The religious roots of torture

William Schweiker has an article in Sightings (here) which, after expressing some bemusement that we should be debating torture in the twenty-first century, points to the religious roots of torture(see Martin Marty’s earlier article here).

Less often observed is that the practice of waterboarding has roots in the Spanish Inquisition and parallels the persecution of Anabaptists during the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic Counter Reformation. Why did practices similar to waterboarding develop as a way to torture heretics—whether the heretics were Anabaptists or, in the Inquisition, Protestants of any stripe as well as Jews and witches and others?

Schweiker sees the use of water for torture by Christian persecutors as a kind of anti-baptism:

Torture has many forms, but torture by water as it arose in the Roman Catholic and Protestant reformations seemingly drew some of its power and inspiration from theological convictions about repentance and salvation. It was, we must now surely say, a horrific inversion of the best spirit of Christian faith and symbolism.

Christianity uses powerful symbols, its discourse addresses the great issues of life and death, morality and sin, and it also proclaims the possibility of transformatory redemption – that all things may be made new.

And beyond the symbols and discourse there is religious practice – the translation of such ideas into the reality of the way we treat one another. It is in this practice that we are judged. The question of torture should never be one of utility but one of fundamental respect for the human body: shaped by God, given for holy purposes.

And if the leaders of our religions can agree on nothing else, can they not agree that torture is reprehensible? And then that religious practice should always and actively set its face against torture – in symbol, in discourse, and in political influence?

There is no

                             there is no
symmetry in cloud, treason
lies in Heraklitus’ stream,
needles are lost in a forest,
words hobbled lame

                            can these words live?
spewed as unmetered seconds,
as gamblers’ coin, not seeds
but stones kicked onto gravel.

                           Once they spoke

of their own volition conjured
jinni castles feasts juggled
puns joked with children till
like gods they fell tangled
in nets of their own cunning
crushed thin as ice in the crude
jaws of calculated time.

                             I write my story
on water, stutter in smoke,
break it between leaves, lose
nouns and tempo, yet would still
rhyme it in hope, in love.

                            Speak to me!
can these words live?

Don't take holiday snaps

The geographer Ghazi Falah was caught between Israel and the Arab world, John Gravios writes in the American Chronicle of Higher Education.

Falah, with dual Israeli and Canadian citizenship, was held by the Shin Bet allegedly for spying until released after 23 days following a campaign by fellow geographers and other academics.

He felt he was being questioned more about his academic career - and that it was held as an accusation against him - than about any putative spying.

Most of all, the article concludes, Mr. Falah is haunted by the sense that his imprisonment was meant to send a message.

"I feel it was like a punishment," he says, meant to scare him and other Palestinian scholars into self-censorship.

And that's the way of police states, the purpose of interrogation and torture: not solely the punishment of the individual but the breaking of civil society and the crushing of any independence of thought and autonomy of action.  If the Palestinians are to be cowed then any who attain prominence of any sort - within or outside the Palestinian territories - become legitimate targets. 

And across the world the police seem to go to the same school.  Keep interrogation and torture hidden and secret so that no-one can see what is happening, but make sure it's an open secret so that it can terrify the rest of the society.  There is nothing so powerfully destructive as a dirty secret that everyone knows.

In the end the use of force is unsustainable - but in the mean time too many are broken and suffer from it.

Violence in decline

A fascinating talk by Steven Pinker at The Edge on the long-term decline in violence - video and article.

He addresses some of the reasons why violence has declined, and the equally puzzling question of why, given this fact, it doesn't feel like it.

Where do terrorists come from?

There is an interesting article at The American called What Makes a Terrorist ,by Alan Krueger.

First- not poverty or lack of education, though these have been fastened on as explanations.

On the contrary, higher education is correlated with greater support for terrorism in research in certain Islamic countries.  The indications are that actual terrorists are likely to be less poor and more educated than the average in their countries of origin.

Krueger is an economist and sees things in terms of supply and demand, including terrorism.  As people choose to be suicide bombers for a a range of reasons, he says, reducing the supply is difficult.  More sensible is to reduce demand by the dual programme of aggressively reducing the capacity (technical, financial) of terror groups to act while, simultaneously, enabling political engagement and non-violent protest.

Thus the absence of civil rights and sufficient GDP may be expressed in a greater number of potential and actual terrorists.  These were people taking reasoned decisions to try to impose an extreme solution on a political problem by the use of violence.

Thus (in my opinion) terrorists and terrorist groups should be treated as rational, as open to reason and engagement.  The necessary 'war' on terror should be targetted as precisely as possible (I accept Krueger's suggested targets). 

And it should be accompanied by, and perhaps be secondary to, political programmes which enable populations to have the capacity of political engagement, to be able to make a difference.

Countries which use harsh repressive measures and torture will breed violence much of which will rebound against them.  (It has to be acknowledged that many such countries do not engender international terrorism and that a strong universalist ideological programme may also be a necessary condition for the supply side of terrorism.)  But at the very least this provides a strong self-interest argument (where moral arguments seem insufficient) for western countries to stop supporting repressive regimes.

Raven

The Anglican Covenant - a view from NZ

Bishop Brian Carrell of Nelson, New Zealand, has posted a talk giving a considered overview of history and prospects for the dissolution of the Anglican Communion. (Here.)

I share his list of centrifugal factors with which the Anglican Communion must cope, though these pull in different directions.

For example, the need to address diversity in a post-modern world suggest the possibility of a range of differing answers - a loosening of the bonds of Anglicanism without finally untying them. Conversely the resurgence of conservative Christianity across all parts of the Church which tends to look toward answers in the narrowing the bonds of unity and greater degrees of centralisation and control. I share his statements that the authority and understanding of the Bible is a core issue, whilst sexuality has been the occasion (rather than the cause) our our present disputes; and also that the centre of gravity in Anglicanism has moved from London and Washington to Africa which would require an organizational response whatever the occasion of our differences.

But his discussion of the Anglican Instruments of Unity is a little sparse. To quote Michael Nazir-Ali as asserting that "Lambeth has a moral authority which is different to legal authority but not less; it’s the authority of the common mind of Christ manifested in his Church." does not make it so. Previous Lambeth Conferences have explicitly eschewed such a level of authority and it's hard to see what this statement means in constitutional terms. If Provinces are autonomous (i.e. self-governing) then they are not subordinate to the Lambeth Conference however carefully they may listen to its pronouncements.

Michael Nazir-Ali's statement also equates the mind of the church with the resolutions of its bishops. But perhaps the ACC (with its formal constitution and lay participation), has a better claim to express the mind of the church. Whoever has the better claim, however, the idea of 'the mind of the church' entails a deliberate choice not to hear minority voices from any quarter, and to not take seriously the evident diversity of the church. Why should disputes have only one outcome?

Bishop Carrell rightly points to the antecedents of the Primates' assumption of greater power. However he misses the Primates' decision that we already have a fifth Instrument of Unity - Canon Law, as agreed in Canterbury, 2002. But - although a network of legal advisers was agreed - this has largely sunk without trace as an element of restructuring the Communion, overtaken by subsequent events. It would be no more than a footnote in any talk on this issue except for one thing: the fact that the proposal could rise and fall so quickly shows the flexibility inherent in decision making: just because a meeting comes to a decision it doesn't make it so. There also has to be a process of reception.

Lambeth 1998 certainly expressed its mind in Resolution I:10 on human sexuality. The Bishop doesn't explain that this involved the rejection of the results of the international study group which had been preparing a paper for the conference - and this may very largely explain the surprise (in NZ as elsewhere) at the eventual outcome.

Bishop Gene Robinson's election and consecration as Bishop of New Hampshire certainly brought the pot to the boil. However, first, enough people were looking for a fight - if Gene Robinson hadn't been the cause célèbre someone else would have been. Second, to say

Gene Robinson had been a married man, but before his election had parted from his wife to form a public partnership with another man in a same-sex union.

is to telescope events of his personal history in a way which at best is seriously misleading.

The Windsor Report was clearly a significant pivot in the progress of the dispute (and I note the Bishop does not also cite the Windsor Report's opposition to the intrusion of one bishop into the jurisdiction of another) but it was not a statement of the mind of the church. Again, its recommendations did not make it so - notwithstanding the semi-juridical and now ecclesiological weight the Report has subsequently been accorded.

And so to the Covenant. (This talk was evidently given before the Episcopal Church made their response public - my summary.) The Covenant was part of the Windsor Report. But the suggested draft with the Report, once again, has sunk without trace. Again, in a talk, this would be no more than a footnote. Except that what it shows is that the issue is not 'Covenant or no Communion' but: 'what are the terms of our association with one another which are to be expressed in this document?' Writing a Covenant will not create harmony - and the Covenant as drafted was evidently designed to give power to the Primates to exclude The Episcopal Church - but if there is sufficient agreement between the parties of a voluntary communion then these can be written down for all to follow.

The response of TEC's House of Bishops to the Primates' Communiqué from Tanzania, and its broad welcome by the Joint Standing Committee of the Primates' meeting, provoked considerable disappointment from more conservative bishops. But they don't constitute "the rest of the Communion", they are pursuing their partisan commitment like the rest of us. (And the Global South isn't a monochrome entity with a single voice - there are as many differences in Africa and Asia as anywhere else on the globe.)

And, after all this, my major criticism of Bishop Carrell's account is its one sidedness. He hears the voice of the conservatives much louder than he hears the voice of others. But their answers are not the only ones, nor do they have a monopoly on faith or wisdom.

The causes of disintegration are also the sources of reconstruction, and multiple answers are possible. My sympathies are unashamedly with TEC - but I don't suppose that whatever happens will simply echo what I (or any other individual) would ideally like to see. The church is formed by the actions and decisions of all its members.

The mind of the church can only be determined by historians, if there could ever be such a thing in the singular. In the meantime all is politics: while we continue to struggle together we stay together - it is when we walk away and stop talking that division ensues (and, as Bishop Carrell notes, in the US at least the only thing holding the dissentients together is their dislike of the Episcopal Church - they walk away in different directions).

And of course the next Lambeth Conference will go ahead. Who would want to miss the opportunity of a truly global shebang in the midst of such uncertainty? To miss this party is to have no say in the shape of the church to come.

Pheonix church

Grandmère Mimi said,

But the church, as we know it, is moribund. A new thing will arise from the ashes of the old, but it will not look much like what we have now.

Perhaps it's moribund. Though it's not dead yet. In fact it seems to have enough energy to squabble and fight in a very lively way.

And the church 'as we know it' has surely always been passing away, it's just that each successive generation knew it as something slightly different and laments the loss of what was good and forgets the bad - a kind of rolling golden age.

But I'm not accusing Grandmère Mimi of nostalgia. I think she means something much bigger - that whatever happens at Lambeth or with covenants or by any official attempts to decide anything, TEC has been torn up and scattered to the winds. The legacy of anger, bitterness, sorrow will poison its soil for a generation. TEC's hurt will wound other parts of Anglicanism, leaving scarring, and possibly a broken body. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I recognise the hurt in Linda McMillan's comment and the expectation on her blog of something new (and not just great looking tomatoes).

I guess that only when historians have had the time and distance to turn around and make measured assessments of this period (and their problem will be the excessive number of words poured into the conflicts) will there be a way to assess what has died and what still lives.

So what is important, I think, is to do what we can for the present, not for tomorrow. I add my little voice to the chorus of those who want no greater concentration of power with the Primates (or bishops, for that matter), no top-down power to determine narrow bounds of acceptable doctrine, no command morality. I do this for now, not for the future church.

But I think we do need rules. (I'm thinking I'll post something about why I think rules are important, and the necessity and difficulties of having them in a church, but it may not be straight away.) The rules I want to see would place the people who sit in the pews and chairs on a Sunday, who pray together in small groups, who follow the call of God whever the dance leads them, right as the centre of the church. Rules which require all the paid people, especially the clergy, bishops, bureaucrats, globe-trotting Primates, to be accountable to their congregations. Let there be a hierarchy, by all means, so long as it's upside down.

It seems to me, looking from a distance, that TEC is much further along this line than the CofE is (and possibly will ever be). It clearly isn't a recipe for happiness. And, in a voluntary body which should inherently reject policing and enforcement, rules will only work with those willing to making them work.

This is the life I want to work for, not out of the ashes but mired in the mud.