Christians for Torture

Posted on | August 7, 2008 | 1 Comment

John Schwenkler posts about the strange moral/ideological  gymnastics that devout (”conservative”) Christians must go through in order to support the administration’s torture policy. The real political divide lies somewhere you might not expect:

There are a great many writers – Andrew [Sullivan] mentions Mark Shea, but plenty of others including Rod Dreher, Daniel Larison, several of the Vox Nova bloggers, and of course (albeit in a theologically unorthodox vein) Andrew himself jump quickly to mind – whose self-identification as Christians and political conservatives has not hindered, but rather has been a quite obvious cause of, their recognition of the gravest evils of the last seven years, and the standoff between these voices and those “conservatives” who continue to idolize Dick Cheney is one that has been a long time coming. The great dividing line in American conservatism is not between the Hucksters and the Paulites, the libertarians and the moralists, or the Christianists and the leave-us-aloners, but rather between those whose conservatism means something more than identification with a political party and for whom religion is not a thing to be used only when it is politically advantageous, and those of whom these things cannot be said. Let’s put our cards on the table, and let’s do it now. To borrow a trope from the neocons, nothing less than the fate of the world is at stake. And I’m pretty confident that I know who’s going to triumph.

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One Response to “Christians for Torture”

  1. Pensans
    August 7th, 2008 @ 7:14 pm

    Augustine thought the issue of torture to be less obvious — proof that life is miserable, not judges criminals:

    City of God, XIX: If such darkness shrouds social life, will a wise judge take his seat on the bench or no? Beyond question he will. For human society, which he thinks it a wickedness to abandon, constrains him and compels him to this duty. And he thinks it no wickedness that innocent witnesses are tortured regarding the crimes of which other men are accused; or that the accused are put to the torture, so that they are often overcome with anguish, and, though innocent, make false confessions regarding themselves, and are punished; or that, though they be not condemned to die, they often die during, or in consequence of, the torture; or that sometimes the accusers, who perhaps have been prompted by a desire to benefit society by bringing criminals to justice, are themselves condemned through the ignorance of the judge, because they are unable to prove the truth of their accusations though they are true, and because the witnesses lie, and the accused endures the torture without being moved to confession. These numerous and important evils he does not consider sins; for the wise judge does these things, not with any intention of doing harm, but because his ignorance compels him, and because human society claims him as a judge. But though we therefore acquit the judge of malice, we must none the less condemn human life as miserable.

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Theopolitical is the weblog of Davey Henreckson, a graduate student of theology at the University of Notre Dame. Topics of conversation are political and historical theology, with semi-frequent forays into literature, economics, localism, and the divine American sport -- baseball.

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