Christian Ethics Today

Torture and America: A Response and a Reply

Torture and America: A Response and a Reply
By Burton H. Patterson

Editor’s Note:  in the interest of pr omoti ng civil discussion of controversial  topics, this response to a CET article and  the author’s reply are printed below. The  two authors are both friends of CET and  have authored articles in past Journals.

David Gushee, in the Fall 2009  Issue 76, pontificated that torture was an official instrument of  United States foreign policy, implying that it was a product of Bush  and Cheney without honestly tracing  its origin back to prior administrations.1 He also indicated those policies, which included waterboarding,  had been nearly totally repudiated  by Barack Obama. He failed to mention that although Obama’s Executive  Order2  prohibited waterboarding for  the time being, he reserved the right  to reinstate that procedure if warranted in the future. He also failed  to mention that Obama has retained  the prior Clinton policy of rendition where the U.S. sends prisoners  for interrogation to other countries,  where torture is a way of life.

Gushee’s thought-provoking  article raises the central question of  where should a Christian stand in  relation to torture. The American  Heritage Dictionary defines torture as  “Infliction of severe physical pain as a  means of punishment or coercion.”3 The Merriam Webster dictionary  defines it as “anguish of body or mind”  and “infliction of severe pain especially to punish or coerce”4  Such definitions would include waterboarding.  Query, however, if such definitions are  the ones in the minds of those 62%  of white evangelical Protestants who  Gushee stated support torture under  appropriate circumstances.

Torture,  to many white  Protestants, references the brutality  of the medieval ages which included  stretching the human body on the  rack, burning at the stake, quartering a living human, or the beheadings  which radical Islamists have utilized  in this decade. There is a significant  difference between historic torture  and the physical abuse which does  no permanent physical harm such  as waterboarding which was used on  only two radical Islamic terrorists and  resulted in very significant information which in turn leads to stopping  future attacks on American soil and  saving additional American lives.  Christianity is certainly no stranger to  psychological torture. Christ healed  many who were suffering from the  results of torture.5 During the Inquisition one hundred fifty thousand  Christians were murdered through  various type of torture according to  many historic accounts.

To determine the real meaning of  the quoted statistic it is necessary to  determine the definition of “torture”  in the mind of the white Protestants  who responded to the survey. If those  who answered the survey thought  of torture as such things as sleep  deprivation, solitary confinement,  tasering, use of sensory deprivation,  subjection to extended interrogations  or any number of other things which  could be classified as physical abuse,  it is understandable these so called  “tortures” would be acceptable.

Professor Gushee is categorically  correct that a Christian’s “grounding in the resources of Scripture and  Christian faith, ought to function as  the primary source of moral discernment”. The first Protestant, Martin  Luther, taught a dichotomy where  each individual lived in both a spiritual and secular world. Each individual  had a spiritual responsibility to live  the life of the Christ, but in the secular world had an obligation to uphold  the law which was promulgated by  rulers ordained by God for their role  in history. A basic and fundamental  responsibility of any head of state is  to secure and protect the citizens of  that state. If the ruler determines danger to the citizens is imminent then  a citizen, under Luther’s mandate,  must support or even carry out the  ruler’s instructions even though in  the spiritual realm of that individual’s  life a different opinion and different  actions would be both indicated and  appropriate. When the infliction of  brutal abuse is perpetrated against an  individual whose principal desire is to  eradicate a nation and the Christian  principles on which they are founded,  what should a Christian’s response be?

Luther’s dichotomy gives excellent  guidance to today’s Christian. In his  view the individual Christian could  not, following the example of the  Christ, engage in torture acting on  his own. However, if carrying out the  instructions of civil authority given in  carrying out such authority’s responsibility to protect its nation, Luther  would require the Christian to obey  the civil authority.6

Then, the question becomes “can  secular authority in good conscience  engage in torture for the common  good of the country?” Phrasing the  question this way elicits an answer of  “no” because torture sounds barbaric.  If the question was posed as “could a  country use sleep deprivation in good  conscience in interrogating an enemy  combatant?” an opposite response  probably would be elicited. Obviously  the term “torture” must be defined in  order to get a purposeful answer.

Instead of being overly upset by  the physical abuse of a very few individuals in the here and now by civil  authority, attempting with all the  forces at its command to procure and  maintain the security of the population entrusted to its rule, the individual Christian’s task is to be far  more concerned with the everlasting  torture unrepentant sinners will face  in the hereafter.–Burton H. Patterson, Southlake, TX.

Reply of David P. Gushee:

At the request of my friend, CET  editor Joe Trull, and in violation of my  customary policy of never commenting  on criticisms of my writing, I will offer  a few “pontifications” on torture that I  hope will at least be “thought provoking,” in response to Burton Patterson.

There is now no longer any doubt  that severely abusive treatment of prisoners in our custody was widespread  during the Bush-Cheney era. (Or that  our nation was complicit with torture  during the Cold War.) Whether the  treatment meted out in various theaters  of the “war on terror” (2001-2009)  should be described as “torture” has  been a matter of public debate for several years. The Red Cross has described  some of what was done as torture;  so have a number of well-informed  military and security officials. I stand  by this summary description—what  began as a  secret  policy of torture  became a euphemized policy of torture  and is now an  implicitly acknowledged  policy of torture. It can’t be explicitly  acknowledged as torture by those who  authorized it because that might deepen their risk of prosecution.

Bush-Cheney defenders have  attempted a double-jointed move that  I also see in Dr. Patterson’s response.  On the one hand, they have sought to  narrow the definition of torture so that  whatever was done by the last administration will fail to meet the definition  they set up, and thus everyone involved  will be able to breathe free air. But on  the other hand, they have sought to  defend the admittedly “brutal abuse”  inflicted by the state as legitimate and  necessary for national security. So it’s  not torture, but if it is torture, it’s still  acceptable.

And why is it acceptable? I was disappointed to see any Christian thinker  as well-educated as Dr. Patterson go  back to an uncritical reading of Martin  Luther’s two-realms dichotomy for  the answer to that question. Luther  dichotomizes the Christian into two  selves—private and public, spiritual  and secular. He accepts the lordship  of Christ—the authority of the actual  teachings of Jesus Christ—only in  the private and spiritual realm. In the  public and secular realm, the ruler  determines what must be done in the  interests of the state, and the Christian  must simply submit to that determination. This public/private split is heretical  because it confines to the private sphere  the lordship of Christ who is in fact Lord  of every square inch of creation and every  aspect of the believer’s life. The damage done historically by this particular  truncating of Christ’s lordship has been  abundant; one need only look at the  Nazi era in Germany for all the evidence one might need.

No, Christ is Lord of all. He is  certainly Lord of every aspect of the  Christian’s life. It was precisely that  acknowledged lordship that enabled  a number of Christians in our own  military, security, intelligence, and law  enforcement services to say no to the  torture policies they were being asked  to become complicit with or directly  involved in. Their protests helped to  slow and finally stop these policies,  especially once the fight spilled into  public view.

States themselves have responsibilities to God, whether they acknowledge them or not. God is Lord of the  whole world and all are answerable  before him. They have God-given  public responsibilities and God-given  constraints on their exercise of those  responsibilities. This is the best reading  of Romans 13 and the rest of scripture’s  witness on the role of the state, not the  “anything goes” security-authoritarianism suggested in Dr. Patterson’s letter.

States also have responsibilities  to the rule of law both domestic and  international. Even under human law,  states and their leaders are not permitted to do just anything in the name of  security, unless we accept the reasoning  of the worst tyrannies of the world’s  history. States that have signed international conventions categorically banning torture (as we have), and to that  have added domestic laws categorically  banning torture (as we have), are not  all of a sudden permitted to abandon these legal commitments when it  no longer is felt to be convenient to  uphold them.

Finally, to the last sentence of  Burton Patterson’s letter, I can only  say: is this really what we want to do  with the doctrine of hell? Do we really  want to use this difficult, disputed, but  probably necessary doctrine as a means  to justify turning the lives of human  beings here on this earth into a living  hell, through torture? I respectfully  submit that it is time for that particular  rhetorical move to be retired once and  for all.


1 See the United Stated Code, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A, which defines torture as the infliction of sever pain for obtaining a confession or information and was the result of an examination of the American use of “rendition” commended under President Clinton.
2 Executive Order 13440, January 22, 2009. The order established a new Special Interagency Taskforce on Interrogation and Transfer Policies which has the authority to reinstate any interrogation techniques deemed advisable under any circumstances presented to it.
3 Excerpted from American Heritage Dictionary. © 1997 TLC, Inc., Houghton Mifflin Company.
4 Excerpted from Merriam–Webster Dictionary, © 1995, Zane Publishing Company.
5 Matthew 4:24 where Jesus in Syria healed many of torments. The word is βασανοις, from βασανιζω, to examine by torture. Forms of this root word appear twelve times in the New Testament. The Louw–Nida Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament, United Bible Society, 1988, defines is as “to punish by physical torture” as does Arndt and Gingrich, Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament, University of Chicago, 2000.
6 Martin Luther, Whether Soldiers, Too, Can be Saved, 1526. Translation by Charles M. Jacobs.  

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