An Evangelical Call on Torture and the U.S.

Four months have passed since a group of 17 prominent evangelical leaders and scholars issued “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror.”Writing “as Christians and U.S. citizens,” the authors declared:“We renounce the resort to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees,call for the extension of procedural protections and human rights to all detainees,seek clear government-wide embrace of the Geneva Conventions,including those articles banning torture and cruel treatment of prisoners, and urge the reversal of any U.S. government law,policy or practice that violates the moral standards outlined in this declaration.” Will everyone who has read this document,or even heard of it,please raise his hand?Well,you’re forgiven.There are reasons,unfortunate perhaps but understandable,that the declaration hasn’t received the attention it deserves.Not that it went entirely unnoticed,particularly back in March,when the board of the National Association of Evangelicals all but unanimously endorsed it.This endorsement,by a body claiming to represent 45,000 evangelical Protestant churches with 30 million members,was quickly reported as another sign of an important shift in evangelicalism’s political stance.For several years, eading evangelicals have been pressing the movement to widen its public agenda to embrace issues like poverty and global warming
alongside standing concerns about abortion,religious symbols in public spaces and sexual norms.
But in March, the declaration also drew immediate fire from other religious conservatives.Daniel R. Heimbach,a Southern Baptist professor of ethics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary,called the evangelical declaration a “diatribe” that was “confused and dangerous,” mainly because it failed to pinpoint exactly where coercive interrogation crossed into torture.
To read more go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/us/21beliefs.html?ex=1185681600&en=d55a38d8f1915281&ei=5123&partner=BREITBART
As in the days of Noah...