A combined 54 percent of at-least-weekly church-goers say torture is either often or sometimes justifiable; for those who attend monthly or a few times a year, that figure is 51 percent; for those who do not attend, it is 42 percent.G.K. Chesterton said it best: "The best argument against Christianity is Christians." Put another way, my experience has been that there is quite a large chunk of Christians in this country who have absolutely no idea what the faith is about. They haven't read hardly any of the Bible, haven't checked out Augustine or Aquinas, and basically go to church every week as a self-esteem booster, or perhaps for a little shot of optimism from a content-free inspirational preacher or, better yet, as a way of validating their existing lifestyle choices, which accounts for much of the banality and vapidness of megachurches.
If there's a fundamental message of Christianity, it's that you must do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Not necessarily as they would do unto you. This comes from a love for others, which is kind of the point in Christianity, and there is a big difference between these two concepts. They sound the same, but they're not even close. Would we want to be waterboarded if we were captured by an enemy? I suspect not, and in my opinion, the more heinous the crime, the more evenhanded must the justice be. And justice is important--some of the Bible's greatest heroes are judges. There's a book of the Bible called Judges. Ensuring fairness and justice are, essentially, Christian ideals.
There's also Christ's famous "turn the other cheek" declaration from His Sermon on the Beatitudes, which strikes me as wildly idealistic and challenging but essential to understanding what one's role is to be in dealing with oppressions. And there's Jesus's forgiveness of his torturers, the healing of the guy whose ear Peter cuts off. All this is good stuff, but the thing is that it's incredibly hard. I don't really think that we should be following these dictates on a national level. But I do think that the guiding philosophy of Christ--as a sort of nonviolent healer who treated everyone, regardless of gender or race or class, with dignity and love--is exactly what we need to be following. The man said that we need to love our enemies. Once again, very hard but very important. I doubt that there are too many people who would really turn the other cheek anywhere in the world. It cuts against human nature, which shows how Christianity is really, really hard, if you actually try to live it as it's written. But vengeance--one of the Bible's betes noires--is easy. It's easy to just take restrictive stances on social issues. It's easy to give an eye for an eye, which I suspect is what underlies much of the conservative support for torture. It's easy to just sign off on whatever makes us safe and cower under the covers.
But American evangelicalism is a tradition with decidedly Southern roots, and the South has rather a terrible history of oppression and Jesus standing side by side, seemingly without contradiction. It isn't surprising that public opinion would turn out that way for them--when your ancestors were justifying slavery in the name of Christ, it's perhaps inevitable that the same sort of warped value structure has trickled down through the ages. I've long maintained that I think that Christianity as it's practiced in America is not really all that similar to actual Christianity, and I would go even further to say that it is a corrosive force that seeks to legitimize the very sort of hatred and inequality that Jesus so virulently opposed. I think that this poll merely continues to show how worthless much of the Christian establishment in America really is. They can't even get the most fundamental aspects of Christianity correct, to the extent that the less you go to church, the more likely you have a moral (and, ironically, Christian) view of torture. Since Christianity is an ironic faith I suppose it's fitting that less exposure to Christianity leads to more adoption of Christian ideals. I've found more of Christ's compassion for the poor and His passion for justice on the secular left than I've ever found on the religious right. It's amusing but it shouldn't be happening--it should be Christians leading the charge against torture. It should be Christians arguing for solutions for poverty. Instead they argue against things that are either not mentioned in the Bible at all (abortion, gay marriage) or that are only glancingly mentioned (sexual practice in general). I'm honestly all for a period of decline in "Christianity" here in America, as it looks is happening. Creative destruction might be the only way to save the faith from the wolves in sheep's clothing.
