Associated Baptist Press - 10/2/2008

Associated Baptist Press
October 2, 2008 · (08-94)

Greg Warner, Executive Editor
Robert Marus, News Editor/Washington Bureau Chief

In this issue
Human Rights & Wrongs: Why the religious silence on torture?...
Human Rights & Wrongs: Torture has consequences for body, soul
Human Right & Wrongs: Christians should defend rights, ethicist says
Human Rights & Wrongs: Not all coercion is torture, ethicist says
Opinion: God-talk and conservative politics

Human Rights & Wrongs: Why the religious silence on torture?
By Ken Camp

ATLANTA (ABP) -- Most evangelical American Christians remained silent about torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo for some of the same reasons European Christians 70 years ago largely failed to resist the Holocaust, ethicist David Gushee told a national summit on torture.

"The great majority of European Christians proved to be bystanders, neither helping the Nazis nor helping the Jews," Gushee observed during the National Religious Summit on Torture, held Sept. 11-12 in Atlanta.

Similarly, evangelical Christians -- particularly white Southern evangelicals -- failed to speak up when it became apparent American policy to sanction the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- many of which can be considered torture -- to interrogate suspected terrorists.

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 Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison 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, who also writes a regular column for Associated Baptist Press, 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.

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 the prison at the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba, 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," he 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," he 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.

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.

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Human Rights & Wrongs: Torture has consequences for body, soul
By Robert Marus

ATLANTA (ABP) -- Nearly two decades ago, Sister Dianna Ortiz says, Guatemalan security forces abducted her and took her to a clandestine prison where she was brutally gang-raped; burned more than 100 times with cigarettes; forced to cut another woman with a machete; and suspended by her wrists over a pit full of dead and dying men, women and children.

Worse, yet, her torturers documented their brutality through videotape and photographs -- with her captors warning they would release the visual evidence to the press if she spoke out about the experience.

"This past has awakened again, both here and now," Ortiz said of the experience, in remarks prepared for a recent summit of religious leaders in Atlanta. "The smells of burning flesh and decomposing corpses, the mutilated bodies of children, the policeman's cratered face and button-like eyes devoid of feeling are returning. I have no wish whatsoever to return to that prison in Guatemala; nor do I wish to hearken back to how I felt as I cried to a silent and deaf God. Yet, it all does come back."

The American Catholic nun went to the Guatemalan highlands in 1987 as a missionary to indigenous Mayan people. What she experienced at the hands of right-wing paramilitary officials -- and a fair-skinned accomplice, identified only as "Alejandro," who she said was obviously an American -- in 1989 nearly destroyed her faith.

It wasn't like that before the torture. Ortiz experienced what she called "the radiant face of God" in the first two years of her missionary work, teaching Mayan children in their own language.

"We are nearly blinded by the glorious colors, shining from heaven's door," she wrote. "But now, try to imagine a dark shadow falling across that face of God -- eclipsing it, obliterating every sign of it. Hope is gone. Belief is gone. The God you once knew -- you once trusted -- is dead. Where are the colors now? What colors emanate from a dead God? 'I will be with you always.' That was the promise. Where is that promise now? What kind of a place is it where God dies -- where trust in self and others die as well?"

Ortiz had been scheduled as a speaker at the summit on torture and United States policy, sponsored by Mercer University, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Evangelicals for Human Rights and a host of other religious organizations. Although unable to attend because she was to testify in a torture trial, Ortiz provided prepared remarks to conference participants.

The kind of crisis of faith and psyche that Ortiz endured is just one of many long-term consequences victims of torture suffer, said Doug Johnson, executive director of the Center for Victims of Torture.

"Whatever we do learn about the impact of torture must be placed in the context of what we know about the impact of intense traumas, and particularly human-induced traumas," Johnson said. "We're getting a clear idea that there is a biological effect that is induced by intense traumas -- not merely a psychological one."

For example, even mild forms of torture -- forcing victims into stress positions for long periods of time, or sleep deprivation -- can have subtle physical side-effects that only manifest themselves years later, Johnson said. And the psychological effects can be not only profound, but long-lasting.

"We know, for example, that survivors of the Holocaust ... still have high rates of clinical depression and suicide 50 years after the fact," Johnson said. He noted the sin of torture visits itself on subsequent generations, as well -- children and even grandchildren of Holocaust survivors also have higher rates of suicide and depression than the general population.

Johnson's organization provides psychological treatment to survivors of torture at clinics in Minnesota; Washington, D.C.; Guinea and Sierra Leone. He said some effects of torture are so profound they can fundamentally change its victims' personalities.

"I had a very gentle, sweet client who was driving an ice-cream truck in the streets of Minneapolis.... He got rear-ended," Johnson said. "He came out swinging, totally enraged."

The man, who had been abducted by his torturers in another country and then fled to the United States, later told Johnson the rear-ending caused him to act irrationally because it brought back a flood of bad memories.

"He told me that, when he had been taken in his country, he had been in his car, on the streets of the capital city," Johnson said. "His abductors crashed into him."

The man also exhibited another long-term consequence of torture, Johnson said -- the inability to complete tasks. "This man was a wealthy businessman in his home country; now he is having difficulty driving an ice-cream truck," he said.

And the often-stated purpose of torture -- to gain information -- is almost never achieved by physical or psychological coercion, both Johnson and Ortiz said.
Ortiz, who founded an organization of torture survivors, said simply destroying the victim and his or her community is torture's true goal.

"Torture is an attempt to obliterate a person's personality, to turn him or her into a quivering mass of fear, cowering in some corner of the world afraid to look for the dawn," she said.

"It is not something we, the tortured 'get over.' It is something we live with the rest of our days. It is forever strapped to our backs. It constitutes a permanent invasion of our minds and our souls. Someone in uniform; a scream; the smell of a cigarette; the sound of someone whistling; the sight of a dog; the sound of keys rattling; cutting a piece of meat with a knife -- any of these may continually threaten a return to that past which walks so closely behind us."

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Human Right & Wrongs: Christians should defend rights, ethicist says
By Ken Camp

ATLANTA (ABP) -- Concern about human rights means biblically grounded compassion for oppressed people -- not a selfish desire to protect one's own property or prestige, Baptist ethicist Glen Stassen told a recent meeting of religious leaders concerned about torture.

"It has been the defenders of the unjust status quo and unequal privileges who have said: 'Christians should not push for human rights. Human rights are selfish,'" he told the interfaith conference. It was held on Mercer University's Atlanta campus Sept. 11-12.

"My theme is that human rights are about caring for those who can be victimized by the more powerful," he noted.

Stassen, a professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, insisted human rights are rooted in the Bible and in religious teaching that predated any Enlightenment emphasis on possessive individualism.

He urged churches -- particularly those in the free-church Baptist tradition -- to recover their history and reclaim their heritage. "Human rights are our baby, coming from the struggle for the right to religious liberty -- well before the Enlightenment," he said.

Historically, Richard Overton -- an early Baptist, alongside John Smyth and Thomas Helwys -- articulated a call for human rights during the free-church struggle for religious liberty in Puritan England, Stassen noted. Overton advocated human rights in writing dating to 1645, drawing support for his position from the New Testament, natural law and historical experience.

Overton urged full religious liberty for all people, economic justice for the poor and expansion of civil liberties, including "the right not to be arbitrarily arrested nor forced to incriminate oneself; the right to speedy trial; the right to understand the law in one's own language; equality before the law; and the right of prisoners not to be starved, tortured or extorted," Stassen noted.

Christians care about human rights because it is a teaching grounded in the Gospels. Jesus cared about people, Stassen insisted.

"He cared for people with so much compassion that he confronted the authorities over the wrongs they were doing," he said. "Many people miss this. They think the authorities were the Romans. But the day-by-day authorities were the high priests and the wealthy and the Sadducees, and their somewhat-supporters, the Pharisees and Scribes who taught and enforced the moral codes."

Jesus confronted religious authorities over four types of injustice, Stassen noted:

-- Greed: "Human rights emphasize the positive right to life as having the basics needed to pursue a life's calling."

-- Exclusion: "Human rights emphasize the human right to community."

-- Domination: "Human rights emphasize the rights to liberty and to the means to check and balance unjust authority."

-- Violence: "Human rights emphasize the right to life."

"They are not four arbitrary types of injustice; they are deeply grounded in the prophetic tradition of God's own caring for the powerless and the deprived and the oppressed," Stassen added.

"They are based in God's caring, and in God's own realism about who needs standing up for in a world of greed, oppression, domination, exclusion, violence -- a world of sin."

And nations are as prone to sin as are individuals, he insisted.

"The temptation to sin is greater the more powerful you are, and our nation is very powerful. So, we badly need the check and balance of humility enough to listen to other nations, to restore international cooperation, to respect international law," Stassen said.

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Human Rights & Wrongs: Not all coercion is torture, ethicist says
By Ken Camp

WAKE FOREST, N.C. (ABP) -- Debate over the morality of coercive force would be served better if everyone involved quit using the word "torture" altogether, said Daniel Heimbach, professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

"The problem here is that in hotly debating the ethics of so-called 'torture,' one side strongly -- and rather self-righteously -- objects to any 'immoral use of force,' while the other side is most often in fact trying to defend nothing more than 'morally justified use of force,'" said Heimbach, research institute fellow with the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

"But, of course, 'moral' and 'immoral' uses of force are by definition completely different things, and there is no real disagreement as to the ethical substance of the issue."

The real questions are when, how and under what circumstances the line between morally justified and unjustified use of force is crossed, he insisted.

"Neither side in the torture debate is defending immoral use of force, and neither side is saying coercion should never be used, under any circumstance, no matter how mild. [Which is] all to say, we should stop using the word 'torture,' which is so emotionally inflammatory opponents cease communicating," Heimbach said.
Instead, opponents over the use of coercive force "should use other language that states more clearly and exactly what is truly opposed and defended," Heimbach said.

Both sides in the debate should be able to find common ground by starting with the acknowledgement that coercive force is a "graduated continuum" that extends from mild discomfort to painful death, he asserted.

"For those able to set aside emotion for the sake of moral clarity, answers for how anyone finds the moral boundary separating justified from unjustified use of force are answered by applying principles of just war," Heimbach said.

Just-war principles -- such as proportionality of ends and means, probability of success, whether war is the option of last resort, whether the proper authority is making the decision to enter war and whether the prosecutors of the war use no essentially evil means -- would provide reasonable guidelines for determining whether moral boundaries are violated in regard to coercive force, he suggested.

"I strongly agree it is always wrong to apply force immorally, and if that is what ... [is meant] by 'torture,' then I do indeed strongly oppose torture -- immoral use of force -- under any circumstance and urge everyone else to oppose it as well," he said.

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Opinion: God-talk and conservative politics
By David Gushee

(ABP) -- Every so often, conservative evangelical politicians, military officials, or ministers are quoted describing the outcome of an election, the actions of the United States, or the deeds of its president or its troops as if they are self-evidently the direct will of God.

In recent decades, actions ranging from the "crusade" against communism, to the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, and the appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices have been described in these ways.

These comments then evoke outrage from those who, for a variety of reasons, strongly reject any such identification of a political or military action with God's will.

The dust settles after each of these latest angry volleys in the culture wars , with cultural polarization and mutual incomprehension only deepening. And then the cycle repeats.

This issue has surfaced again recently in the public vetting of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, as both Palin and her pastor are visible on YouTube with comments appearing to identify preferred policies, such as an expensive gas-pipeline project, as "God's will."

I think we need a deeper analysis of what is going on when Christian politicians and pastors make these sometimes-troubling rhetorical moves. I also think it is possible to draw at least some rough distinctions between harmless and harmful uses of "God talk" in relation to government and its policies.

It all begins with the Bible. Remember that evangelical Christians are taught to read the Bible every day on their own as well as to study the Bible in church and in small groups. Our pastors dream of immersing their people in the Bible, and many are really quite successful at creating churches in which their people are essentially drenched in biblical teaching. As a Baptist minister, seminary professor, and Sunday School teacher myself, this is certainly one of my own goals.

I propose that, for most evangelicals, the Bible is the primary text from which we first derive at least an implicit political philosophy -- because it is our primary text for understanding the world in general.

Two-thirds of the Christian Bible consists of what we call the "Old Testament." And most of the Old Testament tells the story of an ancient nation-state called Israel. I believe it is no overstatement to claim that for millions of Americans, the meaning of nationhood is learned more fully from the Old Testament than from any civics or government class offered sometime along the way in school.

Many scholars have documented the impact that this immersion in the Bible has on evangelical attitudes toward the contemporary state of Israel. Fewer have emphasized the impact that such an immersion has on evangelical attitudes toward America.

I am coming to believe that most of the seemingly outrageous claims that theologically conservative politicians and ministers make about America flow from a political-moral imagination in which ancient Israel provides the template for the functions of a nation -- any nation, including our own. The accounts offered in the historical books of the Old Testament, running from Joshua to II Chronicles in the Christian canon, are read with a kind of authoritarian literalist straightforwardness , producing the following basic understanding of nationhood:

-- The source of the state of Israel was God, who brought it into being.
-- The proper ruler of Israel is therefore also God, whose will is to be obeyed.
-- Any earthly ruler of Israel has been appointed by God and is answerable to God alone.
-- The wars of Israel are divinely ordained, and Israel's troops are fighting for God.
-- Setbacks for Israel are not coincidental but are God's will -- and are usually punishment for the nation's sins.

Of course, this is only one version of how to understand biblical Israel, and it has been challenged, reworked, and revised in many ways through the centuries. Such revisions and reinterpretations have come within the canon itself, from the prophets, and later from Jewish and Christian biblical scholars and community leaders. Certainly it is not the way the modern state of Israel is understood by most of its own inhabitants.

Nor is it the understanding of America taught in our high school American government classes. (Well, actually, I have seen curriculum in private Christian schools that comes pretty close to this.) I am not sure that it is a self-consciously chosen vision of America even for a majority of evangelicals. But it goes deeper than that. It lies in our moral and political imagination.

This helps to explain why many conservative evangelicals persist in describing America as an especially God-blessed and God-called nation and why they persist in calling America as a nation "back" to obedience to the God in whom, says our currency, we trust. It also helps explain why they tend to envision at least their favored politicians as God-appointed and God-anointed leaders whom it is wrong to question or criticize, and why they often lift our wars to a kind of holy status and describe our warriors as doing the work of God. Finally, it helps explain why they often attribute national setbacks to divine punishment for our sins. They are, effortlessly and naturally, applying an ancient Israelite paradigm to the modern United States.

And remember, I am not just talking about rabid ideologues or those with a particular ideological ax to grind. I am suggesting that this is the native language of millions of grassroots evangelicals.

If this is true, the implications are enormous. I will name just one implication for evangelical churches, and one for all Americans.

Evangelical churches and their leaders need to read more widely in Christian theology and ethics to develop a theology of the state that considers seriously both the difference that Jesus makes and the difference between ancient, theocratic Israel and modern, democratic America.

Americans need to take seriously the fact that millions of their countrymen are operating from an implicitly theocratic paradigm into which Enlightenment-era American constitutionalism has only partially penetrated. They certainly need to know as much as possible about the political imaginations of those who seek the highest offices of the land.

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-- David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University. www.davidpgushee.com