What the Torture Debate Reveals about American Christianity (Sept 08)

[struggle4progress]

Speaker: David Gushee
Panel:
Lawrence Carter, Dean, Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel
Rabbi Brian Walt
Cathleen Kaveny, John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law and Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame
Mohamed Elsanousi, Director of Communications and Community Outreach, Islamic Society of North America

Gushee: ... Governments have advantages through their authority, especially among Christians raised to submit to the authority of government through the lens of Romans 13. Government also has the power of intimidation. Resisters are also at a disadvantage because they must first observe the wrong doing and can be thwarted if government can hide their wrong doing or the wronged ... White evangelicals proved especially unable to notice the shift in our policy toward torture. They were focused on the moral issues of abortion and homosexuality and blind to other moral issues. This has created an evangelical weakness in fighting for justice and human rights ...

Elsanousi: Muhammed, peace be upon him, said we must help a person whether he is the oppressor or the oppressed ... If these torturers realized they were torturing their own brothers and sisters they could never torture. Islam demands that humans act with justice even when they are overwhelmed by hate because justice is next to piety ...

Kaveny: ... The use of torture is in Catholic moral theology terms called an intrinsic evil, wrong in and of itself. Nothing can justify the use of torture; it is always wrong. The United States Conference of Bishops has issued a statement on torture as a moral issue on its website. The universality of the Catholic Church is meant to say, "wait a minute, it's not only about you," but the response to torture in America has been muted. To fully address the problem of torture, the Church has to admit we were deeply mistaken on a matter of grave moral import ... The image of Mary holding the baby Jesus in her arms, which has become the image in our minds in our approach to abortion, needs to be supplemented by the image of Mary on Good Friday. Every man who suffers torture is someone's son ...

Walt: ... We must give voice to the prophetic voice that exists in each of our traditions in the face of injustice ...

http://faithfuldemocrats.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=What-the-Torture-Debate-Reveals-about-American-Christianity.html&Itemid=147

Although this is a rather old link, I'm posting it because Gushee is still doing this around the country. If you read the above, it will clear just how much difficulty people have, when they attempt to discuss this issue, and how naive even educated Americans are, as they attempt to think about political matters

[sam sarrha]

1. Poppy Bush was in charge of the South American Milton Friedman Shock Doctrine genocide where 240,000

Innocent people were tortured to death and murdered as a terror program to institute free trade and create a cleptocratic plutocracy pilot program for the NEW WORLD ORDER.

nothing has changed, the same people were charge then, doing the same thing... in the name of god.

Dubya was a figure head puppet, anyone who believes he did anything other than play video games all day in the Oval Office just drank the Kool Aid. and Obama has no intension of upholding the law and investigating these mafia criminals.. doing nothing is OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE. THEY BECOME COMPLICIT IN THOSE CRIMES. HE SHOULD BE IMPEACHED IF HE DOES NOTHING

[Jim__]

2. I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to as naive.

I definitely do see this: ... We are doing to terrorists what the Nazis did to Jews, what was done to Negroes in the South. ...] as naive and one of the big problems. A lot of people don't care if we torture terrorists - and that can be a difficult argument to win, people just don't care about that. The reality is that we're torturing innocents, not only in the way the catholic speaker meant - not currently engaged in aggression, but people who've never engaged in any aggression against us. I think once people understand that, we can win the argument against torture.

[struggle4progress]

3. What strikes me as "naive" is a certain carelessness in speech, that

seems to result from the attitude that it is productive merely to express one's own point of view sincerely, without deliberate attention to the facts and and without consideration of message and audience

An assertion such as We are doing to terrorists what the Nazis did to Jews suggests all manner of potential counter-factual implications -- such as We are only torturing terrorists or We are kind of like the Nazis, but the Jews were terrorists. I do not think the speaker intends anything like that, but the phrasing is nevertheless careless and invites inappropriate responses. Of course, the moral and pragmatic objections to torture remain, whether or not the person tortured is a terrorist -- and I suppose one can infer that the speaker takes that point of view -- but it is important to realize in soundbite America that such "shooting from the hip" can convey unintended messages, especially if only small excerpts are circulated -- which is (unfortunately) the common media practice.

Similarly, the rabbi wanders off into irrelevant territory with I am not blind to the Jews in South Africa who stood silently in the face of apartheid. The anti-apartheid struggle, of course, was important, and it may still contain valuable lessons for anyone trying to work for justice, but the comment doesn't actually serve any purpose: vague and general, it actually conveys no useful information -- it is simply emotional "shooting from the hip" and distracts from the discussion at hand

And what can an audience really make of a statement like We forget that it was evangelicals who sanctioned state sponsored terrorism in the Southern United State. I am very proud that I am an evangelical. There are those who want to class me in the liberal camp, but I am conservative ... and I'm moderate. I'm a modernist and post-modernist, in a panel discussion intended to shed light on torture and American Christianity?

I don't really want to beat up on this panel. They sound to me like most of the Americans I've ever heard in panel discussions about outrages that have finally reached the public conscience -- unable to keep discussion focussed on the issue and pre-occupied with their own emotional responses. But I don't really question their goodwill, and I think they are working in the right direction