A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Catechesis FAIL

Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings brought these depressing opinion poll results to my attention. Essentially, the more of a Bible-believing regular churchgoer you are, the more likely you are to approve of torture:

53% of white mainline protestants said that torture can rarely or never be justified, while 46% said that it could sometimes or often(!) be justified. (1% weren’t sure or refused to answer.)

47% of white non-Hispanic Catholics said rarely/never; 51% said sometimes/often. (2% not sure/no answer.)

33% of white evangelicals said rarely/never; 62% percent said sometimes/often. (5% not sure/no answer.)

The religiously unaffiliated come off best, with 55% saying that torture is rarely or never justified.

And further, the more frequently a respondent attended church, the more likely they were to approve of torture.

Not only does torture cut against the grain of the moral witness of Jesus, but our willingness to support it in an attempt to save our own skins evinces a disturbing lack of trust in God.

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4 responses to “Catechesis FAIL”

  1. Michael Westmoreland-White

    Some have questioned the Pew Study for using too small samples, but the results are nonetheless troubling. Especially if one remembers that a decade ago, the results would have been very different.

    Our church members have been bombarded by a different catechism: torture porn (24, The Unit, etc.), color coded terror alerts, propaganda about terrorist threats, propaganda about how we have been kept safe through torture, etc. Remember, until 2006, churchgoers also were the biggest supporters of the Iraq war. And the 15% of th country which still believes that Iraq was responsible for 9/11 are in the churches, too.

    At this point, the American churches are no more Christian than were the German churches during WWII.

    Reply
  2. Camassia

    Did you see this post at The Immanent Frame?

    http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2009/04/15/cheerleading-for-war/

    It’s actually about war and not torture, but one could translate the thesis easily enough.

    Reply
  3. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    Of course, it was the Enlightenment that opposed and, we thought, largely ended torture in the Occident after Christianity had continued it from the ancient world almost to our own time.

    Outside the West, as so many have noted these recent years in discussing church and state in Islam and the absence of liberal religion in Islam, just as the Reformation did not happen the Enlightenment did not happen.

    Torture is everywhere.

    And just as all Enlightenment values are constantly under assault within the West, and perhaps especially those that are most directly related to politics, so is the rejection of torture.

    A principal assailant of Enlightenment values in the West is now and has always been traditional, illiberal religion.

    Lately we have seen that the rejection of torture is not an exception to this point.

    Reply
  4. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    By the way, I could not agree more with Michael Westmoreland-White in laying part of the blame for popular support for torture on the wave of pro-torture Hollywood propaganda we have seen since 9/11.

    But I could not agree less with his claim, “At this point, the American churches are no more Christian than were the German churches during WWII.”

    Both the American and the German churches are and were, going by the history, just as Christian as could be.

    Reply

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