ATLANTA — Most evangelical American Christians remained silent about torture at Abu Ghraib and Guan-tanamo for some of the same reasons European Christians 70 years ago largely failed to resist the Holocaust, ethicist David Gushee told a na-tional summit on torture.
“The great majority of European Christians proved to be bystanders, neither helping the Nazis nor helping the Jews,” Gushee observed.
Similarly, evangelical Christians — particularly white Southern evangelicals — failed to speak up when it became apparent American policy sanctioned the use of torture to interrogate suspected terrorists.
Philip Zimbardo via U.S. military/Google images
Gushee, professor at Mercer University's McAfee School of Theology and president of Evangelicals for Human Rights, noted when governments misuse their power to harm people and violate human rights, they hold key advantages that discourage resistance:
• Information. Only a small number of people within the government know what its policies are and how they are implemented.
“Even in a society with a free press and a political opposition, there will always be a time lag between the development and implementation of secret government policies and the public discovery of those policies,” he said.
“Thus, any resistance will always be playing catch-up and operating on the basis of less-than-complete information — often information purposefully distorted by the government.”
In the case of torture, two years passed between the time secret government interrogation policies were developed and abuses at Abu Ghraib became public knowledge.
“Once again, government had a head-start over those who would check its behavior and has retained an informational advantage as the Bush administration has sought to keep its paper trail as hidden as possible,” Gushee said.
• Authority. Most ordinary citizens hold the presupposition “that the government has both the right and the obligation to undertake the policies it deems necessary to protect national security or advance the common good, and that citizens should trust government with that power,” he said.
That tendency proves even stronger among conservative Christians who believe the biblical text in Romans 13 grants the state a God-ordained right to exercise the power of “the sword.”
“This is related to a broader evangelical authoritarianism — especially in our most conservative quarters — that elevates the role of the man over his family, the male pastor over his church, the president over his nation and our nation over the rest of the world,” Gushee said.
“All of these authorities are viewed as having been put into place by God and as answerable primarily or only to God. The kind of checks and balances provided by democratic constitutionalism, the wisdom of other nations and international law are devalued.”
• Intimidation. Government has the power to impose high costs on anyone who resists its policies.
In the case of evangelicals, critics of the Bush administration's policies on torture “have been charged with everything from being soft on terrorism to being closet leftists to offering shoddy definitions of torture to being naïve for not realizing that it is a new kind of war against a new kind of enemy requiring new kinds of policies,” Gushee said.
Many evangelicals also fell into the trap of objectifying Muslims, he added.
“It is clear to me from the nature of conservative evangelical discourse about Islam and terrorism that many evangelicals after 9/11 perceived Islam as an intrinsically dangerous religion and Muslims as the enemy of both America and Christianity — as the international cultural ‘other,'” he said.
Stephen Jones
David Gushee, Christian ethics professor at Mercer University's McAfee School of Theology, tells participants at the National Summit on Torture why he believes most white evangelicals in South remained silent when they learned about abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
People who resist injustice face clear disadvantages, Gushee noted. Potential resisters must notice something is wrong or someone needs help; discern the significance of what they notice; and move from inertia to action.
That demands a heightened sense of personal responsibility, a conviction that action will make a difference, the ability to execute an action plan and network-building skills to sustain resistance.
“Despite a biblical record full of the demand for justice and the affirmation of human dignity;
“Despite the commitment to justice and human rights of the Radical Reformers;
“Despite the 19th century evangelical reform groups that fought for abolition, women's rights and the rights of workers;
“Despite the Catholic social teaching tradition with its careful theology and ethic of justice;
“Despite the Christian liberation movements and civil rights movement anchored in the black church;
“And despite the justice witness of many other faiths, late 20th century white evangelicals have often acted as if justice and human rights are strange, alien, irreligious concepts imported from the Enlightenment,” Gushee said.
“This has left us with weak antennae for sensing injustices in society — or for that matter, in our own churches.
“What an incredible tragedy that evangelicals lost touch with their own tradition and with the broader Christian tradition, and with such horrifying implications.”
Evangelicals — particularly high-profile leaders — were slow to notice torture as a moral issue and reticent to criticize an administration they had supported, he added.
“If our faith's leaders can't figure out that waterboarding and freezing people to death is immoral — people who have been disarmed, deprived of protection from international law and the U.S. Constitution, defenseless against their abusers, made in the image of God, loved by Jesus Christ and sacred in God's sight — we need some new leaders,” Gushee said.
In a panel discussion that followed Gushee's address, an African-American Protestant, a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim and a Roman Catholic offered perspectives from their faith communities.
American policy carried out in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is consistent with the same attitude that allowed racism to flourish in the South, said Lawrence Carter, dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College.
“Torture is the new lynching,” Carter said.
Mohammed Elsanousi, director of communications and community outreach for the Islamic Society of North America, stressed many Muslim-Americans failed to speak out against torture out of fear of being associated with terrorists.
Brian Walt, founding executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, underscored Gushee's observation about seeing Muslims as “the other.”
“How we deal with ‘the other' is the litmus test for our religious integrity,” Walt said.
Roman Catholic teaching declares torture “an intrinsic evil,” said Cathleen Kaveny, professor of law and theology at the University of Notre Dame.
“Even so, in the United States, Catholic voices against torture are far more muted than they ought to be, and the response of the faithful has been lukewarm at best,” she said.
Catholics should draw on the same passion for the sanctity of human life that has energized opposition to abortion as they deal with the torture issue.
Given the Catholic affinity for iconic imagery, she suggested the image of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus has provided a compelling visual for right-to-life advocates.
She suggested a similar emphasis on the iconic images of Mary on Good Friday, watching her son being beaten and crucified, could provide a similar visual expression for the torture issue.
“Every man who is subjected to extraordinary rendition is some mother's son,” she said.