Mainline Protestants: America's Moral Conscience

Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center released a survey on the views of religious Americans regarding torture.  They survey found that white evangelical Protestants were the most supportive of torture--only 16% of evangelicals reject the use of torture.  A whopping 62% of white evangelical Protestants think that torture is justified in most or many circumstances.  Since the findings became public, numerous columnists, pundits, and bloggers have opined on why evangelicals support torture.

The unaddressed question is, however, why white mainline Protestants--those belonging to the historic "brand name" churches--do not support torture.  Indeed, approximately twice as many mainline Protestants (31%) believe that torture is never justified and an additional 22% think it is almost always wrong.  Their attitude toward torture is nearly opposite of evangelical Protestant opinion.  More than half of mainline Protestants reject the use of torture against other human beings as justifiable means to political ends.  They are the religious community most strongly opposed to torture.

Despite the fact that evangelicals garner most media attention, they do not represent the entire Protestant community.  Depending upon what survey one believes, mainline Protestant churches--even after many years of numerical decline, internal struggles, and bad press--still comprise somewhere between 15-20% of the American population.  The Pew survey on torture makes it startlingly clear why mainline Protestantism remains an important constituency in American political life: Mainline Protestants are the nation's moral conscience.

And it isn't just torture.  In recent years, mainline Protestants were also the religious group that most strongly opposed the Iraq War, rejected waterboarding, and expressed worry about the admixture of religion and politics at the nation's military academies.  In every survey, mainline Protestants see torture, violence, and military intervention as the strategies of last resort in national politics.

What makes mainline Protestant reject violence?  Critics argue that mainline Protestants are wimps, theologically soft, and adhere to an "unmanly" and "feminized" version of Christianity (if you don't know, this is an unoriginal critique--it goes back to the nineteenth century) with no stomach for hard decisions.  Real Christians, they will insist, are tough and know when to wield the sword in defense of faith and democracy.

But mainline Protestant apprehension regarding torture is more than taste or a matter of character.  No, the divide between evangelical Protestants and mainline Protestants regarding violence is a sharp difference in theology that continues to shape the two communities.

The most significant Christian theological question is:  What does the death of Jesus on the cross mean?  In the last century, evangelicals and mainliners have answered this question in surprisingly different ways. 

Evangelicals believe that Jesus' death on the cross--with all its brutality--saves them.  Put bluntly, an act of political torture resulted in their "personal salvation" and entry into heaven. Jesus' death "substitutes" for the death of Christian believers and, in that his suffering, the rest of humanity is granted a reprieve for their sins. In a very real sense, God allowed the Romans to kill Jesus in order that God might accomplish a holy end.  Hence, they don't see torture as fundamentally bad.  Indeed, some evangelical theologians argue that torture is redemptive--that one person may die for the sake of the whole community.

Mainline Protestants generally reject this conception of Jesus' death.  Instead, they argue that Jesus was a victim of political violence that revealed the essential ruthlessness of sin.  And, in that demonstration, he also demonstrated that to "lay down one's life for one's friends," instead of revenge, was the way to redeem the world.  Mainline theologians switched the focus away from the violence-as-salvation toward self-sacrificial love as the route to human wholeness.   They do not believe that Jesus' suffering was good.  They believe that it was a demonstration of the evil of a human political system that placed Caesar before God.  Torture, as Jesus himself suffered, has no redemptive qualities.  Salvation occurs as one loves one's neighbor as one's self. 

We don't typically think of theology as having immediate social consequences.  But, in the case of torture, the difference between evangelicals and mainliners should underscore that the fact that theology is important.  The ways in which different religious communities interpret the meaning of scripture has profound political implications.  This isn't an obscure argument between rival religious groups--it is a meaningful difference in a fundamental way of understanding the nature of suffering, sin, and human nature based on sacred texts.

Although some people think that mainline religion is irrelevant and deserves to go the way of the dodo, I don't.  Their churches may be small, their congregations aging, and their worship, well, can be dull.  But they are also right.  What would we do without them?  Somebody's got to protect America's moral conscience by respecting the dignity of every human being.  And, while there may be some individual exceptions to the rule, from the results of the Pew survey, it doesn't look like we can depend on white evangelical Protestants to do so.