Evangelicals Wrong to Endorse Anti-Torture Statement, Says Activist
by Chad Groening
July 12, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A conservative Christian leader says the organization known as the National Religious Campaign Against Torture isn't saying anything about torture in places like North Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia -- but instead is focusing its ire upon the U.S. and the Bush administration. Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist Committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), based in Washington, DC. Tooley says he has reviewed the declaration issued by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and has noted the document does not say anything about torture in places where it really occurs. That causes him to question the group's motive.
"If this group were genuinely interested in torture, of course they would be addressing those regimes that actively and deliberately do practice torture rather than focusing exclusively on the United States," he comments. He says he detects a "double standard" in the campaign against torture. "[It] is primarily a creation of the religious left and whose interest is not so much in torture, per se, but about opposing U.S. foreign policy."
Among other things, the Campaign's statement calls for an independent investigation into what it describes as "severe human rights abuses" at U.S. installations like Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. It also implies that President Bush was less than sincere when he signed into law a piece of John McCain-sponsored legislation reaffirming a long-time international ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and on torture.
It is unfortunate, says the IRD spokesman, that some high-profile leaders like mega-church pastor Rick Warren and Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals have signed on to the document.
"A growing number of evangelicals are ultimately repeating the same mistakes that mainline Protestant church leaders first started making 50, 60, 70 years ago," he states. As a result, says Tooley, those denominations suffered deep theological divisions and great declines in membership.
Chad Groening, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
