Torture During Warfare Is Evil – Mark Rich

Do we really have to say this? Torture during warfare is evil, and as such it is against the will of God.[1]

Yes, we do have to say it. The pagan culture we live in has forgotten this, and we believers have a lot of saying to do in order that the truth may somehow be heard. (The Greek word for truth, alētheia, means literally ‘unforgetting.’)

But we Christians should also do some remembering of our own. Jesus gives us specific instructions concerning torture, before heading off to his own torture and death.

1)      We are not to fear.

2)      We are not to defend ourselves. (Even theologians such as Augustine and Luther knew this. They sought to find and explicate the exceptions to this rule, but now those exceptions have become the rule, and this rule itself is almost unknown among lay Christians.)

3)      Instead of defending ourselves, we are to tell the truth about what God is doing in Christ.

4)      Christ is going to nullify the powers of this world that demand torture and killing. For us, his followers, that nullification has already happened. Our rule of life is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Or to put it differently, “abstain from EVERY FORM of evil… hold fast to what is good.” Or to put it differently again, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” These rules give us our way of living in the midst of evil. Christ will handle the powers directly.

We have also lately learned something essential about the real function of torture in warfare. It does not procure information; it produces lies. It does this not as an unfortunate byproduct of poorly-conducted interrogation. The lying is inherent to the practice.

The lies from this latest episode of the CIA’s adventures in evil include: 1) the lies the torture subjects told in order to give their torturers the story that the latter were obviously looking for; 2) the lies the torturers told about how much torture they were carrying out; 3) the lies the torturers told about how effective were their techniques.

So it becomes clear that the real political, social, and cultural function of this form of torture is the production of lies. This was done in furtherance of a larger lie, which was that the unnecessary war was in fact necessary.

The US government and the ruling elites have gotten themselves so deeply involved in the politics and economics of the Middle East that their own involvement has become invisible to themselves. They cannot ever think clearly and calmly about that region by now; they cannot separate cause and effect, their own actions and reactions from those of others. They take it as a matter of the purest and clearest faith that they are the honest, good-hearted patrons of the whole region, that what happens there is of the most vital interest to the United States. And so self-deluded, they are repeatedly taken by surprise by events in the region.

The CIA’s torture program thus served the larger cultural and political function of hiding, of rendering opaque, the deep complicity and foolishness of the American perpetual war footing throughout the region. Torturing people from that region tells us that they are the evildoers, they are the plotters, they are the unrighteous – and more importantly, that we are not all those things.

We Christians must learn to have different eyes from those of the US corporate media and elites. The gospel narratives of Jesus’ arrest, humiliation, phony trial, and crucifixion are told to us first so that we can see the evildoing of the elites when they cannot see it themselves, and second because we have been called out of this evil so that we can become part of God’s empire of faith, hope, and love.

“…as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see– we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

The wicked one has no power against such strategies. And we can openly adopt such strategies knowing that we are no longer in the kingdom of lies, but of the One who is truth.

Mark Rich is a sometime contributor to ecclesio.com and a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

[1] For this article I’m leaving aside the matter of torture as an instrument of mass social control in order to create a subject population – see here. I’m also leaving aside the matter of the similar use of the death penalty – see here.