By David Gushee
It was an odd reunion last Wednesday at the Evangelical Theological Society meeting in Atlanta. I had reluctantly agreed to engage Dan Heimbach of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and Keith Pavlischek of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in a scholarly debate about the ethics of torture. Pavlischek, called away to serve in Afghanistan, was replaced by Mark Coppenger of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Thus it turned out to be an all-Baptist panel at the Hilton as the three of us presented papers and then dialogued with each other and a sizable audience. It is interesting, if not disturbing, to note that at an international gathering of almost 2,000 evangelical scholars, the three participants in a debate about torture were all current and former Southern Baptists.
I had dreaded this encounter. I had not seen Heimbach or Coppenger in person in 15 years. We once worked together on the response to the abortion doctor killings and on the 1995 racial reconciliation resolution in the Southern Baptist Convention. Since that time, having been criticized by Heimbach and other politically conservative evangelicals for my work on torture, I assumed I was in for another “evangelical death match,” as my old friend Greg Thornbury of Union University “tweeted” before the conference.
But it did not turn out like that at all. The atmospherics of the event were cordial, as is supposed to happen at academic colloquies. Moderator Tim Denny of the U.S. Naval War College set an irenic tone, and neither of the other panelists went in for ad hominem attacks or polemics.
The substance of the three papers is hard to summarize in this brief space. My paper, linked here, focused on the actual interrogation policies approved and implemented by the Bush-Cheney administration and the spirited defense of those specific policies offered by Bush official Marc Thiessen in his book Courting Disaster.
I sought to present fairly Thiessen’s arguments for those policies and then to rebut them one by one. I ended the paper by suggesting that Christian apologists for those policies had contributed very little in the way of distinctively Christian reasoning, and I tried to point to a kind of Christian community that simply by its identity, calling and mission could not be seduced into support of state acts of such great cruelty and brutality.
Coppenger’s presentation was not available in print form to the audience, but he made a variety of forays into the subject. One of the most memorable was comparing his own teetotaling stance on alcohol with a teetotaling stance in relation to torture and suggesting the former made more ethical sense than the latter. He argued that in at least one sense, the Golden Rule could be understood to justify torture. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” could mean, “Stop terrorists from killing innocent people, using torture if necessary; in so doing you are doing them a good turn.”
Heimbach’s paper was a philosophically elegant analysis of what he called the “semantic problem” of defining torture and thus assessing the ethics of torture. He proposed that subtly different ways of defining and using the term “torture” actually obscured large areas of agreement that exist between people who thought they were adversaries on the issue. He suggested that evangelical ethicists actually agree that there are some inherently evil means of interrogation that are never morally justifiable, and also that there are coercive means of interrogation that must be avoided as much as possible but are sometimes justified. The real difference, he said, is which techniques should be placed in which categories.
Here at Thanksgiving I am indeed grateful that Heimbach’s paper and much of the discussion later recognized that Christians cannot and must not take a “by any means necessary” stance toward national security. But a reticence remains among many to classify waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” of the Bush administration as a clear violation of Christian moral principles.
Meanwhile, my question lingers: does the identity and mission of the church provide any real grounding for how most Christians think about torture — or most other public issues?