Perhaps you have seen the SAY NO TO TORTURE banners hanging on the walls of faith communities throughout the city. The banner project, sponsored by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (www.nrcat.org), is actively seeking to build a national faith-based coalition to end this deeply immoral practice.
As I said in this column a couple weeks ago, torture is at the center of the narrative of Christian faith. After all, Jesus was himself apprehended as a criminal of the state, brutalized and eventually tortured into a hideous death. Multitudes of early followers of Jesus met the same gruesome fate. What's at stake for the Church is nothing less than the core tenet of its faith: the insistence that Jesus was resurrected from death into life. In other words, Christians interpret the world, the political world from the perspective of God raising Jesus from a tortured death. What this means specifically is that God has judged the agency of imperial torture and opposes it with enough force to annul its power through the gift of new, resurrected life. God, the Creator and Source of life itself, will enter into history on the side of the tortured ones. Resurrection is the power of insurrection against those who torture.
In the Christian narrative, the tomb in which the dead Jesus was laid was sealed with a Roman emblem announcing to the world that all inside belonged to the Roman Empire. The resurrection was God's political act within history announcing God's victory over empire, and over the fear that empire creates through torture and injustice. The resurrection of Jesus was God's insurrectionary permission to the followers of Jesus to oppose, as God opposes, the arrogance of empire. Concretely, what this means is that if our nation continues its policies of aggressive war mongering, coupled with the use of torture as a means of disciplining the social body, then God, the source of life itself, will enter into conflict against our nation.
When a nation so debases itself as to become an enemy of life, that nation will stagger through the sorrows of losing its moral compass, of losing its intellectual and creative capacity, and of losing its ability to generate hope that overcomes adversity. The nation will itself die in a frenzy of violence and intensified madness. When life is not honored, death reigns.
Christian faith, rooted in the resurrection of Jesus, warns us to repent of such folly. Repentance is not merely an inner spiritual attitude, but also an outward political act. When our nation promotes terror, that itself is a sign that Death has replaced Life as our moral governor. Christians should be able to discern this sign and, with courage and hope, offer an insurrectionary alternative that leads to life. To do less is to betray the power of God, and continue the crucifixion of Christ within history.