Nick Baumann at Mother Jones links to a few others and makes his own good point about the new Ugandan law that calls for executing gays:

Part of what I was trying to get at in my post is that one reason conservative writers might be reluctant to make detailed arguments against the Ugandan law is that doing so would force them to confront the more unpleasant parts of their coalition. It’s not good politics (or particularly pleasant) to be seen associating with people who need to be convinced that gays shouldn’t be executed or that slavery is bad.

That’s true, but I think we can carry that a step further. There are significant number of people opposed to gay rights who believe that, for example, gay men are-literally-trying to convert American youth to homosexuality, by “preying” on and recruiting boys with gay sex. To them, “gay” and “pedophile” are synonymous. As with the other paranoid fantasies of the American right, the enemy’s goals are framed in radical and apocalyptic terms. Some of this is opportunism by people who are opposed to gay rights, but don’t literally believe that gay men want to have sex with children. But some people do believe it, literally. So when you characterize the “gay agenda” as a threat to America’s children, who wouldn’t believe that extreme action, and perhaps even violence, are the appropriate response? Fortunately civil society in our nation is developed to an extent where killing someone you are opposed to politically is an exceptional act, even (mostly) amongst those who hold hardened opinions. But it’s fair to say that Ugandan civil society is not as highly developed (if I may use a word that implies judgment) as ours. So if you, an American evangelical, run over to Uganda and start telling people that gays, already maligned in Ugandan society, are trying to recruit children with gay sex and want to run roughshod over the rights of people who aren’t gay, what do you imagine the response will be? It will be to react to that threat in a direct and forceful manner, a manner that is logically related to the dire nature of the threat.

So what we have is a logical disconnect between the apocalyptic picture that the anti-gay movement presents, and the action that they call for in response. Anyone who believes, literally, that gays are a threat to American children should probably react the same way that conservative Ugandans have. The reason that anti-gay conservatives can’t attack the Ugandan legislation forcefully is because it would require them to say to people who believe these apocalyptic arguments, essentially, “Well see, all of these dire threats are true…but it’s still wrong to kill people.” And that just doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense. So now they find themselves in the position of either attacking the Ugandan legislation and thus implicitly undermining the beliefs sincerely held my millions of conservative Americans, or remaining (mostly) silent in the face of this travesty. A travesty which, by the way, probably doesn’t bother people who believe, literally, that the gay agenda is a giant conspiracy to convert children to homosexuality.

The other day I dismissed this puff piece in the NY Times about Robert George, the “big thinker” of the Christian right. Today Andrew Sullivan has more to say about George’s “new” natural law approach to homosexuality, which seems awfully similar to the old “it’s gross” approach to homosexuality:

On marriage, it seems to me that George is right about something: heterosexual intercourse within marriage that begets children is a vital, sacred, wondrous and central fact of human life. I’ve never doubted that. I’ve never even argued that the sacrament of matrimony in Catholic tradition could be anything but heterosexual. Where I differ most from George is how one approaches the diversity of nature around this central – and largely civil – human institution.

George is selectively flexible on this (for an online discussion, see Jon Rowe’s post here). He can see oral sex, for example, as okay even if it is not procreative, as long as it is somehow integrated into the procreative, i.e. foreplay. He is even prepared to endorse the sex lives of the infertile or post-menopausal, although both groups obviously have no natural way to procreate by sex. Why? Because they are engaging in something he calls “procreative in form,” as long as he is on top and rubber-free. If it looks like heterosexual procreation, even if it actually isn’t, it’s kosher. Maybe if a man and a man had sex with one dressed as a woman and retained rigid gender roles, they might squeak through George’s “procreative in form” loophole. But one suspects the loophole is there not to express compassion for the straight but to retain an iron-clad exclusion for the gay.

If the whole thing sounds like convenient sophistry to you, you’re not alone.

In fact, it is very hard to see what George’s argument means unless it can be reduced to the idea that sex for the infertile is moral merely because they are heterosexual, and that sex and love for homosexuals is immoral merely because they are homosexuals. So sexual orientation is the critical category here, not procreation or nature as it is actually found, and the result is to retain a stigma and legal discrimination against homosexuals – simply because they are what they are.

Well yes, that’s what all arguments against homosexuality boil down to. It’s wrong…because it’s wrong. This is why the argument against gay marriage, and gay rights in general, is ultimately a losing argument. And thank Robert George’s God for that.

Last month I wrote about the “Manhattan Declaration”, wherein a unified front of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox leaders got together to petulantly whine that nobody pays enough attention to abortion and who’s sleeping with who anymore. This NY Times Magazine article profiles Robert George, a Princeton professor who was one of the lead authors of that declaration and is touted as the “conservative Christian big-thinker” by the article (that’s actually the title of the article.) What challenging and novel ideas does George bring to the table?

Last spring, George was invited to address an audience that included many bishops at a conference in Washington. He told them with typical bluntness that they should stop talking so much about the many policy issues they have taken up in the name of social justice. They should concentrate their authority on “the moral social” issues like abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, where, he argued, the natural law and Gospel principles were clear. To be sure, he said, he had no objections to bishops’ “making utter nuisances of themselves” about poverty and injustice, like the Old Testament prophets, as long as they did not advocate specific remedies. They should stop lobbying for detailed economic policies like progressive tax rates, higher minimum wage and, presumably, the expansion of health care — “matters of public policy upon which Gospel principles by themselves do not resolve differences of opinion among reasonable and well-informed people of good will,” as George put it.

In the American culture wars, George wants to redraw the lines. It is the liberals, he argues, who are slaves to a faith-based “secularist orthodoxy” of “feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism and lifestyle liberalism.” Conservatives, in contrast, speak from the high ground of nonsectarian public reason. George is the leading voice for a group of Catholic scholars known as the new natural lawyers. He argues for the enforcement of a moral code as strictly traditional as that of a religious fundamentalist. What makes his natural law “new” is that it disavows dependence on divine revelation or biblical Scripture — or even history and anthropology. Instead, George rests his ethics on a foundation of “practical reason”: “invoking no authority beyond the authority of reason itself,” as he put it in one essay.

Huh. Well, it seems to me like this guy isn’t so much a “big-thinker” as he’s the smartest guy who thinks the same stupid, moralizing and paternalistic crap as people like James Dobson. Different road, same result I guess, only everybody thinks you’re smarty-pants if you constantly refer to “natural law” and name drop Aquinas.  Here’s the always-worthy-of-a-read Fred Clark on this “doctrine” and it’s proponents:

Their own awesomeness is a topic the authors address with relentless relish. Everything else in the document is merely a foil for this central subject. The threat of The Gay is grave, ominous and potentially world-altering, they warn, repeatedly, before reassuring us that their heroic resolve and moral superiority will save the day. Even the passages in which they luxuriate in their own massive humility are saturated with this swaggering self-regard.

This all-consuming self-absorption coupled with an utter lack of self-awareness plays like something from a Christopher Guest movie. I’m only half-convinced at this point that Robert George is even a real person and not a Fred Willard improv run amok. The authors possess that same remarkable knack for straight-faced seriousness while making uproariously ridiculous assertions.

And at one level it’s impossible to view these pretentious peacocks, these Malvolios grimacing and strutting in their yellow stockings, without succumbing to the derisive laughter they deserve. Such self-inflation demands deflation. And anyway it can’t be helped. I mean, just listen to them:

We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.

The whole thing is like that — like a bad parody of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. Except of course that Henry was outnumbered. Here instead we have a group of powerful elites, men at the center of political, cultural, academic and ecclesiastical privilege bemoaning their oppression at the hands of the homosexuals and religious minorities they claim run the world. They are overlords posing as underdogs. (It’s hard out there for a pope.)

[...]

So ultimately, even though we’re being treated to grand examples of the Blowhard Fool — a comic type that dates back before Plautus — this isn’t funny. And formally, structurally, we’re dealing with tragedy. There is no resolution, no reconciliation, no marriage. (Shakespearean shorthand: Tragedy means everyone dies; comedy means everyone gets married.) Indeed, the whole production here is an explicit rejection of the possibility of reconciliation and an adamant denial of marriage. So this isn’t comedy. We can’t help but laugh at these tragic clowns, but the laughter has a bitter aftertaste.

The important thing here, though, is to recognize why these buffoons have embraced this buffoonery. Their silliness is not a sideshow. The pompousness is the purpose. The fatuousness is the function. This is, as the kids on the Internets like to say, a feature, not a bug.

The anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-religious minority Manhattan Declaration is not primarily about opposing any of those things. That’s all just collateral damage. The primary purpose of the Manhattan Declaration, its raison d’etre, is to help the authors and signatories convince themselves that they’re better than everyone else. The ridiculous, overweening pride is what it’s for.

Chuck Colson, Robert George and Timothy George are blitzed out of their minds on the drug of smug. They’re hard-core umbrage junkies, snorting offendedness, mainlining grievance, freebasing uncut self-righteousness.

Big thinker indeed.

I can only shake my head at this sort of nonsense (via DougJ.) Well, shake my head and blog about it! Apparently, Focus on the Family has a website that rates how “Christmas-Friendly” retailers are, wherein right-wing Christians are apparently invited to offer feedback on their holiday shopping experiences, approval being given only when staff at these retailers affirmatively wish a “Merry Christmas” to the shopper…and nothing else! Examples of reviews:

At check-out the clerk wished me Happy Holiday and I said Merry Christmas. And she repeated Happy Holidays again and I said can you not say Merry Christmas? And she said they want to be respectful of everyone and she went through some of the different “holidays” this time of the year. And I said but it Christmas! She looked afraid to say Merry Christmas, very sad.

[...]

I was so thrilled to hear true Christmas Carols being played in the store. I mentioned it to several other shoppers and they were equally pleased. I happily did a large amount of shopping at this store because I was so thrilled with the Christmas atmosphere. Thank you for not giving into ridiculous political correctness and having a backbone.

[...]

Staff was friendly and helpful, but no mention of Christmas. When I said Merry Christmas, they said same to you.

So not only is saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” offensive, but failing to say anything is considered “Christmas-Negligent” and even playing the wrong kinds of Christmas carols is “political correctness!” Now like me, you may be puzzled to find that these Christians believe that not only does Christ belong in Christmas, but he apparently also belongs in most major retailers as well.

Nothing encapsulates the problem with right-wing Christianity more than this ridiculous effort to force people working retailers to say “Merry Christmas” instead of whatever they want, or nothing at all. I happen to think that many of the ancestors of these Christian thought police would be appalled by what the celebration of the holiday has become. It is essentially a month-long orgy of stress, consumerism and cheap sentimentality. Naturally these right-wing Christians would blame that one the over-secularization of the holiday…while posting to websites complaints about all the retailers they are spending they’re money in. Is the irony not obvious enough?

Inspired by the example of Martin Luther King Jr., Christian culture warriors declare that they will stand together as one in an attempt to suppress the rights of those whose conduct they do not condone:

…45 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.

“We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence,” it says.

The manifesto, to be released on Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, is an effort to rejuvenate the political alliance of conservative Catholics and evangelicals that dominated the religious debate during the administration of President George W. Bush. The signers include nine Roman Catholic archbishops and the primate of the Orthodox Church in America.

They want to signal to the Obama administration and to Congress that they are still a formidable force that will not compromise on abortion, stem-cell research or gay marriage. They hope to influence current debates over health care reform, the same-sex marriage bill in Washington, D.C., and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.

They say they also want to speak to younger Christians who have become engaged in issues like climate change and global poverty, and who are more accepting of homosexuality than their elders. They say they want to remind them that abortion, homosexuality and religious freedom are still paramount issues.

“We argue that there is a hierarchy of issues,” said Charles Colson, a prominent evangelical who founded Prison Fellowship after serving time in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. “A lot of the younger evangelicals say they’re all alike. We’re hoping to educate them that these are the three most important issues.”

Don’t forget kids, millions may live in poverty or die of hunger, the global economy is a wreck, climate change threatens all of nations, but the real issues of consequence are the sexual practices of a minority of Americans!

Ira C. Lupu, a law professor at George Washington University Law School, said it was “fear-mongering” to suggest that religious institutions would be forced to do any of those things. He said they are protected by the First Amendment, and by conscience clauses that allow medical professionals and hospitals to opt out of performing certain procedures, and religious exemptions written into same-sex marriage bills.

Well right, but you can’t get anybody’s attention or sympathy (or votes) be moralizing at them, at least not openly. Far better to pretend you are the oppressed minority, so as to shield your bigory and more grand-standing in the guise of religious tolerance! A technique which, by the way, only works when most people actually agree with your intolerance.

This excerpt, from an otherwise okay article about the (literal)  evolution of religious belief, irkes me:

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.

This is just wrong. Atheists are elated at the news that religious belief may be hard-wired, because it undermines the argument of faith, the bedrock of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Atheists are delighted to tell believers that their faith may be programmed into them.

This is an attempt to build equivalence into the story where there is none. This story does not provide an equal boost (or detriment) to the arguments of atheists and believers; it almost unequivocally backs a standard atheist arguments, that faith is a biological construct. Would it have been offensive to say as much?

Another moment of note for gays and American Christianity:

After an emotional debate over the authority of Scripture and the limits of biblical inclusiveness, leaders of the country’s largest Lutheran denomination voted Friday to allow gay men and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as members of the clergy.

The vote made the denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the latest mainline Protestant church to permit such ordinations, contributing to a halting sense of momentum on the issue within liberal Protestantism.

By a vote of 559 to 451, delegates to the denomination’s national assembly in Minneapolis approved a resolution declaring that the church would find a way for people in “publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships” to serve as official ministers. (The church already allows celibate gay men and lesbians to become members of the clergy.)

Conservatives members of the church reacted in the same manner as conservative members of the Episcopal church, with threats to leave the denomination:

“I think we have stepped beyond what the word of God allows,” said the Rev. Rebecca M. M. Heber of Heathrow, Fla., who said she was going to reconsider her membership.

Conservative dissenters said they saw various options, including leaving for another Lutheran denomination or creating their own unified body.

[...]

Before the vote but sensing its outcome, the Rev. Timothy Housholder of Cottage Grove, Minn., introduced himself as a rostered pastor in the church, “at least for a few more hours,” implying that he would leave the denomination and eliciting a gasp from some audience members.

“Here I stand, broken and mournful, because of this assembly and her actions,” Mr. Housholder said.

Of course they will cite to the Bible, and to non-orthodox interpretations of it as their justification for talk of leaving, but of course non-orthodoxy doesn’t seem to be a huge issue until it involves gays and gay rights. I’m bound to offend someone with this comparison but to me, that argument seems vaguely reminiscent to arguments that the Civil War was really about “states’ rights.”

Xanthippas sent me this article entitled “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?” a while back and I’ve been letting it ripen (although I hope it hasn’t become overly ripe!) to try to get some thoughts worth sharing together. The gist of it is this:

At a time when the once-vaunted unity of the religious right has eroded and the mainstream media is proclaiming an “evangelical crackup,” Driscoll represents a movement to revamp the style and substance of evangelicalism. With his taste for vintage baseball caps and omnipresence on Facebook and iTunes, Driscoll, who is 38, is on the cutting edge of American pop culture. Yet his message seems radically unfashionable, even un-American: you are not captain of your soul or master of your fate but a depraved worm whose hard work and good deeds will get you nowhere, because God marked you for heaven or condemned you to hell before the beginning of time. Yet a significant number of young people in Seattle — and nationwide — say this is exactly what they want to hear. Calvinism has somehow become cool, and just as startling, this generally bookish creed has fused with a macho ethos. At Mars Hill, members say their favorite movie isn’t “Amazing Grace” or “The Chronicles of Narnia” — it’s “Fight Club.”

Now, this offends me. It’s a silly theology, and thoroughly unpleasant, but more importantly, I don’t want a bunch of Christians claiming one of my favorite movies as their own. Obviously they don’t get the message, or just don’t care.

I better back up. I’m going to assume that most readers of this blog, even if they’re American Christians, while possibly knowing the name John Calvin and even having heard of Calvinism, have no idea what it really means. No reason they should. But if you want to know a lot more about Calvinism, check out the Wikipedia entry. As Wikipedia says:

A distinctive issue in Calvinist theology that often is used to represent the whole is the system’s particular soteriology, its doctrine of salvation. This doctrine holds that humans are incapable of adding anything to obtain salvation and that God alone is the initiator at every stage of salvation—including the formation of faith and every decision to follow Christ.

Do you get that? You can’t work your way to Heaven, nor can you be saved and get to Heaven. You’re either going to Heaven or you’re not, based on God’s decision alone. Which begs the question, why bother? Why bother with anything if you’re already saved? Well, as with most denominations it’s not really about the details of the theology as much as how comfortable a fit a person finds the church, and evidently this church appeals to a lot of the “edgier” crowd.

In the lobby one Sunday not long ago, college kids in jeans — some sporting nose rings or kitchen-sink dye jobs — lounged on ottomans and thumbed text messages to their friends. The front desk, black and slick, looked as if it ought to offer lattes rather than Bibles and membership pamphlets. Buzz-cut and tattooed security guards mumbled into their headpieces and directed the crowd toward the auditorium, where the worship band was warming up for an hour of hymns with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”

But what really makes this kind of church so appealing? Not it’s Calvinist theology, surely, nor the fact that face jewelry is acceptable (since it’s far easier not to go to church in the first place), but rather its “manlification” of Jesus (I know, that’s not a real word).

New members can keep their taste in music, their retro T-shirts and their intimidating facial hair, but they had better abandon their feminism, premarital sex and any “modern” interpretations of the Bible. Driscoll is adamantly not the “weepy worship dude” he associates with liberal and mainstream evangelical churches, “singing prom songs to a Jesus who is presented as a wuss who took a beating and spent a lot of time putting product in his long hair.”

What really grates is the portrayal of Jesus as a wimp, or worse. Paintings depict a gentle man embracing children and cuddling lambs. Hymns celebrate his patience and tenderness. The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.”

Transformed? Here’s your problem, guys: the Jesus of the Bible is not presented as some kind of brawny, hairy-chested anti-feminist, bare-knuckled boxing bringer of the message of God. Nobody had to “transform” him into the guy who fed the thousands with the loaves and fishes, or tell everyone that they were to love each other, or showed endless compassion by healing the sick. If you’re going to accept the truth of the Bible, well, that’s the truth. Even in the churches I grew up going to, which were the completely non-liberal kind where the pastor spent a solid hour yelling at us about damnation and the fires of hell and the Bible is the written word of God, there wasn’t any doubt that Jesus was a man of peace and love. It was God who’d send you to hell unless you accepted Jesus into your heart. In other words, the emasculation is all on you, not Jesus. If Jesus doesn’t work for you, you’re going to have look somewhere else, like the Vikings.

But hey, what do I care about their doctrine? It’s not like it’s going to affect me one way or the other. People inside the movement may feel the need to justify it or elevate it in comparison with other “softer” versions of Christianity that are out there, but I really think that, as always, it’s a matter of exclusivity. There are always some people who don’t feel comfortable belonging to “the mainstream”. You start seeing this in high school. Everybody wants to belong, but some people want to belong to the fringe crowd instead of the main group. No reason church should be different, although the idea of Jesus coming back at the rapture and kicking people’s asses while knocking back cold ones seems pretty silly to me.

The other reason that this kind of Calvinism is appealing is because it makes more sense in one regard at least: God is responsible for the bad stuff happening too.

Traditional evangelical theology falls apart in the face of real tragedy, says the 20-year-old Brett Harris, who runs an evangelical teen blog with his twin brother, Alex. Reducing God to a projection of our own wishes trivializes divine sovereignty and fails to explain how both good and evil have a place in the divine plan. “There are plenty of comfortable people who can say, ‘God’s on my side,’ ” Harris says. “But they couldn’t turn around and say, ‘God gave me cancer.’ ”

I guess it’s the logical conclusion of the idea that “bad things happen for a reason”. Obviously, that reason is because God said so. This really makes sense in the context of believing there’s a God who’s omniscient and omnipresent. If you were a believer, you could really find that comforting.

If you’ve read some of my blog posts before, you know I don’t believe in that kind of thing. I don’t need some manly Jesus to strengthen me in my masculinity. I don’t need to believe that everything happens for a reason to cope with living in a world where insane and unfair things happen every day, and I certainly don’t feel the need to blame it on some cruel god who predestines us to heaven or hell without any regard to what we do in our lives. But hey, I’m not a joiner anyway. I was the guy who rebelled against rebelling in high school by wearing stuff that kept me from being identified with any cliques whatsoever. I guess this is what counts for “cool” with Christians. Which, to me, makes it about as pathetic as the kids desperately trying to be cool in high school, but if that’s what helps you sleep at night, whatever.

Now I don’t link to these stories to bag on the military, so much as I link to them to bag on the right-winger Christians and bigots in the military. Item #1:

After posting his resume on online job site CareerBuilder.com, Corey Andrew was contacted by an army recruiter about a job.

The email exchange between Andrew and the recruiter, Sergeant Marcia Ramode, quickly turned hostile when Andrew revealed that he was a homosexual.

“You are definitely unqualified,” wrote Ramode. “Now take you gay self [sic] back to someplace else we do not tolerate gay people like you in any part of the military.”

“Her response was appalling,” Andrew told CNN.

The email exchange grew more heated, with Ramode suggesting that Andrew should, “go back to Africa and do your gay voodoo limbo tango and wango dance.”

One reprimand, coming up. And then there are these yahoos:

Al Jazeera has posted a video alleging to show American soldiers trying to proselytize in Afghanistan — which would be a clear violation of the military code and, potentially, the U.S. Constitution. More from Crooks and Liars here.

[...]

The video shows, among other things, a prayer circle of evangelical soldiers discussing how and whether to distribute a set of bibles in Afghanistan. If the soldiers ended up doing it, that would be a clear violation of military rules and a great way to earn enmity in a crucial corner of the world. But the video doesn’t show that. Rather, what it shows is the soldiers talking about whether such behavior would be kosher or not, acknowledging clearly that proselytizing is wrong. One of them wonders aloud whether it’s OK to distribute the bibles as “gifts” as a way of getting around the rules, and the prayer leader quickly cuts him off, saying “Alright, let’s talk about it. What do you think?” The video shows no conclusion being reached.

One moment that is slightly greater cause for concern (but not necessarily damning) shows Afghanistan’s chief of chaplains — Lt. Col. Gary Hensley — telling a congregation of military personnel that every Christian is commissioned to be a “witness” that “hunts people for Jesus…get the hound of heaven after ‘em so we get ‘em in the Kingdom…That’s what we do, that’s our business!” To those not in the know, this is boilerplate evangelical rhetoric that’s to be expected in such a service. The problem is that for soldiers, it’s not clear who exactly they should be trying to convert.

So, draw your own conclusions, but let’s just say there are many, many Christians who don’t see any problem with invading a predominantly Muslim country and then trying to hand out Bibles and convert people.

Yesterday Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy blogged about a recent NY Times article about increased atheist “activism.” The comments following were mostly a discussion of the usefulness of atheist activism, but naturally, some commentators could not pass without condemning atheists as having no basis for morality (unlike Christians, who can always trace their morality back to God.) Not unexpectedly, the conservative Christian who is quick to condemn the atheist for his/her lack of morality seems to share a different definition of morality form the atheist and less avowedly religious:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

I hesitate to draw too general a conclusion from the study, but it seems rather obvious that the more outwardly religious you are, the more likely you are to support torture, and the less outwardly religious/more secular you are, the less likely you are to support torture (naturally, someone can attend church on a fairly regular basis and be completely opposed to torture.) I have my own uncharitable explanation for this of course. It seems that those inclined to more simple-minded religious beliefs, are also inclined to the sorts of old-fashioned notions of tribalism, xenophobia and human rights that our society has gradually moved away from. It would not at all surprise me if those who are quickest to condemn atheists as immoral, are also great supporters of torture. Of course, our current political climate probably has done quite a bit to move the numbers up in recent years; twenty years ago evangelicals and fundamentalists might’ve had something very different to say on the subject of torture, before it was in vogue on the right again as it is now.