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.
