"57% of white evangelicals in the South believe that torture is often or sometimes justified. Another 16% believe that it can be justified in rare occasions. Only 22% believe that it is never justified. This is surprising because only 48% of the general population believe that torture can be justified."Further, noted the author, when pressed, 44% admitted that they based their moral decision on torture not on their faith, but on their own personal experience and "common sense."
I think this speaks to a troubling trend I see in conservative Christian circles. The emphasis on the personal relationship with God has superseded the church as moral voice. The assumption is that those in relationship with God will automatically have a much better chance of making good moral choices, so the church often doesn't address those moral issues. But, as we see here, a large percentage of these compartmentalize their morality and address certain issues outside the faith.
In the comments several also pointed to another troubling trend. One commentator differentiated between individual and government action. Completely wrong for an individual to torture, but this commentator could not get past the OT God endorsing war and even genocide. The morality of terrorist actions, then, were viewed through the individual lens, but the morality of our government actions (war, torture, rendition) was seen through the government lens. Handy little silos of moral decision-making.
I have thought for sometime that many Christians pick and choose between the Old and New Testaments depending on the type of God they want. If they want a kind, gentle shepherd, they turn to the New, but when they need a God who smites, the Old comes in very handy.
Perhaps it is just me, but that seems to be how we get conservatives who are very moral in their own lives. They don't drink, cheat on their spouse, steal, and would never murder or torture anyone. They were horrified by Clinton's own personal sins, but see in everything George Bush has done the OT God exerting his ordained governments to destroy evil.
6 comments:
Handy little silos of moral decision-making.
You need those silos to keep everything simple. If you can't justify each thing you do, say and believe with a soundbite that sounds superficially clever while simultaneously demonizing people who aren't like you, there's something wrong with your faith. /snark
Though what's interesting is that everyone has to compartmentalize to an extent to make moral decisions in a finite amount of time; it's just that people in an environment like American conservative Christianity that has been essentially conquered by authoritarianism tend to have different criteria for deciding what doesn't work and needs more thought. Adults use "Ye shall know them by their fruits," whereas authoritarians use "This doesn't trust my human leaders 100%."
Interesting point, Leighton. I guess I agree that we have to compartmentalize. The difference, perhaps, as you note between adults and authoritarians has to do, in part, with the relative permeability of those compartments?
Perhaps?
It's just a question of bandwidth; we can't possibly hold all the information relevant to key decisions in our mind at once, so we have to oversimplify, and part of this is ruling out entire regions of our life as irrelevant.
But I think you're right, permeability is the difference; most people with working amygdalas can figure out (eventually) that something isn't right and doesn't work, whereas for authoritarian personalities, admitting their pastor (or the Bible) was mistaken even about a tiny issue is tantamount to destroying the meaning of life and the universe.
Adults spend their time worrying about issues like "How can I treat my clients fairly, yet still make enough money to support my family?" Or, "How can we make sure everyone has access to health care, yet still keep the economy stable?" This involves a lot of mental gymnastics, and a lot of stress. But authoritarians exert themselves, sometimes to the point of sickness, over pointless minutae like "What does God mean when he says that Peter was going to deny Jesus 3 times, but the four gospels describe Peter denying Jesus to at least 9 people? How can that be right?"
It reads almost like narcissism, or solipsism--spending years trying to achieve a comfortable, idiosyncratic, irrelevant consistency while the world burns around them. But I think in a lot of cases the cause is physiological, and it's more than just a personality disorder. Or else it's people who grew up in a small or mid-sized church where nobody was more mature than a 15-year-old, and they never had any well-adjusted adults to socialize them.
I'm admittedly biased, as I think 95% of my theological musings years ago were a completely valueless waste of time and life, and I wouldn't have been so distracted by them if I hadn't grown up in an environment where the #1 priority in the universe was to believe (read: affirm) Exactly The Right Things. But I think I'm right that such a large demographic making political decisions on very poorly informed gut instinct puts us in a precarious political situation.
Leighton, this reminds me of an observation I had following my witnessing of a theological discussion. It was about something that had absolutely no cost attached--the answer one way or another did not ultimately cost anyone anything meaningful. At the time, i noted to sOF it was like arguing about how many angels one could fit on the head of a pin.
Is that what you are talking about?
Yeah, except that to extend the metaphor, millions of people seem to believe the equivalent of the following: if fewer than 950 angels can fit, there won't be enough of them per square millimeter to keep away the demons who want to control our minds and turn us into murderers, rapists, sadists and liberals, so it's vitally important to believe that you can fit at least a thousand per pinhead. (I was going to use "eaters of flesh of the dead" as a reference to World of Warcraft, but then I realized that could be mistaken for a reference to the Eucharist.) Never mind that even if you were to abandon all pretense of reasoning and pretend that the question made sense, believing anything you like wouldn't affect the actual number in the slightest.
It's like their relationship with what they call God drives them inward to such an extent that they do all their living in their head, rather than in the world we all share.
Hey if God can have a torture chamber (Hell) why can't we?
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