» Four Great Posts from A Bob’s Life
Four outstanding posts to read (and be sure to read the comments too!): Darryl: Why I Really Like Reformed Guys Keith: The Soul of American Evangelical Christianity Andrew: Penal Substitution Brian: Letters to American Christians … [Read More]

Like Americans generally, evangelicals as a group have not taken a strong stand against torture.

By whose measure? As I remember, CT published a cover article entitled “Why Torture is Always Wrong”. Books and Culture published a scathing critique of the justification of “torture lite”. The problem is not a general indifference to torture, but ambiguity as to what “torture” means at the margins of interrogatory practices.

To imply, as you do, that American Evangelicals have tacitly endorsed torture is simply a continuation of the gross over-simplification of American political debate. It smacks of scape-goating, not a serious engagement with the issues: At what point does legitimate detention and interrogation become torture? Who makes that determination? Can the legitimate interests of the state (the protection of its citizens from physical violence) be protected when this determination is made through an “open” civil justice system? To what extent do we modify that system to maintain its effectiveness in the present circumstances without destroying it?

I submit to you, Professor DeRose, that the answers to those questions are not easy, and to label someone else’s partial resolution of those issues by a process of political compromise as “torture legislation” is not particularly enlightening. Unless, of course, you are willing to consider your own position to be “in support of terrorists”.

But unlike Americans generally, evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Pres. Bush in both of his presidential elections.

So? Does the fact that African-Americans overwhelmingly supported Bill Clinton in his elections (and, in fact, were responsible for his election) make them especially responsible for the bombing of Serbia? For abortion on demand? Should we then morally condemn African-American leaders because they failed to be more outspoken in their condemnation of Clinton on these issues?

Or does guilt by association only apply to the supporters of your political opponents?

At what point does legitimate detention and interrogation become torture? Who makes that determination? Can the legitimate interests of the state (the protection of its citizens from physical violence) be protected when this determination is made through an “open” civil justice system? To what extent do we modify that system to maintain its effectiveness in the present circumstances without destroying it?
I submit to you, Professor DeRose, that the answers to those questions are not easy

“halflight”: I agree that none of those fairly general questions are easy to answer.

I do think that some related, but more specific, questions are easy to answer. For instance, while your general question, “At what point does legitimate detention and interrogation become torture?” is extremely difficulty to answer, I hold that, given widely available information, much of it coming from the Pentagon, it is easy to answer this one: “Did US military officials engage in torture in Iraq?” That one, I say, is a clear and easy “yes,” under any reasonable construal of what constitutes torture.

[Compare: It is notoriously difficult to answer this question: “Under what conditions does a subject know that some proposition is true?” But it is easy to answer this one: “Do I know that Goldbach’s conjecture is true?” (No, I don’t.)]

My conclusions in recent posts here (see especially this, this, and this; I should note that this present post is a follow-up to the three I’ve just linked to) are based on certain judgments — for instance that we have good reason to believe that US officials have engaged in torture, by any reasonable construal of what constitutes torture, and to at least suspect the possibility that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 will lead to more. Perhaps you disagree with those judgments, or perhaps some other judgments that I actually rely on (and there are several of them), in which case we can discuss what can be said for and against them. But we should be clear about what I am and am not supposing, and, in particular, that I’m not relying on it that the general questions you say are tough to answer are in fact easy to answer — though I do rely on some more particular judgments related to the general questions you ask. It’s probably not wise for me to guess which of the judgments that I actually rely on you want to reject. But if you tell me, we can discuss them.

So? Does the fact that African-Americans overwhelmingly supported Bill Clinton in his elections (and, in fact, were responsible for his election) make them especially responsible for the bombing of Serbia? For abortion on demand? Should we then morally condemn African-American leaders because they failed to be more outspoken in their condemnation of Clinton on these issues?
Or does guilt by association only apply to the supporters of your political opponents?

What I am supposing is that while all citizens of a democracy (at least one much like ours) have a responsibility to monitor what their government does and what various government officials are doing, and to speak out when it goes wrong, that is especially so in the case of citizens who support(ed) a given elected official. I suppose this both because supporters are more responsible for the official being in office in the first place, but also because these officials are (generally) more likely to responsive to their supporters. This doesn’t seem to me to be the use of any bad form of “guilt by association.” (I’ll note that while I personally didn’t vote for President Bush, I do consider myself to be an evangelical Christian, and so do take myself to be a member of a group that bears a special responsibility for what he does.)

I did vote for Clinton, and, for that reason, did feel a somewhat stronger call to speak up when I thought he was going wrong. But on Serbia… Well, you should know that I’m no pacifist (though I have a lot of respect for many Christian pacifists). I was actually fairly hawkish on Serbia, so there felt a special call to speak up against what I saw as a deplorable lack of action by our government and especially the Clinton administration for what seemed to me far too long a time. (On that issue, I was much more in line with what Senator Dole was saying at the time.)

I remember visiting a predominantly black church near my house (I believe my family were the only whites present that Sunday) during Clinton’s presidency when the preacher had occasion to be critical of then-President Clinton in his sermon — though this didn’t concern either Serbia or abortion. He cited the fact that African-Americans overwhelmingly supported Clinton as one reason (among others) for members of his congregation to take an active stand on the issue. That struck me as being sensible.

I appreciate your bringing the torture issue to this forum, Keith.

One question: What makes you say that President Bush is an evangelical Christian? Certainly, his administration has courted evangelicals and they, in turn, have projected their beliefs (and desires) onto him. Many of his borderline blasphemous speeches were written by an evangelical. However, I know of no instance in which he has claimed to be an evangelical, and much of his religious and political rhetoric bears little resemblance to that of “confessing” evangelicals.

Coleman: In some ways President Bush doesn’t perfectly fit the paradigm of an evangelical. On balance, though, I think it’s more accurate to affirm than to deny that he counts. This is a fairly good discussion of the issue.

I hold that, given widely available information, much of it coming from the Pentagon, it is easy to answer this one: “Did US military officials engage in torture in Iraq?” That one, I say, is a clear and easy “yes,” under any reasonable construal of what constitutes torture.

The problem with “reasonable person” standards is that they depend on hypothetical people put in a situation with an artificially limited context. Your experiments with stress positions may be partially instructive; but you aren’t known to have been instrumental in an attack on a civillian target that killed 3,000 people; you aren’t part of an organization that is daily detonating explosive devices in marketplaces that kill or maim women and children; you don’t possibly have information about a plan to detonate a radioactive explosive device in the L.A. basin that would cause thousands to die of radiation sickness.

When we broaden the context to include information other than the physical suffering of the person interrogated, I think what interrogation methods are permissible, and thus what we want to call “torture”, becomes a bit more cloudy. In the hypothetical context I’ve constructed, a “reasonable person” may believe that using stress positions is not only morally permissible, but morally imperative.

So, when the interrogators (or their superiors) determine in a specific circumstance that it is morally imperative upon them to use stress positions to extract information, do we afterward brand them as criminals and throw them in prison? Isn’t that a way of completely transferring the cost of moral ambiguity onto the interrogator to preserve our sense of righteousness? Or do we, as a society, accept some of the cost of moral ambiguity in terms of moral guilt, by creating guidelines that in some circumstances may allow interrogators to use methods that are arguably immoral? Isn’t that what the legislation to which you object is trying to accomplish?

I do rely on some more particular judgments related to the general questions you ask. It’s probably not wise for me to guess which of the judgments that I actually rely on you want to reject. But if you tell me, we can discuss them.

I question your assumption that you can judge the morality of certain interrogation procedures solely by their effect on the person interrogated. To me you seem to be relying on a “common sense” intuition in your judgments that wouldn’t hold if you considered a wider context.

I suppose this both because supporters are more responsible for the official being in office in the first place, but also because these officials are (generally) more likely to responsive to their supporters.

Not if it means losing an election, or going down in history as the president who permitted mass civillian casualties in an Al Qaeda attack. Anyhow, Bush has already defied Evangelical pressure on other issues (stem cell research, Chinese and Sudanese human rights), the National Association of Evangelicals has already endorsed the published statement expressing its concerns about administration policy; what else can be done?

I don’t see the moral clarity that you do; I don’t know what is an appropriate Christian response to the situation. If it were a matter of protecting myself, there is clarity: my hope is in the resurrection, so I can forego using torture as a means of protecting my own life, with the faith that God will set things right. The same reasoning may hold in a Christian community. However, when I am an elected official of a secular state, entrusted with the physical safety of others who do not share my belief, to whom the idea of resurrection is incredible, I don’t think I can make the same decision. I’m violating their trust, and exposing them to the cost of a faith which they don’t share. So do I disengage from political life? That protects my personal piety, but doesn’t stop the torture; I can fool myself into believing that I’m not involved, but in fact I’m being protected by the state’s arguably immoral act. As Niebuhr suggested, I can’t escape from the moral predicament. So, if I’m not out on the street branding Bush as a war criminal, and labelling the detention act as “torture legislation”, its because I don’t know what I’d do making a decision in the same situation.

You’re taking a very troubling, possibly tragic, moral predicament that all Americans face, with no clear-cut, easy answer, and turning it into yet another opportunity for partisan polemic.

(while I personally didn’t vote for President Bush, I do consider myself to be an evangelical Christian, and so do take myself to be a member of a group that bears a special responsibility for what he does.)

First, if you feel especially responsible for all of Bush’s actions, then you can do an individual public mea culpa. Personally, I did not vote for him, because after the WMD debacle, I did not trust him to make the kind of difficult moral choices that we’re talking about here.

Second, the bio at your website indicates that you are a universalist, and the two congregations that you mention are both members of mainline Protestant denominations, and if their programming is any indication, members of the liberal wings at that. You may privately identify yourself as an evangelical–I’m not questioning that. But neither you nor the public communities with which you associate are likely to suffer the kind of derision and bigotry that is aimed at theologically conservative Evangelicals (who may or may not have supported Bush) by so-called “tolerant” progressives.

I just returned from the bookstore and saw yet another batch of “progressive” hate books denouncing the “Religious Right” as the greatest threat to the American polity. Did I miss something? Was it graduates of Liberty University that rammed four jetliners into public buildings? Pat Robertson who is testing nuclear devices? Leaders of Evangelical churches embezzling billions of dollars and causing the collapse of public companies and impoverishing thousands? Is our biggest problem really that some misguided people want to have prayer in public schools? (By the way, check out the cover of Susan Estrich’s book on Ann Coulter. It’s hilarious.)

Personally, I don’t appreciate people assuming that I voted for Bush, or that people presume that something in conservative Evangelical theology is responsible for Bush’s actions. You know that isn’t true, yet your claim that Evangelicals are somehow especially responsible for Bush’s policy on interrogation techniques perpetuates that falsehood.

But on Serbia… Well, you should know that I’m no pacifist (though I have a lot of respect for many Christian pacifists). I was actually fairly hawkish on Serbia, so there felt a special call to speak up against what I saw as a deplorable lack of action by our government and especially the Clinton administration for what seemed to me far too long a time.

I don’t see the coherence in your position. It’s morally impermissible to put an individual in a stress position to extract information in order to avoid attacks on civillians, yet permissible, even morally imperative, to bomb Serbia and kill 500 Serbian non-combatants?

Here (http://hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/) is Human Rights Watch report on the bombing of Serbia.

In the end, I probably agree that NATO had to do something in Serbia, but I don’t see it as being morally unproblematic. In fact, I see the use of stress positions in the interrogation of Al Qaeda members, especially those who are known to have been involved in the planning of terrorist attacks, to be less problematic than bombing densely populated cities like Belgrade and inevitably maiming and killing innocent civillians.

Dale/halflight

Dale: This will have to be a relatively quick response on four of the matters you raise. (Well, OK, coming back now, I see it hasn’t turned out to be so quick.)

First, you quote me as saying that it’s easy to positively answer the question, “Did US military officials engage in torture in Iraq?” You then respond as follows:

The problem with “reasonable person” standards is that they depend on hypothetical people put in a situation with an artificially limited context. Your experiments with stress positions may be partially instructive; but you aren’t known to have been instrumental in an attack on a civillian target that killed 3,000 people; you aren’t part of an organization that is daily detonating explosive devices in marketplaces that kill or maim women and children; you don’t possibly have information about a plan to detonate a radioactive explosive device in the L.A. basin that would cause thousands to die of radiation sickness.

I think you’re actually denying that US military officials engaged in torture in Iraq. I’m not sure if this is because you don’t know about some of the more extreme cases that seem to have taken place, or if you just have extremely high standards for what counts as torture. But in any case, what seems to be behind your denial is the thought that you have to take into account how guilty/dangerous/etc. a person is in determining whether treating them a certain way constitutes torture. To my thinking, those considerations aren’t important to whether a treatment is torture, but are better construed as considerations that might be used to argue that torture is justified in certain situations.

Second, on me being an evangelical. Though for very different reasons, what I wrote a couple of comments above about President Bush — that he “doesn’t perfectly fit the paradigm of an evangelical” but on balance should be counted as such — applies to myself as well — or so I believe. But you contend:

the bio at your website indicates that you are a universalist, and the two congregations that you mention are both members of mainline Protestant denominations, and if their programming is any indication, members of the liberal wings at that.

Yes, I am a universalist — but very much in the style of Gregory MacDonald’s (pseudonym) The Evangelical Universalist. As those who are familiar with my on-line defense of universalism know, while I arrive at a conclusion that’s very much a minority position within Christian evangelicalism, I arrive at it via a very evangelical route. Whether or not they end up agreeing with my conclusion, I hope readers of that defense will be able to think, “Ah, so that’s how an evangelical Christian could end up being a universalist.” Interested parties can follow the link above & see for themselves.

I would not count the churches I link to on my Yale web site as evangelical churches. But the church I myself attend (& have attended for several years now), is. It is an Episcopal church, but is very evangelical nonetheless. Indeed, as one can see from my church’s web site, it summarizes its own character, right there at the top of its webpage, with 3 E’s, with the E-word at issue now being given first place: “Evangelical, Episcopal, Ecumenical.” I used to have a link to my own church on my web page, but replaced it a while ago with the links you found, which I thought would be better recommendations for most newcomers to New Haven. A discussion of why I made that replacement, and also of why I myself continued with my more evangelical church, would be out of place here, but would, I think, reinforce the conclusion that I’m an unusual sort of evangelical, but an evangelical nonetheless. But what makes someone an evangelical is indeed a very tricky matter.

Third, you write “I don’t appreciate people assuming that I voted for Bush”. Of course, I made no such assumption — about you or about any other particular inidividual. I did say that evangelicals “overwhelmingly supported Pres. Bush in both of his presidential elections,” which is true. In support, I pasted statistics to the effect that 68% of WEP voters voted for Bush in his first election and 78% in his second. Of course, that means that about 32% and 22% voted against him.

Fourth, on Serbia, it sounds like we may not be that far apart when you write: “In the end, I probably agree that NATO had to do something in Serbia, but I don’t see it as being morally unproblematic.” I certainly don’t want to endorse everything that was done in that war. But I was trying to relate that my own main frustration, and where I felt most called on to speak up, was during what I saw as the deplorably long period of inaction. Finally, you write that you “don’t see the coherence in [my] position.” No surprise: You don’t know enough about why I supported action (including military action, though not necessarily the actual military action taken in all its details) in Serbia, nor even about what my exact position on that issue is, to assess that coherence.

Oh, one more thing: about my turning this issue into “yet another opportunity for partisan polemic”: I don’t see why you assume it’s concerns for the fates of parties that motivates me here, but I do know that you’re wrong about that.

I appreciate the scholarly discussion, but a key assumption is questionable.

Bush may say he has the faith, but his works say otherwise.

Over half a million Iraqi people would agree with me, if they weren’t dead as a result of his policies.

Sin is the human condition, and constructing a hierarchy of sin is assuming one knows the mind of God, but I find it hard to believe that a just God would wink at what our nation has done in the last six years and put it on the same level as adultry.