abortion restriction proposal.
The issue is not eliminated even when someone brings into public advocacy what seems to them a secularly motivated conviction. Tax rates should be made more progressive; school board election procedures should be reformed. Whatever it might be. As soon as the advocate of such a proposal is asked why this or that view or policy should be advanced, the deeper reasons for it are usually unveiled. They may be explicitly religious, or they may be based on some abstract moral principle or concern for the community’s good—as they see it. For any person of conviction, whatever it is they believe to be of great moral significance almost inevitably spills over, applying not just to their personal lives but also into some form of public application or advocacy: ecology, economic fairness, women’s well-being, children’s rights, even the aesthetic beauty of a community. Let’s try it as a formula, like this:
Ultimate Moral Values// fund Personal Moral Convictions/Practices// spill over into Public Ethical Advocacy// sometimes including Public Policy Advocacy. The only difference for the explicitly religious person is one additional step: Religious Convictions shape Ultimate Moral Convictions. If you don’t like the idea of all this morality and sometimes religiosity affecting public moral and policy arguments, I ask you this: would you rather leave it to mere economic interests? Partisan considerations? The mere desire for reelection? The highest bidder? Simple pragmatism? Which leads to…
Truth 3: Sometimes it seems that only stubbornly held religious convictions hold the power to resist short-term or utilitarian or dehumanizing motivations and policies.
If I had to ask you how the issue of torture is debated most of the time in our media and in our culture, what would you say? Consider the occasional eruptions, as for example the debate over the current movie Zero Dark Thirty. The question is always, it seems: does it ‘work’? Does it give good intelligence?
Think about it. This is a utilitarian question. It resolves rightness or wrongness by attempting to determine with torture is effective. It assumes that if the answer is yes, then torture is the right thing to do.
I know a lot of people who are not Christians, not religious at all, who are deeply disturbed by how this is our national default position when it comes to talking about torture. Did it work/Does it work. Those terribly uneasy with this move include military officers and lawyers who know that soldiers who torture violate their training, the Geneva Conventions, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and that they do not want soldiers resolving that matter on the basis of whether torture works. It includes policymakers who drafted our felony bans on torture and want a culture of respect for law, or constitutionalists seeking to protect the rule of law in our 235 year old democracy. It includes diplomats who are committed to reducing the amount of torture around the world and want our country to set a good example. It includes human rights activists who want rights of all types respected regardless of whether in some country respect for human rights is viewed as advancing some perceived greatest good for the greatest number of people.
Still, in my experience, it is primarily religiously motivated people who most strongly resist merely utilitarian thinking. That is because in our very relativistic, utilitarian society these are the largest group of people who still believe there is such a thing as an absolute right or wrong and who still believe they are obligated to live accordingly.
I had a very interesting encounter along these lines during the most intense days of the torture fight. I was asked to submit testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in DC when they were holding hearings on detainee abuse issues. I asked the staffer what voice they wanted from me as a religious activist. Was it appropriate for me to speak the language of faith that I had used in my articles and our declaration against torture? Or would that be inappropriate? I got an email back asking for me to speak the language of my faith and not try to self-censor. I was told that this was precisely what was most needed in the debate at that time. Which leads to…
Truth 4: Seriously held religion is an enormously powerful force because it transcends all other considerations.
If you ask a serious believer how they are supposed to live, they won’t say: I am supposed to live so as to do whatever works, or whatever produces the greatest good, or whatever defends our nation the best against terrorism…they will say: I am supposed to live to please God. I am answerable to God. God is my judge. That is what was motivating those soldiers writing to CT asking for some help. They wanted to please God. They wanted to know what God wants. They didn’t think it could include detainee abuse but they needed some help making sense of it all.
So from a seriously religious perspective God, or God’s will, gets the last word. It doesn’t matter whether it “works.” What matters is whether God accepts or rejects it. This leads to another little glimpse behind the scenes: in my first draft of the CT article, I had a sixth reason to oppose torture: that it doesn’t actually work, or at least not better than standard interrogation methods. The evidence I have seen leads me to believe this claim was and is factually true. But in true seriously Christian/religious style, the editors of CT cut it. They didn’t want that sixth, pragmatic, utilitarian reason. Either torture is right with God or wrong with God. So the reasons that survived in the article were all deeper, moral, ultimate—not pragmatic. And I’m glad. Which leads to
Truth 5: Accessing the resources of a religious tradition for public ethics is an art form—it’s something you learn how to do, and some do it better than others.
Listen again to the way the resources of my faith tradition functioned in my original CT article.
1) Image of God/human dignity
2) Justice for the vulnerable
3) Torture trusts government too much
4) Torture dehumanizes the torturer
5) Torture degrades the nation
I found resources in my faith tradition—not some specific injunction—thou shalt not torture—but a broader set of resources. The image of God as funding an absolute commitment to human dignity and human rights is a move deeply affected especially by Catholic moral theology. (My new book on display here attempts a Protestant version.) The justice from below theme is a product of biblical studies and especially the hard lessons learned from the cries of the oppressed, as articulated in liberation theology, black theology, etc. The theme about trusting government too much was shaped by a robustly pessimistic understanding of human sin developed in much of the classic Christian tradition; and especially collective sin, a theme for which I am especially indebted to Reinhold Niebuhr. Torture dehumanizing the torturer is a character-oriented theme, shaped by reading a lot of Stanley Hauerwas and other writers about the way our practices shape and misshape our character. The theme about torture degrading the nation reflects an understanding that collective groups, including nations, have a moral character, not just individuals. So we need to be concerned about the moral development or degradation of nations, not just you and me as individuals. Listening to the torture survivor John McCain really helped me here.
These mainly religious themes made the most sense to my co-religionists, in their own terms. And yet others could listen in and find what the political philosopher John Rawls called “overlapping consensus.” Social justice advocates, conservative skeptics of centralized government power, American patriots, human rights activists, those concerned about the traumas experienced by our troops; as well as people of other faiths who saw shared or overlapping religious themes–all could find points of connection to their own concerns. Which leads to…
Truth 6: There are many paths that lead to shared moral truth contributing to a better society; we should celebrate all of them.
Those who deploy religiously specific or ‘thick’ language in the public square are often misunderstood as misguided, intolerant zealots. But this is to assume that anyone who speaks the language of a particular religious tradition is ipso facto rejecting the validity of other religious traditions. But what a disastrous misunderstanding! This is sometimes true, but certainly not always true!
I operate from the perspective that there are real, extant religious communities in the world, and that the world is generally a better place because each of these communities exists. They are part of the great tapestry of the US and global communities. There is something to learn from all of them.
When these communities are operating as real religious communities, they will inhabit a thought world that in many ways is foreign to those not a part of it. Sacred texts, religious authorities, modes of reasoning, traditions of moral practice, etc, are a rich part of each religious community. Leaders in these communities are responsible for the internal work of helping their adherents live out the best insights of their faith. This only happens if they are still able and willing to employ in a rigorous way the indigenous resources of their own traditions.
I celebrate, then, whenever I see religious leaders doing skillful, morally constructive work that shapes the ethos of their communities and the character of their people in positive ways. If they attempted to thin out their religious language so as to have it make sense to me as an outsider I might appreciate the gesture–but I would rather listen to see how they really talk within their faith community. And because I believe that all truth is God’s truth, and that everyone can gain access to that truth using their God-given moral capacities, and that other religious traditions have ingenious and fascinating texts and traditions that help get their adherents to truth, to love, mercy, and justice, I am not threatened by encounters with vibrant religiosity foreign to my own.
I first coined the phrase “many paths to righteousness” when I wrote my doctoral dissertation on those who saved Jews during the Holocaust. I discovered in that research that less than 1% of the local population, mainly Christian, did anything to help Jews survive the Nazis. And of that 1%, motivations of those who have been studied varied dramatically: personal friendship, group ties, neighborliness, political ideologies, hatred of the Nazis, raw compassion, moral principle and yes, sometimes, biblical and religious obligation. I said the issue for a Jew on the run was not what particular motivation might lead a neighbor to help them survive, but whether they would help them survive. Full stop.
And that is what I discovered in a disorienting way during the torture fight. I learned that there were many paths to an absolutist rejection of torture, and that I was certainly glad to find allies, whatever route had gotten them to the same point. Secular, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, human rights, military tradition—I didn’t care how they got there, just that they got there. And then of course I found myself desperately unhappy to discover that many, indeed a majority, of my intimate religious colleagues—my fellow evangelicals, Baptists, Christians—had not gotten there. I learned that the line between right and wrong, as I saw it, did not track with the line separating religious communities. My own religious community was desperately divided morally. And this leads to the final Truth for today…
Truth 7: Religious and moral conflict is inevitable, whether in public or in religious communities.
This one has been hard to swallow. You can read about instances of great fights in church history or great debates in political history and it is all very interesting but you only know what it’s really like when you are in the middle of one, in real time. And it’s terrible. It’s terribly painful. It’s terribly disorienting. Especially for religious folk who believe God is Real, and God is One, and God speaks, and God wants us to know what God wants, and then we can’t agree on much, big or small. We have to fight it out. And the more we think is at stake, the uglier the fight tends to be.
There are ground rules for civility. Whether in our congregations or in our nation, we can and must do better in handling even stark differences of opinion. We can avoid name-calling, deal with the real issues, learn to enter into the other’s perspective, and so on. We can get out of our little information niches and learn to tolerate hearing the perspective of someone who believes differently.
But still, let’s face it: there are times when the discovery of moral diversity and the intensity of moral conflict takes our breath away anew. That was certainly my experience during the torture fight, and has been my experience during other agonizing fights in my 20 year career over such issues as the role of women in church, abortion, race, ecology, war, and today, the gay issue.
It is easy to blame religion for much of this conflict, and certainly when the reasons people arrive at their convictions are religiously laden, the fighting is often particularly intense. But it doesn’t take religion to make us mad at someone who believes fundamentally different than we do about something we are absolutely sure about. This is the human condition.
I remember speaking at a little Baptist university to a group of undergrads about the time that the torture fight was white hot. Normally I find undergrads pretty deferential to the outside speaker at the big lectureship. But this time when the question period was about to end a young man got up, trembling with rage, saying: did you really mean to say in your most recent article that those Christians who believe torture might be okay are in sin? Are you telling me—look at me in the eyes right now–that I am not right with God? I mean, that young man was livid. I told him that I believed he was terribly wrong about torture. But I backed off from claiming the authority to determine whether he was right with God. I lived through the day, and I learned a lesson or two.
Conclusion: On Seeing Through a Mirror, Dimly
I have used the torture issue and my experience with it as an avenue into a general discussion of faith and citizenship, or religion and the public square. I hope you don’t walk away thinking mainly about torture. Think mainly about the illuminating truths revealed by the torture fight. They apply far more broadly.
Let your thoughts wander to major moral fights in the past, or fights of the present. Think of them: the fight over slavery; or the temperance movement; or Sunday Blue Laws; or child labor, or women’s suffrage and other women’s rights issues; or government-guaranteed retirement benefits; or the civil rights movement; or the nuclear arms race; or the gay rights movement; or the abortion fight; or the Iraq war; or climate change; or immigration reform; or…
Now think of the 7 truths I have proposed:
Truth 1: People who are serious about their religion cannot help but apply it to the whole of their lives.
Truth 2: When people serious about their religion apply it to the whole of their lives this often has public, and policy, implications.
Truth 3: Sometimes it seems only stubbornly held religious convictions hold the power to resist short-term or utilitarian or dehumanizing motivations and policies.
Truth 4: Seriously held religion is an enormously powerful force because it transcends all other considerations.
Truth 5: Accessing the resources of a religious tradition for public ethics is an art form.
Truth 6: There are many paths that lead to shared moral truth contributing to a better public square; we should celebrate all of them.
Truth 7: Religious and moral conflict is inevitable, whether in public or in religious communities.
Is this last point a counsel of despair? I think it is a counsel of humility, before God and before our own very limited, very damaged capacity to understand right from wrong. And it is a call to treat others from a starting point of respect, even amidst our endless moral and religious conflicts.
And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Thank you for your kind attention.
