This particular "symposium" is on the Website of Evangelical Outpost. I'll quote Beliefnet.org for a description of the site's perspective:
This is a conservative blog from an "evangelical worldview." The posts are intelligent and cover a wide variety of topics, from science to the media to discussing "What's an Evangelical?" Evangelical Outpost includes a frequent series called "Know Your Evangelicals," a brief bio of important people in the evangelical community, like Chuck Colson, T.D. Jakes, and Jim Wallis.
The Web page introduces the eight essays with a quote from neoconservative publicist Charles Krauthammer's already notorious pro-torture column The Truth about Torture: It's time to be honest about doing terrible things Weekly Standard 12/05/05: "Torture is not always impermissible." The articles are all in response to Krauthammer's arguments in some way. It seems to me all eight make arguments that could be recognized as conservative religious arguments for their positions.
At least a couple of them don't read like Christian Right adherents to me. I would say that anyone who makes a Christian religious argument for torture can safely be counted as part of the Christian Right. I would be glad to hear of people who are clearly otherwise associated with the Christian Right who straightforwardly opposes torture. Only one of the eight contributors to this symposium seems to me to make a clear argument against torture.
What torture means in the context of the Bush administration
It's notable that abstract discussions about torture, including those in this symposium, typically avoid talking about the kinds of practices actually going on, ones that have been clearly documented as being practiced by American forces since 9/11. So before disussing their positions here, I want to mention what real existing torture means in the real existing Bush administration.
The practices that have been well-documented in the public record include: "waterboarding" (near-drowning); prolonged sensory deprivation; sleep deprivation; constraining victims in painful positions for extended periods to cause excruciating pain; physically abusing children in front of their parents; various forms of humiliation including forcing victims to crawl around on dog leashes, stripping them naked and forcing them to urinate and defecate on themselves; various forms of sexual abuse and violence including vaginal rape of females and anal rapes of males, including young Iraqi boys; releasing a dog onto a naked victim with his hands bound qand allowing the dog to rip out chunks of his flesh; extensive beatings; deprivation of food, water and medical care. The violence has caused death in a number of known cases; this is also known as "murder".
Tara McKelvey gives us some information about what's in some of the Abu Ghuraib photos and videos not yet released to the public in Picture This American Prospect 12/20/05 issue (at this writing, the online article is still behind subscription).
Clearly the images - which along with those first disclosed on 60 Minutes II on April 28, 2004 - are disturbing. Members of select congressional committees were horrified during slide shows of the images held in a closed-off room on Capitol Hill on May 12, 2004. The photos show grim-faced young Iraqi women baring their breasts, forced sex among detainees, and a prisoner smashing his head against a wall, according to lawmakers who watched the slide shows. Trent Franks, a Republican congressman from Arizona, told an Associated Press reporter he saw a photo of a bloodied prisoner "sodomizing himself" with an object.Jim Lobe recently reported on the latest allegations from the respected Human Rights Watch (I take it for granted that pro-torture advocates do not respect this or any other genuine human rights organization): Group Exposes CIA's "Dark Prison" in Afghanistan Inter Press Service 12/19/05. He writes:
Amid efforts by a bipartisan coalition in Congress to ban torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the "war on terror", a major U.S. human rights groups charged Monday that Washington ran a secret prison in Afghanistan where suspected terrorists were held in total darkness for days and even weeks at a time from 2002 until at least last year.The Human Rights Watch article of 12/19/05 on the "dark prison" can be found at their Web site.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the prison was known by the inmates as the "dark prison" or "prison of darkness" where they were chained to the walls, deprived of food and drinking water, and continuously subjected to loud heavy-metal or rap music apparently designed to disorient them and break down their will.
Their shackles often made it impossible to lie down or sleep, and interrogations carried out apparently by civilian U.S. personnel - presumed to be Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives - included slaps and punches. Guards at the prison were mostly Afghan, according to the report.
According to HRW, the prison was off-limits to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or other independent agencies.
It's important to remember that when we talk about torture in the Bush Gulag, we're not talking about something sanitary and abstract like "taking the gloves off" or "aggressive interrogation". We're talking about serious, extreme, often blatantly sadistic, illegal acts of physical and psychological cruelty. But not one of these eight specifically mentions the real existing torture practices that the administration has applied in the last four years.
One of them does refer to a blowtorch and pliers, but I don't recall those instruments being specific parts of this administration's torture menu. The practices used by the Bush administration are largely derived from old Soviet practices aimed at inducing submissive behavior over a period of time. For all the sophomoric talk about that ticking nuclear bomb we've all heard about so many times, the administration's torture techniques don't seem to be the blowtorch-and-pliers types that would be aimed at getting information or confessions in the shortest amount of time.
Christian opinions on the Bush administration's torture policy and practices
The most significant of the essays at the Evangelical Outpost site is the one by Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, who is perhaps the President's most important religious adviser. If he's not the leading Christian Right intellectual, he's certainly high on the list.
His argument is that it's better to have anti-torture rules in place, but get around them by defining "torture" so narrowly that anything is allowed:
McCain is right: The United States should be on record as banning "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of prisoners. The meaning of each of those terms will inevitably be disputed, as will the case-by-case application of the principle.And this seems to be the adminstration's position at the moment: we're against torture, but nothing we actually do counts as torture. But it's not surprising that people trying to maintain some fig-leaf of credibility as religious figures of some kind will cover a pro-torture positions with mounds of doubletalk. And Neuhaus is no exception:
Establishing a principle [such as opposing torture] is not "merely for show." Recognizing, clearly but sotto voce, that there will sometimes be exceptions to the principle is not hypocrisy. Those who, under the most extreme circumstances, violate the rule must be held strictly accountable to higher authority. Here the venerable maxim applies, abusus non tollit usus—the abuse does not abolish the use.At least Neuhaus' opinion is marginally more enlightened than that of the Spanish Inquisition.
We are not talking here about the reckless indulgence of cruelty and sadism exhibited in, for instance, the much-publicized Abu Ghraib scandal. We are speaking, rather, of extraordinary circumstances in which senior officials, acting under perceived necessity, decide there is no moral alternative to making an exception to the rules, and accept responsibility for their decision. Please note that, in saying this, one does not condone the decision. It is simply a recognition that in the real world such decisions will be made.
Albert Mohler, who I've quoted here criticizing Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values (2005), also offers his take. (Also found at his Web site: Torture and the War on Terror: We Must Not Add Dirty Rules to Dirty Hands 12/20/05). Mohler's rather lengthy commentary is worth rading to get a good example of the kind of blather rightwing religious commentators will go through to make a radical conclusion sound like a carefully considered conclusion. The bottom line for Mohler: torture is okay, as long as officials pretend in public to be concerned about it. He writes:
Under certain circumstances, most morally sensitive persons would surely allow interrogators to yell at prisoners and to use psychological intimidation, sleep deprivation, and the removal of creature comforts for purposes of obtaining vital information. In increasingly serious cases, most would likely allow some use of pharmaceuticals and more intensive and manipulative psychological techniques. In the most extreme of conceivable cases, most would also allow the use of far more serious mechanisms of coercion – even what we would all agree should be labeled as torture.And, well, gee whiz, what's the point of trying to have anti-torture laws anyway, he pleads:
We are simply not capable, I would argue, of constructing a set of principles and rules for torture that could adequately envision the real-life scenarios under which the pressure and temptation to use extreme coercion would be seriously contemplated.Mohler's piece was written after Dear Leader Bush agreed with the compromise version of the McCain amendments, so Mohler's piece, like Neuhaus', is a defense of letting the Bush administration get away with torturing prisoners at its own discretion.
Darrell Cole at least comes out saying torture is wrong:
To torture someone, or to countenance your government torturing someone, is to admit that you fear death more than you fear displeasing God and it is to admit that you love something more than you love God. To torture someone is to betray a disordered love for something that can never be a proper ultimate good. Not even our society or our own lives, as much as we love them, are that good.At the same time, he comes off a bit like Alan Colmes making a mild liberal argument against a forceful and hyperpartisan Sean Hannity. He lays out and endorses the argument that torture is effective and offers up various sophomoric hypothetical by which torture can be justified. His vague anti-torture position that it's wrong to torture because it shows that "you fear death more than you fear displeasing God" is not likely to be very persuasive to most Christians. Martyrdom cults just don't have the emotional power for Christians they did in the days of Caligula.
The position of Daniel R. Heimbach is basically what we describe by the technical term "gobbledygook". He, too, endorses the current Republican Party line that torture is theoretically bad but whatever Dear Leader Bush authorizes is by definition not "torture". But he wraps this in an incomprehensible argument that sounds like a typical Young Republican on OxyContin that says McCain's anti-torture position is actually more pro-torture than Krauthammer's pro-torture position. Or something like that. He is a Professor of Christian Ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I think I would fail his class.
John Jefferson Davis (dude, I would change my name if I were you) at least uses a word I don't recall ever seeing before, "deontological". That's one of those words that those Tom Sawyer would use that made Huck Finn think, I don't know what it means but it sure does sound grand! My first guess would be that it has something to do with teeth.
In an argument that his namesake would probably have blushed to make (except in the case of slaves for whom torture was routine treatment), Davis argues:
In the extreme circumstances of war, the biblical narrative indicates that some practices not licit in peacetime, e.g., deliberate deception of an enemy with deadly intent, may be permissible in such circumstances to safeguard innocent civilian lives (Joshua 2, the case of Rahab the harlot and the spies). Human life is sacred, made in the image of God, and the government authority has the moral obligation to protect the citizens from murder and violence from both domestic and foreign sources (Romans 13:3, 4). The terrorist in this scenario has already conspired to commit mass murder, a crime intrinsically "worthy of death" (Acts 25:11). By conspiring to commit a horrendous crime "worthy of death" - the ultimate penalty - the terrorist has forfeited the moral right to enjoy the normal immunities shielding the prisoner from pain and coercion. The state is ordained of God to "bring wrath on the wrongdoer" (Rom.13:4).In other words, in Davis' "deontology" God says it's okay to torture people as long as you pretend they're involved in something remotely to do with terrorism. Oddly, he says that the torturers should not be "military and police personnel", but he doesn't specify who he thinks should do the sadistic acts listed at the start of this post. I guess some of the Christian Right's contacts from Guatemala in the 1980s have plenty of experience and could be hired.
Kenneth Magnuson gives us a fairly extended offering of blather, the bottom line being it's okay to torture as long as the intention of the government is good. He's also an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I'd flunk his class, too. Actually, I'd get kicked out of his class.
Mark Liederbach, a colleague of Heimbach's in the same school's ethics department, offers up a string of theological arguments that would put even Martin Luther to sleep. Liederbach is also concerned about "deontological" issues, whatever the [Cheney] those are.
But if you can stay aware until the end of his argument, he actually does say that torture is wrong. And not just because, "We worship God, not safety." But because the premises that pro-torture advocates use - he's specifically addressing Krauthammer's - are bullshit excuses to practice the sadistic acts mentioned above. (He might not use the same terms I did to summarize his arguments.)
Robert Vischer, who is apparently arguing from a Catholic Christian viewpoint, makes a more compact argument from a natural law perspective, and comes to a more straightforward conclusion. He is the only one of the eight contributors that sound to me like an unambiguous opposition to torture:
A Christian's steadfast opposition to the blanket legitimization of torture cannot be allowed to melt into ambivalence toward a case-by-case implementation of torture, as though the existence of the "ticking bomb" scenario can blot out the sinfulness of those charged with searching out that scenario and resolving it within idealized boundaries.It's a commonplace among the Christian Right that one of the sins of American culture is something they call "situational ethics", which they claim makes one unable to take clear stances on right and wrong.
It bears noting that a Christian approaching torture from the premises of natural law will have a markedly different journey than one coming from the realist perspective. But at least on this issue, they arrive at common ground. Whether we lean toward the natural law tradition's deontological framework or the realist tradition’s consequentialist emphasis, the case against torture is formidable. Whatever our convictions as to torture's purported necessity or connection to the public good, the Gospel's call to honor human dignity while recognizing human sinfulness compels Christians to resist the temptation to embrace the utilitarian bent toward using another human life as an instrument of self-preservation.
Yet Robert Vischer is the only one of these eight that says clearly that torture - and we're talking about real existing American torture like the blooded prisoner forced to sodomize him with "an object" - is wrong. Wrong with a period at the end of the sentence.
And, on the issue referenced in the title to this post, not one of them grapples with the real-life issue in the real existing Bush administration that what is currently happening is both factually and in perception about Christians torturing Muslims.
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