No, it's not a right-wing religious justification for torture. Quite the opposite. In the March/April issue of
Books & Culture: A Christian Review (unfortunately, the entire issue is not available online), Vermont Episcopal priest and writer Garret Keizer proposes a "modest project for the resistant church" as an antidote to evil:
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 a conviction that while something ought to be done and probably can be done in the face of evil, we have neither the strength nor the will to do it. We're overcome, paralyzed.
More after the flip.
Keizer says "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 how to begin?" He then says torture is a good place to begin, especially in light of Bush's addition of his now-infamous signing statement to the McCain bill against the use of torture after his administration "fought tooth and nail" to prevent the bill from reaching his desk in the first place.
Calling torture, among other things, "an insult to the image of God," and "a violation of the Golden Rule," Keizer suggests our duty is to keep our fellow citizens "awake to something that many of us would just as soon ignore, rationalize, or dismiss as a dead issue" through graphic visual means. He suggests the placing of black cloth hoods, like the one depicted in the infamous Abu Ghraib photo, with tags attached that say "Stop Torture," in public places, an action that he says has a number of virtues:
First, it employs a traditional activity of the church, the sewing circle, and makes it militant.... It approximates Gandhi's spinning wheel.
Second, for all its simplicity, it makes a complex statement... Mounted in the aftermath of the McCain bill's passage, a protest of this kind says, in effect, "We don't believe you."
Third, the project allows for some exercise of the imagination, not to mention some daring, in the matter of placement. Possible locations include mailboxes, flagpoles, cemetery obelisks, parking meters, lawn statuary, fire hydrants, car antennae, weather vanes, goalposts, street lamps, library busts, microphones, surveillance cameras, suggestion boxes, napkin dispensers, dormant birdhouses, coffee urns, bar taps and gumball machines. Not to forget crucifixes and crosses.
Fourth, it combines the talents of the more and less agile, the young and the old. One sows and another reaps; one sews and another leaps the wall and hoods the bronze general on his horse. THe eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you." The hood-sewer cannot say to the hood-runner, "You are irrelevant."
Fifth, the project is both provocative and authentically nonviolent in that no piece of public or private property is permanently defaced by the hood. To the wisdom of the serpent we add the harmlessness of the dove.
Sixth -- and nevertheless -- it does carry the potential for arrest, at the least for littering or disturbing the peace.
Therefore, and seventh, it prompts the resistant church to engage in discernment. For example, when do we invite confrontation and when do we avoid it.... how do we explain our actions to the youngest members of the congregation without acquainting them too prematurely with the the horrors of this world?... a question faced every Good Friday by any Sunday school teacher who teaches little kids.
Follow-through, Keizer says, is equally important. We need to know how to respond to the inevitable hypothetical question of what choice we make if torture could extract information about an imminent terrorist attack. We need to be able to explain our actions to skeptics and doubters, to those who say that the ends justifies the means. "We will need to know that it is not and never can be an easy one," he says.
He also asks if those who take up this idea will be willing to see it shared, modified and co-opted -- a question that those of us who promote "freeway blogging" have no problem with, I'm sure.
Keizer finishes with a meditation on follow-through. We need to connect with organizations like Amnesty International if this becomes more than an exercise "for the head and heart" as well as the hands, he says. And always, he says, we will need to pray.
But eventually we will need to look ahead to engaging the related issues of militarism, global influence, and our consumption of oil. C.S. Lewis said that a good egg... must either hatch or go rotten. The same can be said of any good idea. How do we hatch this egg and and what can we expect of our hatching?
At any rate, Keizer concludes, it's an action thrown in the face of despair, and may lead to greater actions, including those, he implies, against religionists who collude with evil:
Faithful Christians and faithful Christian communities have brought down empires, brought down institutions of oppression, and when those institutions included the institutional church, they have brought down that as well.
I feel like doing a little sewing this weekend. Given that it's Lent, distributing and displaying the black hood, which echoes the black-draped cross currently displayed in the sanctuary of my home church these forty days, will be an act of meditation for me. And its two-word invocation, "Stop Torture," will be a challenge to those who see or even try to remove it from public view, the way that the Bush regime has tried to crawl under the rock of covert action and bureaucracy to hide his administration's evil from the clear, accusing light of public accountability -- and from the God he claims to revere.
(crossposted at Street Prophets)