Mark Silk rounds up religious responses to the Torture Report:
After calling for religious voices to speak out on the CIA torture report the other day, I received an email from Rev. Chuck Currie of Pacific University in Oregon, noting that the National Religious Campaign Against Torture had released critical reactions from several religious leaders, including Bishop Oscar Cantú, the current chair of the Committee on International Justice and Peace of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Jim Winkler, president and general secretary of the National Council of Churches.
That’s to the good. Even better is the extended statement from Joe Carter, Director of Communications for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Writing in in ERLC’s online magazine Canon and Culture, Carter takes the position that “the CIA’s actions were both immoral and violated the standards and laws recognized by the U.S. regarding the treatment of prisoners.”
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One explanation for the [National Association of Evangelicals] NAE’s inability to influence the millions who belong to the 40 denominations it represents is the strong pushback within the evangelical community itself. For example, when the Evangelical Declaration Against Torture appeared, Mark Tooley, of the neoconservative Institute for Religion and Democracy, denounced it as the work of “pseudo-pacifist academics and antiwar activists” who were contributing to “a barely disguised crusade against the U.S. war against terror.”
See more at: Religion News Service
“TortureWaterboarding” by Carlos Latuff – . Licensed under Attribution via Wikimedia Commons –
Posted by Ann Fontaine