God, torture and morality

My pal David Rieff writes:

I haven't read the comments on your post about the 'religious v. secular people's attitudes toward torture' poll, but selfishly I would hope it would provoke a debate on what I believe at least to be one of the bedrock assumptions of conservatives --- even some conservatives who are not religious in any conventional sense, like my late father, who took this view on 'Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky' principles: to whit, that it is hard maintain a proper moral grounding without God.

The poll hardly negates this argument (as I have written you before, implacable atheist though I am, I have no time for the 'New Atheists' like Dawkins or Christopher [Hitchens], and certainly do not believe for an instant that without religion things would be better). But the poll data at the least suggest that faith does nothing to protect people from the immorality of defending torture, and if this is true, then are you talking about faith being the bulwark against immorality generally or only against sexual immorality (e.g. Gay marriage, abortion, etc..)? I don't think it's a trivial question, nor do I think the (apparently) higher proportion of believers who are willing to condone torture can simply be attributed to the higher levels of support for the Iraq war and the Bush administration's policies toward the Jihadis, though this is undoubtedly at least part of the explanation, for, again, even if it is then this surely means that religion is not necessarily the sine qua non for a moral compass.

Great question. Now, before I respond, I want to let readers who may not know that David's father was the great Philip Rieff. Below the jump, I've posted some information about him that gives you an idea of where Rieff pere, a secular Jew, was coming from. I highly recommend you take a look.

Now, to David's questions and points. I think the distinction he draws about conservative/orthodox Christians seeing God as a bulwark against sexual immorality is not only spot-on, but helpful to us orthodox Christians (and I use "orthodox" in the ecumenical sense of all Christians who lay claim to the customary norms of Scripture and tradition, as opposed to progressives). It is all too obvious that whenever orthodox Christians today talk about the decline in "traditional morality," they're talking about sex and sex alone. How much more authentic and Godly would our Christian witness to this culture be if we spent as much time and effort speaking out against other forms of materialism and hedonism, which are equally as unbiblical! But then, that would probably involve having to do more self-criticism and repentance than we are comfortable with.

Having said that, it is regrettable, and possibly even tragic, that one's support of torture correlates with the conservatism of one's Christianity, and with the degree of commitment to one's faith. But on reflection, I don't think it's as surprising as all that. In the regional cultural milieu in which I grew up, the more churchy you were, the more conservative you were likely to be on political and social questions. When I was 12 or 13, and started reading the Bible myself after having had a kind of born-again experience, I was shocked to read material that directly and obviously challenged and rebuked the racial orthodoxies we white folks had uncritically embraced. I can't exaggerate to you how shocking this was to me. How could we call ourselves Christians and live with this blatant contradiction of our faith? But we did, and we didn't even worry about it -- and that was a case that is to my mind a lot less morally complicated than waterboarding a jihadi terrorist.

It's not hard to come up with examples, historical and contemporary, of belief in God not restraining the immoral behavior of His people. This is nothing new; there's a reason God had to send the prophets to Israel. But consider this: Martin Luther King Jr. (whose faith did not constrain his own adulteries) made powerful use of the same Christian teaching to speak prophetically to American Christians, especially Southern Christians, attempting to show them how the way they treated their black brothers and sisters could not be reconciled with their professed belief in Jesus Christ as Lord. Around about ninth grade, I came across a book in the school library about King, read it and thought, "Well, of course! What he's saying makes perfect sense as a Christian." And I knew that God would hold us accountable for what we did, or didn't do, regarding our racial attitudes.

Now, obviously everything depends on which god, or which version of God; it was easy to find Southerners back in the day who sincerely believed that segregation was divinely ordained. Also, we all know believers who are scoundrels, and nonbelievers who are righteous. It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that for every Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Maximilian Kolbe, you have a thousand, or ten thousand, weak or indifferent Christians who risked nothing to stand up to evil. None of these individual examples are decisive on the question David raises: Is religious belief the sine qua non for a moral compass?

The question, I believe, is one of logic, and of course I take the side of Rieff pere, and Dostoevsky: If God doesn't exist, then anything is possible. That is, without an objective and transcendent source of truth and morality, an absolute standard by which our own conduct is judged, then morality becomes whatever works, whatever we like, or whatever we can get away with. Who can say what is ultimately right, and what is ultimately wrong, without reference to God? Torture is always wrong, you say, to which the interrogator responds, "Says who?"

And this is where we get to a specific point Philip Rieff made in his critique of our therapeutic culture: the "remissions" (that is, the "thou shalt nots") of a cultural order must be experienced as binding. That is, it's not enough to say, "God forbids this;" those who believe it must also believe that at some point, they will be judged for violating the divine command. If they don't, then the moral prohibition loses its ability to restrain.

This is important not when it's easy to do good, but when doing the right thing is hard. Take abortion. Some cynics say, not without good cause, that for most people, abortion is wrong except in three cases: Rape, incest, and My Situation. It's easy for a Christian to believe abortion is a grave evil, if not faced with the prospect of abortion for herself, or his or her daughter. But what happens when the Christian's 14 year old daughter gets pregnant by her boyfriend? What happens when the Christian herself is raped, and made pregnant? In those cases, choosing life would be much more difficult. This is when the divine law is especially necessary to keep us from doing evil when it appears to us that from that evil, much good can come. [UPDATE: Mark Shea quotes Chesterton: "We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong."]

And so it goes with torture. I believe there are non-religious reasons that one can and should oppose torture. But in a psychological climate of intense fear, it may well be that the only thing that keeps us from doing evil is that we fear the judgment of Almighty God more than anything else. In fact, I can think of specific instances from my younger years, which for modesty's sake I won't recount, in which it was only the fear of God that kept me from doing something that would have been profoundly immoral, and in another case, to turn away from a particular besetting sin.

In conclusion, even though there are many examples of righteous unbelievers, and regrettably countless examples of unrighteous believers, I believe that human nature being what it is, belief in God is, in fact, the sine qua non of a moral compass, at least on a philosophical level. If God does not exist, how are we to know what is permitted and what isn't, and more to the point, what authority can restrain the will to power if not the fear of God?

Your thoughts welcome. Please, let's keep this philosophical, and not snide or snipey. Below, the Philip Rieff stuff I promised:

From Richard John Neuhaus's remembrance of Rieff upon his 2006 death:

For all the intellectual panache, however, there was something more sobering about Philip Rieff, for which the right word may be prophetic. While we were preoccupied with our therapeutic games, it went largely unnoticed that our culture died some while back; the ideas, habits, and traditions that sustained and vivified it have been shattered and can't be put back together. Culture began with renunciation and ended with the therapeutic renunciation of renunciation.

Rieff, a Jew, believed that Christianity supplied the best bet for a sustainable culture, but that's all gone now. In a 2005 interview with the Chronicles of Higher Education, he says he does not believe that an authentic religious culture could be resurrected, no matter how hard we might try. Following Marx, Weber, and Freud, he argues that modern prosperity, cities, bureaucracy, and science have completely transformed the terrain of human experience. People who try to practice orthodox Christianity and Judaism today, he says, inevitably remain trapped in the vocabulary of therapy and self-fulfillment. "I think the orthodox are role-playing," he says. "You believe because you think it's good for you, not because of anything inherent in the belief. I think that the orthodox are in the miserable situation of being orthodox for therapeutic reasons."

I'm still reading the last book, but I think Rieff is saying that it's all over. I don't think he's right about that. I hope he's not right about that. But he could be right about that. At the very least, it is a possibility to be considered when proposed by one so thoughtful as Philip Rieff. Christ never said of Western Civilization that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

I don't think Rieff was right about the orthodox "being orthodox for therapeutic reasons," because if that were true, it would be far easier in this world not to be an orthodox Christian (whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant). But I think his insight is worth thinking about in context of this torture argument: are we who count ourselves among the orthodox truly committed to Christian orthodoxy, as we understand it, or do we only cite orthodoxy when it's easy, i.e., when it conforms to what we already believe, or wish to believe?

Also, here's a link to a 2005 Guardian interview Rieff did, cited in Neuhaus's post. Excerpt:

Rieff, it should be explained, sees the world as having developed through three successive cultures, or what he calls "ideal types". "The first, historically, is the pagan, or pre-Christian world," he says. "The second the Christian culture and all its varieties. And finally the present Kulturkampf, which is the third culture."

Are we, then, in a state of barbarism? "No, we're not. But we're near it because we treat the past with considerable contempt. Or nostalgia. One is as bad as the other."

Is there any way back, or around the barriers that confront us? "I don't know whether what I've called the second culture can survive as a form that is respected and practised."

And is the third culture the end of the road? Rieff is not to be drawn into prophecy. "I don't know. It remains to be seen." He says it with the air of a man who only knows that he won't himself be around to see what the future holds.

What, then, is it about the third culture that is so ominous?

"It's characterised by a certain vacuity and diffidence. The institutions which were defenders of the second world, or second culture - I think cultures are world creations - have not offered the kind of defence or support that would have been more powerful than therapeutic forces. So Christianity becomes, therapeutically, 'Jesus is good for you.' I find this simply pathetic."

Are therapeutic cultural drives, then, what one might describe as hedonistic?

"Yes, many of them are pleasure driven. But they are not unintelligent. They may be pleasure driven but there's a limit to their stupidity. They don't act in a way that is blatantly destructive or self destructive. Nor do they ostentatiously deny the past. Christianity in America, for example, has in one sense never been stronger. But I don't believe that 'Jesus is good for you, Christ is good for you' is good Christianity. It's therapeutic Christianity. You can find therapeutic motifs in dozens of examples of Christianity around you today."

His own president, of course, is one such example.

"Oh, absolutely. And proud of it. And he's perfectly sincere. He is president and this is a prime example. I am not going to hammer away at this naive man's beliefs. The prey is too easy."

So is Philip Rieff a pessimist?

"I don't know that I'm pessimistic. Therapies are better than nothing".

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