These Christians, who generally call themselves evangelicals and fundamentalists because they take the fundamental tenets of their religion seriously, have managed to become powerful enough to dominate the Republican party and in 2000 they elected* one of their own as President of the United States. Within a year, this very Christian President began laying out plans for torturing his enemies.

Christianity and torture have, unfortunately, a long historical association. Indeed, the Spanish Inquisition perfected many of the most famous torture techniques, including waterboarding. You might think that Christians would be eager to strand Christianity’s associations with torture in the distant middle ages. You would think wrongly. Under the champion of Christianity residing in the White House, torture of prisoners became the official policy** of the U. S. Government.

It is difficult to write calmly about what has recently been done under the auspicies of the United States of America — difficult to avoid the intense anger and shame I feel as an American. But in the face of the Bush administration, anger and shame are unavoidable for anyone who cherishes civilized society. What is shocking is the extent to which evangelical and fundamentalist Christians embrace what Bush has done, much like the Holy See embraced the Inquisition.

I am no Christian, yet I am shamed by the way American Christians have embraced torture and other odious, uncivilized and unAmerican policies of the Bush Republicans. The evidence for the torture policy was obvious in 2004 — yet Bush was reelected. Reelected, it has to be pointed out, primarily due to the support of the most dedicated Christians. We must not forget that those who attended church regularly overwhelmingly supported Bush despite his policies, while those who rarely or only occasionally attended church opposed him.

This is a colossal moral failure on the part of American Christianity. Amazingly, among church-attending Christians there is little question about abortion’s immorality, but much doubt about whether torture is immoral. Or if torture is admitted to be wrong, it is denied that “simulated drowning” is torture. When pressed, Bush supporters have equated waterboarding with merely being dunked in water a bit — and who could object to that? Yet, everyone knows full well that the entire point of waterboarding (the water cure it used to be called) is to create the experience of drowning in the subject. As described by former Judge Advocate General Evan Wallach,

the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. — “Waterboarding Used to be a Crime”, Washington Post, Nov. 4, 2007

Or consider the description by Scylla at StraightDope.com who tried waterboarding hmself,

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.

And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex. Once that happens, it’s all over.

. . . . So, is it torture?

I’ll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I’d take the fingers, no question. – Scylla at StraightDope.com

It is tempting make the assumption that Christianity’s lack of moral compass on issues like torture is due to its flawed doctrines. Christians believe in a “perfect” God who, it so happens, will torture most people in hell for an eternity. To reconcile this with “perfection” requires a perversity of mind unimaginable to me, though hundreds of millions of Christians seem to have no problem with it. Apparently they reason that if God does it, and if God is perfect, then torture can’t be so bad, can it? So torture becomes acceptable, even respectable.

Still, one might ask, how can decent human beings ever end up there? Are Dawkins and Hutchings and Harris right? Is religion essentially an evil enterprise, one which warps the human mind and subverts decency? Sometimes it seems that way, I admit.

But the better explanation, the one that makes most sense to me, is the one provided by psychologist Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians and endorced by John Dean in his book Conservatives without Conscience and his Findlaw Writ columns. Altemeyer’s studies explain how it is possible for dedicated Christians to become the least morally grounded of all Americans. It happens not because they are Christians or even because they are religious, but because they have a personality trait which certain religions both encourage and attract.

In my opinion, The Authoritarians is a must-read book. You can download it as a PDF, or order it here. Nothing else more clearly reveals the nature of the problem facing us.

——— Footnotes ———

* “elected”– or more accurately mis-elected. In the Supreme Court’s worst moment, its decision in Bush v Gore tossed aside the provisions in the U. S. Constitution for handling Presidential elections (as if the Constitution had nothing to do with the process) and prevented the State of Florida from following the laws set up by its Legislature for choosing Presidential electors. Had the Constitution been followed Bush would likely have become President anyway — but it would have happened constitutionally, a process the religious conservatives on the Court were afraid to trust.

** “official policy” — according to John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in torturing prisoners for the Bush Administration. As Scott Horton wrote in Harpers

But this week, a CIA agent, John Kiriakou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to torture someone (and it is torture he said, no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Company. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose personal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. And, according to Kiriakou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find torture was appropriate. Here’s a key piece of the Kiriakou statement:

LAUER: Was the White House involved in that decision?

KIRIAKOU: Absolutely, this isn’t something done willy nilly. It’s not something that an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner. This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department. — “The President’s Coming Out Party”, Harpers, Dec 15, 2007

Horton goes on to observe that the Bush administration has resurrected

the process of official cruelty under the Stuart monarchs in seventeenth century England. Persons accused of state crimes very frequently were interrogated with the use of specific techniques, including the rack, the thumbscrew, and waterboarding. King James I personally described the process in The Kings Booke (1606). He would, on the advice of his officers, “approve no new torture,” but he would certainly avail himself of the existing practices. In ascending order of severity they were: thumbscrews, the rack and waterboarding. That’s right. Waterboarding was considered the most severe of the official forms of torture. Worse than the rack and thumbscrews.

In the depraved humor of Dick Cheney, of course, it’s just bobbing for apples at a Halloween Fair. — “The President’s Coming Out Party”, Harpers, Dec 15, 2007

This is the face of American Christianity today. Are Christians ashamed? Or will they continue as a group to support the Republicans who have brought us to this point?

The problem is that the U.N. Human Rights Council’s wording is so broad that it condemns not just biases against people of various religious traditions, but any “defamation” of the content of those religious traditions. Instead of defending, this betrays human rights. As Brown wrote,

We believe that the Council resolutions combating defamation of religions are inappropriate and misguided. It is people that merit protection, Mr President, not their beliefs. We would suggest that member States would do better to consider a resolution combating religious obstruction to the enjoyment of human rights.

Brown pointed out that religion is often the enemy of human rights, and the resolution seems to support local laws which protect religion from being criticized on that point.

In our work of promoting reproductive health and rights we often find ourselves being opposed by religious leaders. In our programs for sex education for young people in Africa it is more often than not the churches who oppose us, believing that ignorance in matters of human reproduction is better than knowledge. In Africa, many campaigns for AIDS prevention have been cut back or replaced entirely by religiously-inspired and totally ineffective campaigns promoting abstinence only – in a continent where abstinence is simply not an option for many young girls. And we actually find some church leaders telling lies about the efficacy of condoms in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

In March this year we presented to the Council a paper on the cruel practice of child marriage [A/HRC/4/NGO/84] . In some countries we are told that this blight on the lives of young girls has divine sanction, and that to criticise it is tantamount to blasphemy – defamation of religion.

I’m glad the IHEU has seconded her on thi.

In a not unrelated matter, the IHEU has also criticized the U.N. Special Report on Islamophobia, calling the report by the U.N. Special Rapporteur “seriously flawed”. The idea behind the report is to criticize hatred and bias against Muslims which has been rearing up in Europe and elsewhere. But like the resolution against defamation of religion, the report fails to distinguish between belief systems and the people who hold to them.

As I quoted Brown earlier, “It is people that merit protection…not their beliefs.” The U. N. Special Rapporteur, explains the IHEU letter,

… fails to distinguish between, on the one hand, Islamophobia, which he defines as “baseless hostility and fear vis-à-vis Islam”, and on the other, legitimate concerns regarding the rise of Islamic extremism.

Furthermore, IHEU points out something so obvious that it should never have to be pointed out to any “Human Rights Council”, namely that the radical Islam which has become ascendant in many parts of the world is an enemy of human rights, including the right to freedom of religious belief, but also the right to kiss in public, the right of women to drive cars or teach in schools or even show their faces in public, the right to dance with someone of the opposite sex or play modern music — the list, ridiculous as it is, goes on and on.

Secondly, he fails to recognise the important differences that exist between the Islamic and modern European worldviews; differences that need to be addressed if increasing tension is to be avoided. Rather than dismissing Europe’s defence of its identity, which he describes as ‘based on intangible “values”‘ in scare quotes, he should recognise that these values are neither intangible nor exclusively “European”. They include, inter alia, the dignity and autonomy of the individual, equality of the sexes, democracy, and human rights – surely the very rights that this Council should be seeking to defend.

I have no doubt that many in the U. N. are frightened by the hostile state of affairs which currently exists between Christians and Muslims, and they desire to the stave off the rhetoric about WWIII which rolls so easily off the lips of both Christian Presidents and al Qaeda mullahs today.

The neo-Conservative goal of militarily overthrowing conservative Islamic regimes throughout the middle east was doomed from the start because of neo-Conservatives’ fundamental inability to understand human nature. When under attack or the stress of warfare, people become frightened and religious, and in fact more fanatical. Attacking the middle east the way the U. S. has exacerbates the problem of Islamic radicalism. It’s the opposite of a solution.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Islam is a threat to human rights in every country in which it is dominant if that nation lacks adequate separation of religion and state. We don’t need the U.N. or its Human Rights Council to forget why it exists. Not now and not ever.