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THE CONTEMPORARY U.S. TORTURE DEBATE IN CHRISTIAN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Author(s): David P. Gushee Source: The Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 589-597 Published by: Blackwell Publishing Ltd on behalf of Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41348831 Accessed: 14-06-2017 18:27 UTC

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THE CONTEMPORARY U.S. TORTURE DEBATE IN CHRISTIAN

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

David P. Gushee

ABSTRACT

The U.S. turn toward torture tested the moral resources of all faiths, but perhaps especially of Christianity, which has the greatest number of adherents in the United States. This moral crucible revealed that Ameri- can Christian scholars and leaders were generally blind to the resources available in relation to the resources available to address torture in a

study of scripture, early Christian experience under empire, Christian abuses of suspected heretics, and the just war theory, all of which are considered here. Uses of just war theory have revealed a fracture in that theory between deontological/virtue orientations and consequentialist reasoning, the latter proving susceptible to exploitation in defense of torture. Just war theory also revealed a lacuna of explicit reasoning about torture through the centuries, in a world where torture has so often been an instrument of state power.

KEY WORDS: torture , enhanced interrogation techniques , Bush Adminis- tration , imago dei, human rights , evangelicalism , Christianity , Inquisi- tion , just war theory, pacifism, empire

1. The Recent U.S. Debate over Torture

During the Bush-Cheney years, abusive U.S. policies toward detain- ees held in the "war on terror" were first hidden, then revealed but euphemized under the term "enhanced interrogation techniques" and finally explicitly defended by some apologists even under the name "torture." These developments encountered an American Christian community theologically and ethically unprepared to make adequate response. To say that Bush-Cheney interrogation techniques constituted torture requires further clarification before proceeding with the theo- logical analysis. Much could be said, but it is sufficient to our purposes here to say that this essay accepts the determination of the International Committee of the Red Cross concerning the nature of the interrogation techniques employed in some cases by the United States, especially from 2002 to 2006. Reviewing a roster of techniques their investigators discovered, which included the "suffocation by water" practice known as "waterboarding," continuous solitary confinement and indefinite

JRE 39.4:589-597. © 2011 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.

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590 Journal of Religious Ethics

incommunicado detention, hooding and other forms of sensory depriva- tion, extended sleep deprivation, and use of ear-splitting loud music, "wallings" (or "beatings by use of a collar," involving detainees being propelled forcefully against walls), face and belly slapping, grabbing, beating and kicking, confinement in a box, prolonged standing in stress positions, prolonged forced nudity, exposure to cold temperatures and cold water, prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles, threats of various kinds, forced shaving, and dietary deprivation/manipulation, the Red Cross offered the following judgment in a secret 2007 report to the United States Central Intelligence Agency:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel inhuman or degrading treatment [ICRC 2007, 26].

Beginning in 2006, mainline Protestant leaders and activists offered opposition to these Bush-Cheney counterterrorism policies - but rarely with much theological or ethical depth. Partly this was because main- liners rallied under the banner of an interfaith activist coalition, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. This coalition - with members including Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, mainline Protes- tants, evangelical Protestants, Unitarians, and others - perforce offered its statements of resistance in broad and relatively thin gen- eralizations, such as "Torture is a Moral Issue" (Hunsinger 2008).1

White evangelical Protestants split over torture. The coalition that I led, Evangelicals for Human Rights, opposed torture unequivocally. Our statements, principally the Evangelical Declaration Against Torture (2007), offered theological-ethical opposition to torture rooted in the sacred worth of the human person and human rights claims based on that sacred worth.

Most politically conservative evangelical pastors, organization leaders, and scholars neither supported Bush-Cheney torture policies explicitly nor joined our opposition. But various conservative evangeli- cals tried to refute our claims in the Evangelical Declaration and offered defenses of Bush-Cheney policies based on ad hominem attacks, national security worries, or just war claims. References to the history of Christian thought about, and experience with, torture rarely sur- faced in the recent debates, including in my own work. A kind of

1 Speaking as individuals or in their particular religious voices, some NRCAT coali- tion members did offer reflections of considerable theological depth and nuance. Speaking collectively, this was much more difficult. It should be noted that I worked with NRCAT as part of their anti-torture efforts and deeply respect their contribution.

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The Contemporary U.S. Torture Debate 591

historical amnesia was apparent. It was as if torture was an entirely novel moral problem which had never before been faced in American, Christian, or world history. The purpose of this collection of papers is to reflect on torture from within the theological and ethical heritages of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, as well as feminism. What follows is at least an initial foray into offering some historically tinged Chris- tian reflections.

2. Scriptural Resources

Most opponents of torture, including myself, have focused our bib- lical work on those texts most relevant to establishing the sacred worth of each and every human person and the consequent human rights claims that can be anchored thereto. Reflections have focused on claims

about human being as imago Dei in Genesis 1, on legal protections for human beings offered in the Hebrew Bible, and on prophetic demands to protect the well-being of the most vulnerable. New Testament citations have focused on the way in which the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ elevate the dignity and moral status of all human beings, with consequent implications for the moral practice of a people called to love their neighbors and even their enemies. While never claiming that a full-blown human rights ethic can be read directly off of scripture, we have argued that this biblical framework for establishing the sacred worth of persons is sufficient to ground the now highly elaborate moral and legal development of human rights protections. The argument has tended to culminate with endorsement of the very strict and absolute rejection of torture in contemporary human rights and anti-torture conventions, such as the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture, even while recognizing that these human rights conventions are not similarly grounded in biblical norms (UNCAT 1984). One might say that scripture has in this sense functioned primarily in providing support for extant human rights protections, and secondarily in reminding Christians of their ecclesial rooting as a people called to love even their enemies, and thus to bear public witness accordingly.

Another scripture-based approach available within the Christian tradition focuses less on theological categories such as the imago dei and ethical principles such as human rights, instead turning to nar- ratives of torture in scripture. A close review of the entirety of scripture for such narratives would be instructive but beyond the scope of this brief paper. However, for a Christian the most visible narrative of all is the passion account related to Jesus himself. Whatever one may make of the historicity of the crucifixion narratives - and with all due horror at the evil misuse of those narratives in Christian antisemitism

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through the ages - for the faith community that accepts the New Testament as inspired scripture it is certainly relevant that Jesus appears to have faced the kind of mental and physical abuse prior to his execution that we now see as constitutive of torture. Our central

figure is described as one who underwent personal and religious mockery, being spat upon, blindfolding, slapping, beating, striking with fists and weapons, flogging, and eventually the slow torture-death of crucifixion, all in the context of a purported interrogation by govern- mental authorities in the interest of national security. The parallels to our own government's torture practices are chilling. That Jesus was tortured to death has been noticed by some Christian opponents of torture, and has occasionally been put to allusive rhetorical use (for example, "Who Would Jesus Torture?"), but to my knowledge the issue has been thoroughly explored only by William Cavanaugh, whose 1998 work Torture and Eucharist dealt with torture in Chile and prospec- tively spoke in a profound way to the torture debate in our own country.

3. Imperial Torture

Empires torture those who threaten their power. What might be called imperial torture is a category that can be drawn equally well from scripture, early church history, the studies of other empires, and, yes, the recent history of the United States. This has been crystallized powerfully in Bruce Lincoln's quite striking book about the Persian Empire - Religion, Empire , and Torture (Lincoln 2007). There Lincoln explicitly linked the religious justifications for the torture practices of Achamenian Persia with the horrors of Abu Ghraib.

The recent upsurge in treatments of biblical literature - especially biblical apocalyptic - as a response to empire helps clarify that both Judaism and early Christianity were deeply shaped by resistance to empires that tortured and murdered their adherents. Works by schol- ars such as Richard Horsley, Neil Elliott, John Dominic Crossan, and others are helping Christians in particular to see the founding texts of the Christian faith as anti-imperial documents (see Horsley 2008; Elliott 2008; and Crossan 2007). Both biblical and post-canonical early church documents allude to or directly describe numerous instances of the torture and murder of Christians by Rome; these lie at the heart of Christian martyrdom accounts, for example. Part of what motivated the deep resistance in the early church to the Roman Empire was its despicable violence, including its torture of Christians (and others) in the name of imperial peace and security.

The depth of early Christian resistance to involvement in the Roman military is illuminated when one links that resistance to revulsion

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The Contemporary U.S. Torture Debate 593

against imperial torture. And then when that is linked to Jesus's own death by Roman crucifixion, the depth of early Christian revulsion against imperial violence becomes all the more clear. Jesus and some of his earliest followers were tortured to death by imperial power. Resistance to torture has sometimes been, and could still be, grounded in this formative Christian experience. But this has not surfaced much in the contemporary American Christian torture debate.

4. Torture and Heresy Hunting

This early Christian experience of being tortured and killed by Rome makes the later emergence of torture as an instrument of Christian orthodoxy all the more astonishing, and all the more shameful. It is hard to avoid concluding that our historical amnesia today must be related to a desire not to have to face texts like the following:

The head of state or ruler must force all the heretics whom he has in

custody, provided he does so without killing them or breaking their arms or legs, as actual robbers and murderers of souls and thieves of the sacraments of God and Christian faith, to confess their errors and accuse other heretics whom they know, and specify their motives, and those whom they have seduced, and those who have lodged them and defended them, as thieves and robbers of material goods are made to accuse their accomplices and confess the crimes they have committed [Pope Innocent IV 1252].

Here we have a pope in 1252 offering a rationale to the state for the torture of suspected heretics during interrogations by the Inquisition. Substitute "terrorist" for "heretic" at appropriate places and one sees that there is indeed nothing new under the sun. If the state purposes are deemed sufficiently grave then anything is permissible. Most Christians would prefer not to know the extent of state practices of church-sanctioned torture in Christian Europe and the colonies, or the long trajectory of Christian thought that undergirded torture, probably beginning with Augustine's justification for "judicial torture" in City of God (1998, 926-28). Certainly no Christian theologians or leaders make arguments for the torture of heretics today - but some have made them for the torture of (suspected) terrorists against the United States. Perhaps this indicates better than almost anything else where even the church's loyalties truly lie.

5. Torture and Just War Theory

Any historical exploration of Christian thought on torture must consider the posture of just war theory. Because many Christian

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594 Journal of Religious Ethics

ethicists and Christian laypeople claim adherence to just war theory, which arguably has been the dominant approach in Christian ethics since Augustine, it was inevitable that just war criteria would be considered during the debate about torture.

In a brief 2007 article offering a "Just War Perspective" on torture, James Turner Johnson argues not just against the moral legitimacy of torture but against the misuse of just war theory to defend it. Johnson notes that most of those making just war claims in relation to torture have relied heavily on consequentialist moral reasoning. Leaning on criteria such as last resort, proportionality, and reasonable hope of success (which Johnson says have been affixed to just war theory only recently), some suggest that at least certain forms of harsh interroga- tion that might be called torture are justifiable. Johnson notes that many of these thinkers have argued that the torture of terrorists should be seen as a lesser evil in proportion to the far greater evil of a massive terrorist attack. This line of argument has devoted consid- erable attention to the efficacy of torture in actually gaining useful intelligence - as if the resolution of this factual question decided the entire moral debate about torture, which is often how the debate plays out in American culture.

Tracing the history of what he calls the "classic just war tradition," which he says coalesced in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century canon- ists, Johnson can find no evidence that any major Christian theorist or jurist ever discussed torture. This striking absence seems to have worked its way forward through the tradition. I can find no discussion of torture in the major late twentieth-century just war documents issued by, for example, the American Methodist and Catholic bishops, or in the most important works on just war offered by Christian ethicists in recent decades. This silence occurred during a century in which the routine resort to torture was a major feature of the world's worst tyrannies, as in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - and in which our own government, during the Cold War, quietly supported regimes that tortured. This is a puzzling omission.

Johnson argues in a constructive vein that classic just war tradition offers obvious resources for dealing with the problem of torture in its treatment of just intention, noncombatant immunity, and morally permissible means. Following Augustine's treatment of intention here, Johnson suggests that it would be impossible for anyone to torture without slipping into wrong intentions such as "the passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit . . . the lust of power, and such like things" (Augustine 400, xxii.74). He reminds us that classic just war theory cared not just about the Tightness of acts but also about the character of persons, and argues that just intention speaks especially to the latter. It can be extended to

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The Contemporary U.S. Torture Debate 595

the character not just of the torturer but of the nation that tortures, especially if that nation establishes standing institutions of torture, as the United States was apparently beginning to do after 2002 (Danner 2004).

In terms of the treatment of classes of people who may not be harmed, usually called noncombatant immunity, Johnson traces back to the late Middle Ages the idea that "warriors who had been captured or rendered incapable of fighting by wounds" were not to be harmed (Augustine 400, xxii.74). Today's international law specifically includes prisoners of war as exempt from direct harm or "further attack." Johnson accepts this classification as legitimate and applies it without equivocation to the torture of those suspected of terrorism - a move rejected by those who have claimed that terrorists should not be viewed as true prisoners of war.

Finally, Johnson considers the issue of morally permissible means. Drawing from the classic just war tradition that says certain means are mala in se (evil in themselves), Johnson concludes that torture is "so morally repugnant no second thought should be needed to know" that it must not be used an instrument of war (2007, 31). This is a deontological argument with an intuitionist flavor, and it is offered in a consequentialist/utilitarian era with little patience for deontological absolutes. Johnson is to be applauded for reminding Americans, and especially American Christians who claim to embrace just war theory, that there are certain things a decent nation simply does not do, regardless of whether they "work" or not.

6. Conclusion

The U.S. turn toward torture tested the moral resources of all faiths, but perhaps especially of the dominant Christian faith in our nation. This moral crucible revealed that American Christian scholars and leaders were generally forgetful in relation to the resources available in a study of scripture, early Christian experience under empire, Christian abuses and torture of suspected heretics, and the just war theory. Uses of just war theory revealed a fracture in that theory between deontological/virtue orientations and consequentialist reason- ing, the latter proving susceptible to exploitation in defense of torture. Just war theory also revealed a puzzling lacuna of explicit reasoning about torture through the centuries, in a world where torture has so often been an instrument of state power.

The result of our government's descent into torture, in combination with an unprepared Christian community, has been the formation of a sizable and apparently permanent American Christian constituency

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596 Journal of Religious Ethics

for torture.2 If needed again, that constituency remains ready for mobilization. It is hard to overstate the distressing nature of this development.

REFERENCES

Augustine 400 Contra Faustum. Quoted in James Turner Johnson, "Torture: A

Just War Perspective," 2007. The Review of Faith and Interna- tional Affairs 5.2 (Summer): 30-31.

1998 City of God. Edited by R. W. Dyson. New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press.

Cavanaugh, William T. 1998 Torture and Eucharist. Oxford: Blackwell.

Crossan, John Dominic 2007 God and Empire. New York: HarperCollins.

Danner, Mark 2004 Torture and Truth : America , Abu Ghraib , and the War on Terror.

New York: New York Review of Books.

Elliott, Neil 2008 The Arrogance of Nations. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press.

Evangelicals for Human Rights 2007 "How to Read 'An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture."' The

Review of Faith and International Affairs 5.2 (Summer): 41-55. Horsley, Richard A., ed.

2008 In the Shadow of Empire. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox. Hunsinger, George

2008 Torture Is a Moral Issue: Christians, Jews , Muslims, and People of Conscience Speak Out. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans.

International Committee of the Red Cross

2007 ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen 'High Value' Detainees in CIA Custody.

Johnson, James Turner 2007 "Torture: A Just War Perspective." The Review of Faith and

International Affairs 5.2 (Summer): 29-31. Lincoln, Bruce 2007 Religion, Empire and Torture : The Case of Achaemenian Persia,

with a Postscript on Abu Ghraib. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2 In a September 2008 poll of evangelicals sponsored by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University, 57% of southern evangelicals said that torture can be often (20%) or sometimes (37%) justified "in order to gain important information." See http:// blog.faithinpubliclife.org/upload/2008/09/FPL%20Mercer%20Torture%20Poll%20Memo %20Final-no%20embargo.pdf, accessed January 6, 2009.

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Pope Innocent IV 1252 "Law 25." Ad Extirpanda. http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~draker/

history/Ad_Extirpanda.html (accessed November 11, 2009). United Nations

1984 "Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment." In Basic Documents on Human Rights. 5th edition. Edited by Ian Brownlie and Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, 405-16. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. [Available from many other sources, both print and Internet, including the UN website.]

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