The Ambiguity of (Religious) Practice, Part 2

Recent I wrote up Part 1 on this topic, introducing a little series on the ways that ambiguities of practice matter for practical theology. With the recent important debate about the USA’s drone warfare in the news, and the accompanying contrasts between public outcry about–and congressional oversight and criticism of–the USA’s detention/torture practices (little oversight, continual criticism), and our drone warfare practices (apparently modest oversight, muted criticism), I remembered an a newspaper editorial I wrote in the days of the revelations about Abu Ghraib. I was trying to connect dots between religion and torture, grounded in specific practices of punishment. Here again we are confronted with the ambiguity of religious practice. Torture is not often thought of as a religious practice, but Abu Ghraib raised the specter. Here is what I wrote as a newspaper editorial around 2006 that was reworked for my 2008 book, Witness to Dispossession:
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In 2004-2005, the world learned that under U.S. Army Specialist Charles Graner, detainees were subject to a regimen of physical and psychological abuse and torture, including forced masturbation, being made to lie naked in a pile with other prisoners while their captors jumped on and beat them, suffering strikes from a metal baton to a detainee’s wounded leg, being handcuffed to a door for eight hours, sleeping naked in cold and wet cells, being urinated on by soldiers, having to eat from a toilet, enduring threats of sexual violence against them and their wives, and being forced to eat pork and disavow Islam.
Strikingly, this physical and psychological damage was then put into a spiritual frame. According to detainee Ameen Said al-Sheikh, “Graner told me to thank Jesus for keeping me alive.” With that statement, this torture suddenly and irreversibly enters the theological realm, casting the abuse as part of a Christian sensibility.[i]
Without overfocusing on Specialist Graner, we can say that it is entirely plausible that an American could make such a statement. The statement and its context accurately sum up the way many American Christians feel about the treatment of detainees. This statement, however, is a direct challenge to American spirituality. Why? Because Americans pride themselves on a faith that is essentially private. Indeed, when we use the term “spirituality” rather than “religion,” as I have suggested, we are usually describing faith as an individual experience, as something separate from obligation to a tradition or community, something more pure and freeing than the walls of an embarrassingly particular, and probably broken, “religion.” Yet a private spirituality cannot provide any help in thinking about why this alleged theological claim is wrong. To do so, it must become public, it must risk proposing an alternative vision of Christianity, and it must engage in reasoned argument about faith. To keep spirituality private, in the face of this concrete abuse of persons in the name of Christianity, is tantamount to endorsing the alleged torture. If you can claim that your Jesus is private, Graner can claim that his is, as well, and the prisoners are the ones who pay the price for our private spiritual pleasures.
Yet every Christian, and person of conscience, who is repulsed at this use of “thanking Jesus” shows by their very outrage that spirituality, and attendant theological claims, are necessarily public. The alleged abuse is a public enactment of a theological claim (that Jesus accepts violence toward these detainees). The resistance to that theological claim drags spirituality out of its private captivity and into the publicness of righteous anger, an anger that can and must have good public reasons to denounce that image of Jesus.
[i] Kate Zernike, “Detainees Describe Abuses by Guard in Iraq Prison,” The New York Times, 12 January 2005, at www.nytimes.com (accessed 15 August 2007).
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I will follow up soon with a Part 3 in the series, with another contemporary example, and then move to how I try to address this topic in teaching. My recent published works on this topic are mentioned in Part I.
Tom Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York