One of the great surprises of my life is that my country has become a champion of state-sponsored torture. I know my wording makes you grimace. But the USA is a world state, we do commit or allow torture (while denying it), and our top leaders oppose legal restrictions on torture, so what can I say? Our wimpy allies in other Western nations are disturbed and dismayed, failing to see the redeeming qualities of torture, a practice with a long and distinguished history. I’m proud to belong to a country unafraid to buck world opinion and do what it feels is right.

But at the same time, I’m having bouts of guilt, inexplicable difficulty accepting the obvious merits of torturing foreigners. As much as I fight these impulses, desperately trying to follow the moral leadership of Cheney and Rummy, I find myself too often succumbing to feelings which can only be described as those of a bleeding-heart, raghead-loving, weak-kneed, misguided moralist. So many of our great religious figures, like Jerry Falwell and Tom Delay, fully support the application of torture. And where are the Christian voices speaking out against torture? Nada. My misgivings obviously betray a faulty conscience.

I remember a quote from one military officer who said, “After 9/11 we opened the door to a little torture, and a whole lot of torture walked through.”

To defend torture, people always trot out the “burning fuse” argument: if a nuclear bomb will explode in an hour and a guy definitely knows where it’s located, shouldn’t you be able to torture the information out of him? My response: yes. On that I agree with Cheney et al.

But this is an extreme scenario which, as far as I know (and what do I know?), hasn’t occurred. Yet we’ve tortured a lot of people, and create secret prisons in other countries to facilitate it. Are all of these people sheltering atomic bombs? Well, no. We are torturing for lesser reasons, sometimes just going on fishing expeditions to see if the poor bloke does, indeed, know something useful, which the interrogator discovers upon finding the proper mixture of question and electrical stimuli. If we only tortured people when there was an imminent threat, hundreds of shadowy CIA patriots would be out of work. They need to ply their trade, to keep in practice for when a true burning fuse situation arises. And so they round up hapless Iraqis and Talibanis who might know something about somebody who might know something about something else…or might not. How can we know without the use of creative coercion?

Fortunately, our enlightened Administration determined that we’re exempt from the Geneva Conventions in this case. Astute legal rationalizers like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales determined that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters don’t technically qualify as Prisoners of War, so we’ve got our butts covered. When some ignoramus (like me) offers an objection about how the Geneva Conventions forbids the torture of POWs, Cheney or Rumsfield will set them straight about the true legal status of these detainers. “They aren’t technically POWs,” Cheney says. And the proper response is to nod and say, “Oh, okay.”

I, on the other hand, being wimpy and unenlightened, find myself asking, “Therefore…?” Therefore…we can string them up with piano wire and attach electrodes? Apparently so. Therefore…all morality constraints are out the door? Yep. Since they aren’t technically POWs, we are excused from humane treatment. “Get the pincers out! These guys don’t qualify!” If the Geneva Conventions doesn’t apply, torture is obviously justified. Why can’t I get that through my skull?

Then there’s the “rendition” program, where we secretly send victims to Egypt or Syria or Saudi Arabia and let them brutally extract the information we want, thereby keeping our own hands clean. Because of unenlightened world opinion concerning the valuable role of torture, our Administration feels compelled to wrap itself in multiple layers of deniability, but it’s easy to turn up information about the rendition program. The New Yorker, Time, and Newsweek have all carried stories about it. I’ve read lots of documented stories on the internet. Amnesty International can tell many such stories. Cheney and Condi will look you in the face and say, with carefully parsed words, that we don’t do this kind of thing. And how can anyone not believe Condi? I mean, she’s a concert pianist! But the evidence is overwhelming. We just can’t openly fess up as a nation, and I understand that.

The New Yorker (some of the best reporting in any magazine; a publication renowned for its fact-checking department) ran an in-depth story about a year ago which told story after story about rendering Arabs to other countries. American officers (speaking off the record) bragged about the efficiency of the Egyptians. They could give the Egyptians a list of questions in the morning, and by evening they would have written answers. And suddenly, Tom Ridge is raising the color threat level due to “reliable” information. A few people, innocent or not, happened to die while in foreign prisons. I realize that, hey, that’s just the cost of Freedom. But my defective conscience plagues me.

The Clinton administrative started the rendition program. But lacking the moral backbone of the Bush Administration, they used it only with people already under indictment. The Bush Administrative is less inhibited. Just about anyone is fair game. They’ll say, “This fellow isn’t a bad guy, but we think he might know something about a bad guy. So let’s abduct him, spirit him away to Egypt for a few months, and let the Egyptians see what they can find. If it turns out the guy doesn’t know anything after all…well, sorry about that. Water under the bridge?” Again, it’s a matter of fishing expeditions, torturing people to learn stuff that has nothing to do with a burning fuse.

Sometimes it’s not technically “torture,” but just plain cruelty. That’s what we saw at Abu Ghraib. That’s what seems to have happened in the early days of Gitmo. Just plain, unadorned, gratuitous cruelty. That’s what my country does nowadays, and I’m sure it’s somewhat of a “trickle-down” consequence of allowing actual torture. Oh, I’m not so naive as to think it didn’t happen in the pre-9/11 world. But the open defense of torture (while denying that it happens) is a new wrinkle in our national conscience. And shame on me for doubting the wisdom of our leaders, all of whom talk shiningly about their faith in God, and no doubt force themselves to refrain from using the F-word when they pray.

What would Jesus do? That’s always an interesting question. Jesus would probably say, “Sure, douse him in water and hook up the electrodes. But let’s build a secret prison in Thailand and do it there. Don’t want to pollute my Most Favored Nation.” Of course that’s what Jesus would say. When he looks down on a 19-year-old Talibani, laying naked on a stone floor in a dank cell in some east European country, hungry and alone and scared, taken from the cell twice a day for lengthy interrogations with the added bonus of torture and general physical abuse–do you think Jesus is bothered by that? Of course not. Jesus is a patriot. Jesus loves the USA. He would support our president, who talks to Him regularly.

Nevertheless, while my mind understands why torture is necessary and good, I find myself inexplicably embarrassed by my country’s embrace of redemptive torture. The na√Øve wimp inside me argues that, as the only remaining superpower, we had the unprecedented ability to assert moral leadership in the world, but that our embrace of torture has sacrificed that ability in the eyes of the world. I’d like the other nations of the world to know, “Hey, we’re better than this.” But shame on me. I’m just a hopeless idealist, totally removed from the Real World.

I realize that we evangelical Christians are supposed to follow the Republican lead in taking a hard line against terrorism and supporting our Christianese-talking President. That’s why our evangelical leaders remain silent about the use of torture (silent, in fact, about anything the Bush administration does which may seem questionable). Sure, John McCain has spoke out against torture, but he was probably brainwashed during his years in North Vietnam, so you can’t really trust him. All things considered, I should just shut up.

I know that Jesus would support torturing people who might (or might not) know something that could lead to someone else who needs their own dose of pain infliction until they cough up another name just to “Make it stop!” I realize that Jesus would support the secret detention centers, that he would fly the plane to Cairo himself to unload some anonymous dude with a hood over his head. I realize that Jesus doesn’t care how we treat children of God if they have embraced Islam. I realize that Jesus, like George and Rummy and Cheney, believes that these fellows don’t qualify for humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions, and that we can therefore torture them to our heart’s content. I realize that our spiritual leaders agree with Jesus on all of this.

I guess I’m just a carnal, sniveling, unspiritual excuse for a Christian. I need to try harder.

This afternoon I turned to the back page of this week’s Time magazine, to the essay by Andrew Sullivan. He hooked me with his first line: “Are you a Christian who doesn’t feel represented by the religious right?” Yes, I am. Most vociferously, I am.

Sullivan wrote, “The term ‘people of faith’ has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone….So Christ is a conservative Republican?”

Then I loved this line: “‘My Kingdom is not of this world,’ Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?”

Sullivan then suggested that we coin a new word: Christianism. While Christianity is a religious faith, he proposed Christianism as an ideology, echoing the distinction between Muslim and Islamist. “Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force.” He described Christianism as “the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda.”

I like that. So Tom Delay and Jerry Falwell are Christianists. My own Congressman, I believe, is “merely” a Christian, which is good.

Sullivan said, “I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn’t. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no polical party. It’s time the quiet majority of believers took it back.”

The thing is, Christianists aren’t nearly as visible as they were in the 1980s, during the Moral Majority heydey (which also thrust James Dobson and others, quite willingly, into the political limelight). But the Christianists were na√Øve (and therefore perhaps considerably more pure) back then, novices to politics. They merely wished to stem the cultural slide, not turn us into a theocracy (well, not all of them did, anyway). But today, the Christianists are highly experienced, meticulously organized, thoroughly plugged in to the power centers. They know the strings to pull, the buttons to push to get their all-knowing way. They have become fully intertwined in the political power scene. And I’m sure Jesus is just tickled pink about it.

Now here’s the part of Sullivan’s piece I disagreed with. He said that some Christians believe God is unknowable to our limited minds, and that religious faith is often “interwoven with doubt.” He said many Christians believe we can’t know God’s view on such things as Terry Schiavo, contraception, the role of women, or “the love of a gay couple.” These are the words of someone whose religion doesn’t include a whole lot of Bible study, because the Bible does give us considerable direction regarding social issues. Not always, and not always in line with Republican dogma (like, uh, the poor? ever hear of them, noble Republican?), but Christianity for many of us doesn’t require an undue amount of uncertainty.

So I disagreed with Sullivan that we don’t know how God feels about a lot of things. But most everything else settled well with me. It made for good reading.

If a guy in your church regularly drops the F bomb, is he regarded as a spiritual man? Would you put him on the church board? Make him an elder? Give him a Sunday school class to teach? I don’t want to create a spiritual litmus test based on verbal habits. But the Bible does talk about controlling your tongue, and in our society, using the F word is not considered a redeeming social quality, and certainly not descriptive of a man of God.

Matthew 15:18 talks about a man being defiled by what comes out of his mouth, and says that what comes out of the mouth is actually coming from the heart. David connected the two when he told God, “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord.”

In my church, a person who drops F bombs wouldn’t be placed in any position of leadership, and wouldn’t be considered a spiritual example. Likewise with other forms of what would be considered profanity, vulgarity, cussing, or however you want to describe it. I suspect the same is true in your church. Almost seems like a biblical no-brainer, doesn’t it?

So why do we excuse it in our presidents? G. W. controls his tongue in public, but is known to use the F word in staff meetings and smaller circles. The same has been true of every president during my lifetime, except for Jimmy Carter. Everyone since Nixon has known how to wield religious language for public consumption. GW certainly has that down. When he can’t think of anything else to say, he throws out something that will earn points with grassroots religious people. (“Who is your favorite philosopher?” “Jesus.”) We evangelicals talk about him as a man of sincere faith, the same way evangelicals used to talk about Nixon and Reagan and GHWB being such fine, outstanding, committed Christians who hob-nobbed with Billy Graham. And yet, when we read accounts of GW using the F word, we excuse it for some reason just as we excused it with all of his predecessors. Whereas we would never excuse it for a person in our local church.

I don’t doubt that GW, at one point, had a life-changing religious experience. But past spiritual vitality is not proof of present spiritual vitality. Once you learn the Christian lingo, you don’t forget it, especially if you’re a politician. You can grow spiritually cold, but still sling religious terminology around to maintain the illusion of ongoing spirituality. We all know how easy it is to fool people. I’m not saying that’s the case with GW. But the Bible clearly states that what emerges from the mouth is evidence of what is in the heart. Nobody at Anchor who is on top of his game spiritually uses the F word. So I’m not inclined to give GW a pass, even if he is the President. Why should the President be held to a lower standard? Should be just the opposite.

Okay, now I’ve really really offended my evangelical friends.