Some interesting findings from surveys of cross-cultural attitudes to torture cited at Will Grigg’s Pro Libertate blog:
“a country in which a bare majority, according to a recent global survey, opposes state torture.
That survey found that Americans are much likelier to support government-inflicted torture than citizens of Communist China, and marginally more indulgent of the practice than the residents of Muslim Indonesia and Muslim/socialist Egypt. Support for torture is also more widespread among Americans than among Iranians.…..
…A survey taken earlier this year documented that a majority (54 percent) of people who attend church at least once a week support torture.
Perhaps the most arresting discovery was that more than sixty percent of white, evangelical Protestants condone the practice. Torture advocates of this theological persuasion profess a “personal relationship” with Jesus Christ. That relationship must be, at best, a distant and superficial one…”
My Comment
I take Grigg’s point, but I’ve put a question mark next to this post’s heading, not because I find it implausible but because I’m always a bit skeptical of public surveys, especially, cross-cultural ones, unless they’re very extensive and prolonged. And conducted by people who have tremendous international experience. In this case, the survey of the church-goers apparently had its defects:
The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small.
A search of the Laurence Vance archives @ Lew Rockwell will yield a number of articles written about ‘Imperial Christianity’, Torture, Christianity and War, etc….Some very good reading.
Thanks – I’ll check..
definitely, one could make the argument that a punitive gloating over the 144,000 damned for eternity in the lake of fire, helps people stay in the framework of mind that sees torture as a good thing…
I made that point in The Language of Empire – but recently…
for me, the puritan certainty that we know the exact physical locus of evil and can eradicate it seems to have a temperamental affinity with torture advocacy..
With the Catholics and Hindus and Anglicans, I prefer to see evil as an absence of good rather than a positive presence. It’s error, missing the mark, if you will…
A small sample for sure, but it might still be accurate. From, kill everyone video games to zombie death focused movies, our culture is the culture of death. That’s one thing the Pope got right. Everywhere I go, everyone I meet, kill em all and let God sort em out is the mentality I keep seeing. They all love and want the death penalty, support this, taser everyone, current popular “go get ’em” attitude, and can’t see why a person wouldn’t want to be just like them. I obviously am in the wrong places these days.