A poll of American Christians released last week confirmed my worst suspicions:
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did."
One can only ask: what are these evangelical Protestants hearing at the services they attend that would encourage them to support torture? Susan Brook Thistlethwaite of the Chicago Theological Seminary has a possible explanation:
"White Evangelical theology bases its view of Christian salvation on the severe pain and suffering undergone by Jesus in his flogging and crucifixion by the Romans. This is called the "penal theory of the atonement"–that is, the way Jesus paid for our sins is by this extreme torture inflicted on him."
I touched upon this in an earlier post. The sado-masochistic fixation on Jesus' suffering on the cross is the final result of a distorted God-image based on fear. The American variety of evangelical Christianity posits God as moral lawgiver who is on the side of some humans but against others. The "other" is an embodiment of Satan and must be eliminated – or, at the very least – waterboarded. Once again, Eugen Drewermann has a good response:
"Against the pietistic perversion of the Cross into an ideology of the mysticism of suffering one cannot forecully enough repeat: Jesus did not want to die on the Cross and he never thought to declare inhumanity and torture to be signs of a true trust into God. To the contrary: he lived so that humans would receive back their dignity as creatures of God, so that they would regain their innocence and uninhibitedness in relation to God, and so that the uncreasing suffering which afflicts humans because of God as portrayed in the religions of human history would find an end." (Eugen Drewermann, Das Markusevangelium)
0 comment
I’m reading *Torture and Democracy* by Darius Rejali, at a slow pace. It’s a very long book and, as you can imagine, not easy to read.
I think that the paradox is that out and out degenerate regimes just dump the bodies in the street, but democracies, which want to maintain a facade of respectability, torture in secret with the covert approval of the citizens. Water torture, for instance, is grisly but leaves no marks, so people can choose to believe it isn’t that bad.
Would that there were more pleasant things to think about than all these horrors!
It is very depressing that in 2009 we as a nation are having a debate about torture and its efficacy.