So much for Hollywood being a bastion of liberalism. The new film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” is something neo-cons will love. It promotes the demonstrably false claim that torture works and helped our government find Osama Bin Laden. Yet it has been nominated for an academy award and the lead actress just won a Golden Globe. Rather than being acclaimed, the film deserves to be boycotted for being nothing more than propaganda, and director Catherine Bigelow should be ashamed for making it.
Yet I suppose one good thing that has come out of it is that the film brings torture back into the news. It is much too important to be ignored as it has been since President Obama declared it part of a past we need to forget. That may have fit his political agenda, but it didn’t help the long term health of our nation. That’s because the use of torture and any condoning of it speaks volumes about what kind of nation we are.
Many things can be said about that, about what kind of country we are, but there is one thing for sure. The bland acceptance of torture as justifiable under any circumstances leaves no doubt that we are anything but a Christian nation as some people want to believe. Indeed, not only are we not a Christian nation, being one is an impossibility. Here are a few of the many reasons I say this.
For one thing, we are a democracy. This means majority rules, but that majority often ignores what is right, just, or fair, basic values Christians hold. Racism wasn’t just an attitude in the south, for example, it was codified into state law. The US Supreme Court made it so for the whole nation in its 1857 Dred Scott decision. Since our nation was founded majority rule has produced and continues to produce votes, laws, statutes, and regulations that stand in complete contradiction to anything Christian. This is because what is legal is not necessarily morally right. While majority rule is a good thing politically, it also allows for views to determine public policies and laws that are not only not Christian, but downright un-Christian.
Second, human beings are fallible, prone to good and evil, with evil often winning the day, as torture and public support for it proves. When Senator John McCain spoke against the use of torture a few years ago he said that the issue was not about who terrorists are, but about who we are as a people. And what it clearly says is that Christian principles, indeed, basic human values and morality, do not guide many of the decisions our political leaders make and voters support. If “Zero Dark Thirty” makes a lot of money it will say as much about the kind of people we are as it does about those involved with making it.
Third, many decisions political leaders are forced to make unambiguously contradict the teachings of Jesus. Torture is a graphic example of this fact, but it is also borne out in other methods of war. I am thinking of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the use of drones that indiscriminately maim and kill innocent men, women, and children, or the assassination of foreign leaders we consider anti-American. To suggest any of these actions can be justified on Christian principles reflects a skewed and skewered understanding of what Jesus said and did.
I could say much more about all of this, but at the end of the day it seems unmistakably clear to me that any debate about whether our country is Christian or not ignores the fact that the very nature of our government and how it functions makes being one an impossibility. I just wonder if our founders knew this all along, and accounts for why they never claimed that establishing a Christian nation was anything they had in mind in the first place.
