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Religious life and political life have this in common: the chief enemy of both is despair. Poison to church and state alike, despair comes as the conviction that while something ought to be done and probably can be done in the face of some evil, we have neither the strength nor the will to do it. We're overcome, paralyzed.
Much of the work of Christ in the world consists of disavowing that conviction. "Take up your bed and walk." To bear Christian witness, in the most effectual sense and certainly in the best political sense, means demonstrating that a witness is not the same thing as a bystander.
But where to begin? For we are always needing to begin. How about with torture. It has taken place, it continues to take place, both in detention centers run under the auspices of the United States and in other countries to which suspected terrorists are routinely outsourced for interrogation. That the passage of the McCain bill last December will change any of this seems highly unlikely.
For why should this law exercise any greater restraint on current administration policy than the United States' adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 or, for that matter, than the 1978 law that forbids domestic wiretapping without a warrant? Why should McCain's law compel compliance and not the others? The very fact that the McCain ban would be deemed necessary calls into question that it will ever be deemed binding.
In fact, the little-publicized "signing statement" that accompanied President Bush's approval of the McCain bill declares, "The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a matter consistent with the constitutional authority of the President … as Commander-in-Chief." In other words, the president reserves the right to place himself above the law in the interests of "national security."
As David Golove, a New York University law professor, put it, "The signing statement is saying, 'I will comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture… . I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me.'"
For a Christian, of course, the crux of the matter is to be found not in the nuances of the legal language but in what John the Baptist called "the fruits of repentance." No such fruit is in evidence here, nor was it in evidence as the administration fought tooth and nail to prevent McCain's bill from ever reaching the president's desk.
If Christians cannot find common ground on the issue of torture, then perhaps we deserve to despair. Torture is an insult to the image of God, a violation of the Golden Rule, and certainly a scandal to those of us who "glory in the cross" and the victory it represents over cruelty and the prerogatives of worldly power. Our task in regard to torture, then, is to keep ourselves and our fellow citizens awake to something that many of us would just as soon ignore, rationalize, or dismiss as a dead issue.
One graphic way of doing so might be to sew black cloth hoods, modeled on those featured so prominently in the photos that came out of Abu Ghraib, and to display those hoods along with tags that say "Stop Torture" in public places. The project would be simple—indeed simple enough to risk gimmickry—but it has a number of virtues.
First, it employs a traditional activity of the church, the sewing circle, and makes it militant. It takes "the stone that the builders rejected," or at least denigrated, as belonging to A) the past, B) women, and C) the elderly and turns that rock into "the chief cornerstone" of a small resistance movement. It is an attempt to approximate Gandhi's spinning wheel.
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