Evangelicals and Torture
By Richard V. Pierard,
Professor of History Emeritus,
Indiana State University, Hendersonville, NC
I have for most of my life regarded myself as an evangelical. In my early years I was a fundamentalist Baptist but I eventually outgrew this, and I experimented with various Baptist and other evangelical denominations before settling on the American Baptist Churches U.S.A., a denomination which affirms it is both evangelical and ecumenical. After retiring to North Carolina, I looked for a church of like faith and practice and joined a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship congregation.
Although I have evangelical credentials—I have published with several evangelical firms, served a term as president of the Evangelical Theological Society, and after retirement from my university professorship taught for a few years at Gordon College in Massachusetts—the evangelical establishment generally pays no attention to me. Perhaps it is because I spent nearly my whole professional career warning evangelicals of the dangers inherent in their linkage with conservative political and social ideologies and unquestioning identification with the Republican Party.
My most forthright statement of the problem was in The Unequal Yoke: Evangelical Christianity and Political Conservatism, published first in 1970 and reissued by Wipf & Stock in 2006. The problems I identified here—a politicized faith, support for a pointless foreign war, white racism, American nationalism, and free market capitalism—are as much a problem for evangelicals today as they were then.
Thus, the data released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life from a poll taken April 14-21 that revealed white evangelical Protestants are far more likely than those in other faith traditions to support the use of torture against suspected terrorists came as no surprise to me whatsoever. As the electoral data gathered by John Green and his associates over the past quarter century stunningly demonstrates, white evangelicals have been increasingly voting Republican—in fact, 74 percent in the 2008 election—while most other religious groups were turning against the GOP.
These data were an enormous embarrassment to the evangelical leadership, and when Martin Marty drew the obvious conclusion from them in his May 4th Sightings column, Christianity Today editor David Neff cried foul. He maintained that the evangelical leaders had issued statements condemning the use of torture, but he admitted “it is unfortunately true that evangelicals in the pews” are “among the most likely” to approve so doing with suspected terrorists. Nevertheless, he insisted, the evangelical leadership was every bit as clear on this topic as the Catholic bishops were in their 2006 statement, i.e., the board of the National Association of Evangelicals adopted a statement in March 2007 that formally condemned the use of torture. In addition, although Neff did not mention it, evangelical ethicist David Gushee, who had recently moved from the Southern Baptist related Union University in Tennessee to Mercer University in Georgia, organized Evangelicals for Human Rights and through this body and his many writings unequivocally denounced torture.
Yet, one of the leading voices on the Christian right, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, pooh-poohed the NAE document as “an exercise in moral self-congratulation,” while James Dobson of the powerful lobby Focus on the Family said that concern with such matters as torture and the environment divided evangelicals and undermined their moral witness in contemporary culture. It distracted attention from what he regarded as the real moral issues—abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage.
Still, the question must be asked: If the leaders were so forthright in their actions, why had this not filtered down to the pews? For one thing, the ordinary congregants overwhelmingly supported the Bush-Chaney war policy, as they did all the major actions of Republican administrations since World War II. They were not going to change their views just because some of those above them did, especially when it seemed apparent that many of these normally very conservative leaders did so reluctantly because of pressure from younger progressives in their own ranks and public opinion in general. Evangelicals had surrendered their spiritual values for politics, and the Pew pollsters exposed this for all of the world to see.
Those in charge bear a large responsibility for having led their constituencies down the primrose path of conservative Republicanism and for pandering to their political prejudices. They had not provided the simple believers with spiritual weapons to combat the political and social sins of our day.
It was much easier to stir up their people with fiery sermons about such inconsequential issues of personal morality as abortion, stem cell research, and homosexuality than to condemn the greed of Wall Street, the power interests blocking reform of our broken health care system, rampant militarism, and national hubris on the world scene. Even when some courageous evangelicals tried to speak out on the environmental calamity facing us and the specter of global warming, they were ignored or even silenced. The abrupt ouster in December 2008 of the NAE’s vice president for governmental affairs, Richard Cizik, a very moderate Republican at best, was a good indicator of how the evangelical leadership would deal with those who deviated from the party line on social issues.
Possibly more than any other issue, supporting the use of torture to obtain information from alleged terrorists showed that American evangelicalism has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. They surrendered to a knee-jerk conservatism that eviscerated the power of the message entrusted to them. The life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ was bartered for a political gospel that offered them access to the centers of wealth and power. Now the latter seems to be slipping out of their hands as well.
Is it not time for repentance and for cleansing the evangelical churches of those false prophets who brought them to this point?
