It started with Facebook. A friend of mine, a diehard conservative who once brought a Walkman to a monastery retreat so that he wouldn’t have to miss Rush Limbaugh, posted this article, with a comment that read “waterboarding saved lives, suggests the evidence,” which makes it sound a little like a seat belt. We can feel okay about torture because it works. This prompted a flurry of back-and-forth comments on enemy-love, ethics, and the Christian witness to the state.

Unrelated to my friend’s post, Mark Van Steenwyk issued a call on his Facebook status for someone to write a piece on torture in response to recent news that a majority of white evangelicals believe that torture is often (18%) or sometimes (44%) justified in order to get information from suspected terrorists. The numbers are also higher for those who go to church regularly versus those who do not. This puts me in mind of a quip from Stanley Hauerwas, who once told a group of Catholic clergy, “You know, you Catholics go to church all the time. What good does it do you?”

I’m troubled by more than just the numbers. I’m troubled by a question: why terrorists? If the answer is that the US has actually been torturing suspected terrorists, so that this isn’t idle speculation, then my question is: why terrorists? These are not exactly the same question.

It would probably be naive to assume that the US has just now resorted to torture in the face of the terrorist scourge, but that seems to be the prevailing story. The terrorists, it seems, are reprehensible not only for terror itself but for driving the West to desperate measures. The relative candor with which the former Bush administration has been willing to talk about waterboarding is similar to Jack Nicholson’s confession at the end of A Few Good Men: “You’re goddamned right I did!” The logic of the situation — which I submit is the logic of scapegoating — demanded it. The efficacy of the technique justifies it. These are desperate times. It is better for a few people to be tortured than to risk greater loss of (American) life.

Terror and torture are twin sides of a nakedness in human violence we have been trying to hide. Terrorism doesn’t play by the civilized, genteel rules of state-sponsored violence, so the system responds by nervously extending the rules. Prisoners in the war on terror are not “enemy combatants” and therefore have no rights under the Geneva convention. Both “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” are necessary to maintain national sovereignty and protect the innocent. But this is anxiety-inducing, because it comes too close to admitting our inadequacy in the face of evil, especially our own. “See what you’ve made us do,” the powers nervously declare to those daring to live out the violence of our depravity without pretense.

This is a pathological response, like an abuser who blames the abused is as if the entire relationship isn’t fatally flawed. Our true violence is exposed, leading to the desperate attempt to cover our nakedness once again. The Abu Ghraib scandal is but another example of the scapegoating mechanism — not that Lynndie England and co. weren’t likely guilty, but they offered the perfect opportunity to save a little face and recover part of the fig leaf. Compared to the antics at Abu Ghraib, waterboarding is clean and clinical. It is merely a “technique” (Ellul fans take note…); nobody is dressed up in a dog collar or S&M paraphernalia. The state can partially restore its delusion of moral rectitude.

To make a parallel to the pathology of abuse is not to attempt to justify terrorism or suggest that the West “had it coming.” There is no justification for terrorism, just is there is no justification for rape, another reprehensible act. But I suspect that there would not be widespread support for the torture of suspected rapists in order to get information, even if such information might reduce the incidence of rape. Only terrorists deserve torture, apparently.

But I have to wonder: If the word “terrorist” didn’t conjure up a rather specific (non-white) ethnic group, would white evangelicals sing a different tune? Christianity Today points out that in a 2008 poll of southern white evangelicals, the numbers changed significantly when the question was posed in “Golden Rule” terms: “Should the U.S. government use methods against our enemies that we would not want used on American soldiers?” CT sees this as a positive indicator that “further engagement with careful Christian thinking on the topic” might have an even more significant effect. I am inclined to agree. But the question is troublesome in that it presupposes both a primary identity as Americans and an ethnocentrism that would regard American soldiers with deference over and against others. 48% were still willing to rather baldly confirm that ethnocentrism by answering “sometimes” or “often.”

I’m not sure how to parse torture vis-a-vis the imperial sword-bearing ostensibly legitimated by Romans 13. I’d like to be able to say that states are within their purview to punish criminals and protect innocent life but that torture crosses a dangerous ethical line. I’m glad that there seems to be a consensus that such a line exists, even if there is debate as to which side of it waterboarding and other techniques might fall. But I blanch a bit at a logic that would legitimize wholesale slaughter on the battlefield but condemn torture. Without suggesting that the distinction is meaningless, I’m not comfortable asserting that the dialectic of torture and terror is a special category of violence that demands a special kind of response from people of faith. This seems to play too neatly into the logic of state-sanctioned violence.

If we accept violence as the purview of the state, and torture can be shown to be efficacious in protecting human life, on what ethical grounds do we draw that line? I worry — a little — that if we speak out against torture specifically, we give tacit approval to other forms of violence about which we’ve historically been more complacent. Once we admit there’s a line, the conversation shifts from the ethical difficulties of violence itself to one about where to draw the line. It’s like the old preacher’s joke where a man asks a woman if she’d sleep with him for a million dollars. When she says yes, he asks her if she’d sleep with him for a hundred. “What do you think I am,” she asks, affronted — “a prostitute?”

“We’ve already established that,” goes the punchline. “Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

I don’t want to turn this into a referendum on Romans 13. I’m sure someone here has it all figured out and will feel compelled to enlighten me. But I see a certain value in theologically recognizing the ongoing presence of the sword-bearing state without making sword-bearing the normative mode of human existence, which I think is what Paul is doing. Rome certainly had no qualms about torture; Paul himself submitted to various forms of torture, in solidarity with Jesus, without any hint that he found this exceptional.

Peter encouraged his readers to expect punishment for doing wrong but that it would be far better to submit to suffering even when they had done nothing wrong, which seems to suggest that Peter saw either scenario as plausible. No matter how much biblical weight we give to the state’s role in retributive justice, it is at least as biblical to recognize that the innocent will nevertheless suffer, often by that very same sword. And here, I think, is something important. The church’s willingness to stand as martyrs — witnesses — is a testimony to the poverty of violence. If the state bears the sword and God uses that fact for his purposes, it is not out of ontological necessity but as a concession to a trajectory we should never have been on in the first place.

Jesus triumphed over the powers on the cross, making a spectacle of them (just as crucifixion was intended to make a spectacle of dissidents). We are so depraved, so violent, that we’d even kill God if he came to us — and we did. The cross is the ultimate witness to this reality, and as the church we are called to live out this witness in time and space, in flesh and blood, incarnationally. We are called to a cruciform life that refuses retaliation and rejects the myth of redemptive violence.

We should condemn torture not because torture is an exceptional form of violence but because it so utterly exemplifies the violence that characterizes fallen humanity. We bear witness to a new way of life in which we have no need of torture because we have no need of violence at all, and we bear testimony to a day when this will be the norm for all of creation. It is not the state that bears the divine telos for humanity, that gives us a glimpse into the social dimension of the imago Dei, but the church.

I wish I had made it all the way through Cavanaugh’s Torture and the Eucharist before writing this — I started it a couple of years ago but wasn’t ready for it at the time. But I read far enough to know part of Cavanaugh’s thesis is that torture in general is a parody of the Eucharist. Perhaps we can see waterboarding more specifically as a macabre parody of baptism. The subjection and surrender are real, as is the feeling of drowning, but the immersion is false, and thus there is no resurrection, no new life. In exchange for a confession the false penitant is offered only a respite from further “techniques.” As usual, violence offers no true redemption. The state, itself a sad parody of the body of Christ, cannot deliver on the salvation it promises.

About Ted Troxell

Ted is a writing teacher and church musician currently studying the intersection of Christian theology and radical politics.