Religious Reason-giving in the Torture Debate: a Response to Jeremy Waldron - David P. Gushee

• Citation: Vol. 63 No. 3
• Publication year: 2012

Religious Reason-Giving in the Torture Debate: A Response to Jeremy Waldron

by David P. Gushee*

I am grateful to the Mercer Law Review for including a Christian ethics professor in this colloquy and, wearing my other hat as a co-sponsor ofthis symposium, grateful to our distinguished guests for being here! I am also grateful to my friend Jeremy Waldron for his very kind words about me and about our Evangelical Declaration Against Torture,¹ and for his excellent paper presented at this symposium, to which it is my honor to offer a brief response.

It seems to me that a paper focusing as it does on my own work on the Evangelical Declaration rightly evokes a somewhat autobiographical response. I want to deal with the important theoretical issues raised by Professor Waldron in light of my own involvement in the torture debate from 2005 until today. This will take you behind the scenes to some extent and, I hope, will reveal the cogency of Dr. Waldron's claims about the constructive value of religious contributions to public deliberation.

* Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life, Mercer University. Union Theological Seminary (Ph. D., 1993; M. Phil., 1990); Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (M. Div., 1987); College of William and Mary (B.A., 1984).

1. Evangelicals for Human Rights, An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror (Mar. 2007), reprinted in David P. Gushee, The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center 253-70 (2008).

870 MERCER LAW REVIEW [Vol. 63

I. Stage 1: "Five Reasons Why Torture is Always Wrong"-An Essay for Christianity Today (Feb. 1, 2006)²

I was contacted by evangelicalism's flagship magazine, Christianity Today, in the fall of 2005 with a special request: Would I write a Christian moral analysis of the ethics of torture? Christianity Today (CT), for whom I have published periodically over almost two decades, is an extraordinarily cautious keeper of the flame of evangelical orthodoxy. In Waldron's terms, though it has no "practical authority" like the Vatican, in the odd reality that is American evangelicalism, CT has at least considerable sway. Its politics and its readers tend to the right, though not the extreme right. This is the quasi-official organ of mainstream white evangelicalism.

CT was taking a political risk with its constituency in even asking me to write such an analysis, which would inevitably have political implications and ramifications. However, correspondence with my editor suggested that the issue was urgent at a pastoral level. CT editors were hearing from some ofthe disproportionate number ofdevout evangelicals in the United States Armed Forces and intelligence services-good-hearted souls who were troubled by what they were seeing, hearing, and being asked to do by way of prisoner treatment. They wanted the kind of moral guidance that believers seek from leaders within a faith community when that community's theological and moral resources are brought to bear on a problem that affects their lives.

Thus, my first foray into moral analysis of torture was pastoral. I attempted to tell Christians serving in the War on Terror that torture was always wrong, that they were not morally permitted as followers of Christ to torture anyone because of the following:

(1) Torture violates the intrinsic dignity of the human being, made in the image of God;

(2) Torture mistreats the vulnerable and thus violates the demands of...