Torture: What would Jesus do?

So much for turning “the other cheek,” said Chris Good in The Atlantic Online. A new poll by the Pew Research Center found that the more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support torture as an interrogation technique. Some 54 percent of churchgoers who attend church weekly said the use of torture is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Support for torture among atheists, agnostics, and “unaffiliateds” was substantially lower, at 40 percent. White evangelicals are “more prone to saying torture is justifiable” than either Catholics or mainline Protestants. For those of us who take Christ’s teachings seriously, this is grim news, said John Mark Reynolds in TheWashingtonPost.com. Consider how the Romans tortured Christ. Now, “fear and the desire to protect the innocent often drive good men to do very bad things.” But torturing any man, “even the most base,” debases the torturer, as it did the Romans. Christianity and torture are profoundly “incompatible.”

“I wish it were that simple,” said Brad Hirschfield, also in TheWashingtonPost.com. Imagine, however, that your child’s life “would be saved by information extracted by torture.” What then? “The very notion of torture sickens me,” but we can’t pretend that complex moral problems always have “easy” answers. True, but you can always count on the self-righteous liberals at the Pew Forum for plenty of cheap moralizing—and for cooked numbers, too, said Paul Chesser in The American Spectator Online. Pew’s sample of white evangelicals was only 174 people, which means “a total of 108” voiced support for torture. With such a “limited number” of respondents, it’s easy to paint a misleading picture of Christians.

Actually, these poll results are consistent with others, said David Neff in Christianity Today Online. A survey last year found that 58 percent of white Southern evangelicals believe that torture is sometimes or often justified. What these polls really indicate is the degree to which utilitarian arguments—torture is acceptable if it provides valuable intelligence—have infiltrated conservative Christian thinking. When it comes to abortion or stem-cell research, evangelicals soundly reject appeals to pragmatism. But on torture, expediency trumps principle. That’s because this is about politics, not theology, said Michael Paulson in TheBostonGlobe.com. Evangelicals are still loyal to their fellow evangelical, former President George W. Bush. “Disentangling” their religious views from their political partisanship is probably more than any survey can accomplish.

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