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President Bush faces a defining question of morality on which he has yet to receive any discernible guidance from the faith-based coalition that helped put him in office. The question: whether it is ever right for Americans to inflict cruel and degrading treatment on suspected terrorist detainees.

We read credible reports—some from FBI agents—that prisoners have been stripped naked, sexually humiliated, chained to the floor, and left to defecate on themselves. These and other practices like "waterboarding" (in which a detainee is made to feel as if he is being drowned) may or may not meet the technical definition of torture, but no one denies that these practices are cruel, inhuman, and degrading.

Today, the practical application of that question is whether the President should fight the efforts of a group of Republican senators, led by John McCain, who has introduced amendments to a defense bill that would outlaw such abuse. Two weeks ago, the Senate passed the McCain amendment, but whether it is put into place will be determined by the conference committee charged with resolving differences between the Senate and House defense bills.

For the President's base of evangelicals and conservative Catholics, no practical expediency, however compelling, should determine fundamental moral issues of marriage, abortion, or bioethics. Instead, these questions should be resolved with principles of revealed moral absolutes, granted by a righteous and loving Creator.

Indeed, recent survey results from the Pew Research Center indicated that, in rating the importance of Supreme Court issues, the treatment of terrorist detainees is a close second only to abortion on the list of concerns of evangelical and Catholic voters. Where, then, are the robust voices of theological reflection and moral reasoning that we have come to expect in these debates?

I do not know how others would advise the President theologically on these matters, but as a convinced Christian who has tried for 20 years to apply principles of evangelical faith to issues of human rights, here are three principles of a biblical worldview that seem applicable:

• The state has the authority to protect its citizens by detaining criminals and using force to restrain those who seek to destroy innocent life.

• All those whom the state detains retain the image of God and are due a standard of care required by God.

• Because the power of the state over detainees is exercised by fallen human beings, that power must be limited by clear boundaries, and individuals exercising such power must be transparently accountable.

Therefore, even if it is expedient to inflict cruelty and degradation on a prisoner during interrogation (and experts seem very much divided on this question), in my view, the moral teachings of Christ, the Torah and the Prophets do not permit it for those who bear the Imago Dei.

On the face of it, religious leaders from the President's base might demur by saying, first, the President has already said that torture is not an option, and, second, these are all technical questions for lawyers, not ethical questions for theological discourse. To this latter point, indeed, lawyers and judges will need to argue about what standards of treatment are required as a matter of domestic and international law. In the meantime, however, the Commander in Chief must tell those acting under his authority what standards apply as a matter of policy today.

Moreover, it will not do to say that the President's policy on the treatment of detainees already rules out torture because serious ambiguities still remain—ambiguities that carry heavy moral implications and that are intended to preserve options that some would rather not publicly defend.

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October (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49