By David Gushee
It is still hard to believe that the hopes we have nurtured in the Christian anti-torture movement would come to fruition — and so early, and so comprehensively, as they did with President Obama’s executive orders on Guantanamo, detention policy, and interrogation his first week in office. Those orders fulfilled, to a very large extent, the agenda that Evangelicals for Human Rights has been promoting since our founding. And in nearly every detail the president’s orders tracked with our declaration of principles for a presidential executive order, released last spring. We applaud the president for these decisions.
My first article on the issue of torture was just about exactly three years ago, in the pages of Christianity Today. The Bush detainee policies had thrown off the moral gyroscopes of many people — perhaps especially evangelicals and Southern Baptists, with their so-often-reflexive Republican and Bush loyalties. If President Bush had ordered or permitted something, it must be right, they reasoned — and if anyone was opposed to it, they must be partisans, liberals, irrationalists, pacifists, or heretics. CT wanted me to try to think through the issue biblically and theologically, and I did my best to do so. I argued that Christians could never support torture or cruelty in the name of national security. A few months later, Evangelicals for Human Rights was born as an organization, and later we produced “An Evangelical Declaration against Torture,” which helped change the terms of the debate and gained considerable mainstream evangelical support.
You would have thought we had argued that Jesus was not the Second Person of the Trinity from some of the criticism our work received. A large number of evangelicals simply were unable to reflect on these issues in any coherently Christian way, so they just engaged in ad hominem attacks. (I have a nice collection of these in my “save for a sunny day” file.) Others offered a defense or quasi-defense of abuse, cruelty, or torture in the name of Romans 13 and just-war theory. Some are still at it. A review of the articles and news stories on these issues available in the conservative Christian media since early 2006 would be an interesting, though depressing, project for some enterprising researcher.
History will record how woefully un-Christian — how out of touch with anything approaching Gospel values — that these arguments were. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I believe that some who carry the name of Christian teacher/minister/leader will face serious accounting before God for defending or euphemizing the cruel abuse of human beings made in God’s image.
And I think that is the next stage of the torture fight: coming to grips, settling accounts, evaluating the religious, moral, and cultural meaning of the fact that not only did our government torture people, but that many Christians fully supported it. EHR and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture will continue to press for legislation codifying many of the principles and policies articulated by President Obama. We also support some kind of national inquiry tasked with uncovering everything that happened and hearing the voices of those who wrote the policies, those who implemented the policies, and those who suffered from the policies. We need a total national repudiation of what occurred, and the development of a moral consensus in which we agree that national security will never again be (purportedly) purchased in this country at the cost of our 240-year-long rejection of torture and cruelty during wartime. There is no such consensus now.
Much needs to happen — not just in Washington, but in the churches, parachurch organizations, denominations, and educational institutions bearing the name of Jesus Christ. We need ministers, professors, and organization heads to reflect on what it means that over half of evangelical Christians supported the use of torture even as late as summer 2008. We need these leaders to think about their silence amidst this long-running national debate, and even in some cases their active, public support for extremes of mental and physical cruelty toward those in our custody.
Yes, as critics never tired of saying, there is plenty of torture in other parts of the world. Yes, much of it is worse than what our nation did. Yes, there is plenty of need to protest the torture that goes on elsewhere. But we live here. This is our country. This was done in our name. This was authorized by our leaders at the highest level. And most Christians were fine with it. That is our problem, and it’s a big one.