Well, the article's choice of words implies this; it doesn't explicitly say it. Here's what is says: "The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey." (That would be the Pew Forum analysis of a Pew Research Center for People & the Press survey released yesterday.)
Two comments. First the obvious one: there's a correlation-not-causation problem here. Everyone knows that political conservatives are more likely to be regular churchgoers than liberals. Political conservatives are more likely to offer at least qualified support for the use of torture. No reason for CNN to suggest the faith is to blame, that each additional midweek service you attend makes you embrace sadism all the more. (According to the Pew data, mainline Protestants, many of whom attend weekly worship like clockwork [whether this makes us Real Christians is for the purposes of this post neither here nor there], offer less support for torture than do occasional church attenders generally. It's just that the mainline's overall numbers are so much smaller than those of evangelicals, so they're less represented in the statistic CNN trumpets here.)
Second, the ornery-skeptical one: Contrary to popular belief, by and large, conservative Christians aren't going out of their way to buck the Republican party line on torture much more than most liberal Christians are doing so with the Democrats on, well, anything. On both sides, a lot of churchgoing folks are not political renegades who consistently follow their faith-based ethical imperatives as they understand them, parties be damned. They're Republicans or Democrats who go to church at least once a week. Their faith may well be serious and sincere; so are their--admittedly, OUR--largely secular cultural-political affiliations. Like it or not (I, naturally, do not), many more of them are conservative than liberal.
The prison writings of Alexei Navalny
19 hours ago
From an almost-pastor's perspective, this seems like another ironic case where CNN wants to give the churches more credit than is due for the moral formation of their members. I WISH churches exerted that kind of influence ... then we could stop torture from the pulpits. Unfortunately, the reality is pretty much as your ornery-skeptical analysis describes.
ReplyDeleteWhatever the justification, it's still a sad commentary that so many of us Christians remained silent as we watched it happening.
ReplyDeleteI've had this book: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3818/is_200107/ai_n9003325/
ReplyDeletesitting on my shelf forever. Perhaps I've been too negligent...
skj
Yes, read Cavanaugh right away! As much as anything, he shows that a church that actually opposes torture doesn't just preach about it or hang a banner outside the building (though that would be a great start). He takes the church's ignorance or complicity in torture as a first-order failure of ecclesiology.
ReplyDeleteIf it seems strange to CNN that evangelical church goers support torture, shouldn't it be equally strange to them that non-evangelical, non church goers don't? As I've listened to all the reporting/talk radio/satire about this issue, I've yet to hear decent grounds for such outrage (outside the church) apart from, "We're Americans, we don't do that!" or "It goes against our (un-named) values". Evangelicals need to keep wrestling with the consistency of their ethical worldview. Secularists need to do the same.
ReplyDelete