New Quaker Notebook

American, ashamed. Today I am just overcome with a heaviness of heart. Not at having to pay $2.32 a gallon for unleaded plus at the gas station, nor at the expected rise of coffee prices, but at the most recent revelations about the widespread abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan.

I think it isn't the news that our soldiers in charge over there are a sadistic, brutal, perverted lot, but instead that the officials and officers in charge are, if not outright liars, men and women completely without honor. If we didn't have the Freedom of Information Act, it's unlikely that we would know these things—certainly the Bush administration hasn't been forthcoming about this. Thanks in large part to the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, we are able to see that abuse of the innocent people tossed into prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan is frighteningly pervasive. Innocent children were held in Abu Ghraib, at least one adolescent girl was sexually abused there, the holding of "ghost detainees" was pretty much routine, and the torture and killing of prisoners in both Afghanistan and Iraq are connected to top-down approved interrogation techniques. Medical personnel also used carefully crafted language in their reports so as to misrepresent the causes of prisoner deaths.[1]

Among other unsettling things, our current president authorized the CIA to transfer prisoners to other foreign countries for interrogation there: this includes countries where beatings and torture are commonly part of the interrogation process. According to former intelligence officials, a hundred or so of these transfers (aka "renditions") have taken place since 9/11.[2] And under other circumstances perhaps we could laugh at the recent admission by a former US Marine that the news about Saddam Hussein's capture was pure hokum, that "a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam's capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well."[3] But right now it isn't at all funny.

How can we, as Americans, not be totally ashamed of this? My point here is not to appeal to a sense of patriotism, or to an upstanding national character, but rather to suggest that we must stop making a disconnect between us and our federal government. Other nations do this ("Oh, we love Americans, but hate their government!") and I suppose we tend to express this, too, especially after an administration comes into office on the basis of a vote by a mere 26% of the population. Without this disconnect, without this separation between us and them—perhaps the psychological burden is otherwise too much for us to carry around. But my point is this. Because we function as a democracy, we ourselves have to take responsibility for putting into office the people who shame our country. If nothing else, we each ought to be attentive to the behavior of our elected officials; we ought especially to be diligent about holding them accountable for their actions, for the upright things they fail to do, and for their sincerity as our representatives. In other words, if we expect this American democracy to survive the Bushevik administration, we have to behave like good citizens of a democracy, especially if ours is going to be touted again and again as the template. If not, it will go the way of other great empires that crumbled from within. I think we now call that implosion.

1. BBC News, March 11, 2005. See also New York Times, March 12, 2005; this article is archived at Truthout.org. The news report includes some ugly details about how Army personnel beat prisoners to death. In one horrible case, an Army interrogator killed a man after beating him so brutally over a five-day period that "even if he had survived, both legs would have had to be amputated."
2. New York Times, March 11, 2005; this article is archived at Truthout.org.
3. UPI, 13WHAM-TV Rochester, March 10, 2005; this news story is archived at Common Dreams News Center. I had blogged a similar report about this back on December 23, 2003.

Utilitarian Christians. Whenever morality is viewed in terms of ends, instead of what God requires, humanism will always come out the winner in the heap of competing theories. In the news today is a report that in Kansas alone there are "thousands of Christians congregating at First Family and other churches throughout Kansas who are flexing their political muscle by pushing a conservative Christian political agenda that is rapidly gaining momentum." Says First Family senior Pastor Jerry Johnston, "'There is an evangelical resurgence in this country and what is happening here in Kansas is symbolic of much of the nation.'"[1] Johnston may or may not be speaking for all American Christians, but Kansas certainly appears to be mobilizing for a major push in the direction of a specific political agenda:

"A key concern for the Christian groups is next month's vote on a constitutional amendment that would not only ban same-sex marriages—already prohibited by Kansas law—but also prohibit any relationship other than a married man and woman from receiving benefits associated with marriage, such as shared health insurance.... Conservatives are also making inroads on abortion issues. State Attorney General Phill Kline, a Republican, has demanded the private medical records of dozens of Kansas women who have had late-term abortions, which are restricted but legal.... Kansas conservatives are also busy lobbying for changes in science instruction about evolution, which Christian groups say runs counter to Biblical teachings about the origin of life.... And there are efforts in one of the state's highest-achieving school districts to ban books from the high school reading curriculum because of value concerns.... The moves are the first of many to restore morality to Kansas and the nation, church leaders say."

"'You're going to see more and more of this,' said Johnston, who is preparing for an April 3 rally in the Kansas City area expected to draw 10,000 people. 'The church is alive and well. It has woken up, and it has become politically savvy.'"[2]

Alas! This "woken up" church is only a giant slumbering with open-eye gag glasses over tightly-shut eyelids. This church sleeps on as its leadership drags it into corporate-sponsored war, racial hatred, deeper suffering among the disadvantaged throughout the world, a hideously polluted environment, and toward a US administration that can't speak the truth without first spinning it around a few times. With a kind of ventriloquism, our Lord Jesus is made to speak not words of compassion and charity, but reactionary words—political words with a fascist accent. As this "woken up" church reposes peacefully on a bed of comfort and abundance, its persecuted brothers and sisters must instead carry Christ's burden for the world. American Christians, now so intent on preserving a genteel culture, prefer to fritter resources on a very narrow band of issues in order to "restore morality" to the nation, while at the same time ignoring the homeless, the poor, the hungry—in a country that spends more per capita on its pets than in aid to the underprivileged people of the world.[3]

Perhaps it's true that atheism is on the decline around the world, but its rival is not Christianity but rather a growing spiritual paganism.[4]. When the many religions all speak for the truth and each ends up contradicting the other, we tend to give over to human reason the task of sorting out what, really, we ought to do. Not for nothing did Paul Kurtz say that "from the idea of the fatherhood of God any number of contradictory moral commandments have been drawn." Thus, he says:

"Theists have been both for and against slavery, war, capital punishment, women's rights, monogamy, celibacy, birth control, and abortion. Christians and Jews, Muslims and Hindus, Protestants and Catholics have often slaughtered each other with impunity. Thus religious piety is no guarantee of moral virtue; on the contrary, religion is profoundly unreliable as a foundation for ethics."

"I maintain that we do not need a theological justification for moral virtues; our moral impulses are rooted in both human nature (we are potential moral beings and need to develop these capacities) and human civilization. Moreover, the awareness of genuine ethical principles has developed only over a long period of history. Naturalistic ethics thus does not have a supernatural source but relates ethical choices ultimately to human interests, wants, needs, and values. We judge those choices in part on utilitarian grounds, by their consequences for human happiness and social justice."[5]

When Christians fail to behave consistently as Christ behaved, when our prophetic voices no longer carry Christ's words, when we appear to the world as mere products of an earthly soil—when this happens, human reason will always talk over us. And there is no god in blah, blah, blah.

1. Reuters, March 6, 2005.
2. "Kansas Christians Mobilizing on Moral Issues," Reuters, March 6, 2005.
3. Northeastern University economist M. Shahid Alam has a poignant essay on "Global Disparities: Of People and Pets" at Dissident Voice, March 5, 2005. By his estimate, the US pet economy ($360.1 billion in 2003) is larger than most of the poor economies of the world.
4. UPI, Washington Times, March 4, 2005.
5. "Symposium on Humanist Manifesto II," in Humanist Magazine, September-October, 1998. Article is archived at findarticles.com.