On December 10, the Nobel Peace Prize is scheduled to be presented to Chinese dissident and pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.

Liu will not be in Oslo to accept the award. He’s languishing in a Chinese prison under an 11-year sentence. Nor, in all likelihood, will his wife go to Oslo to receive the prize for him. She has been under house arrest since October 8, when the Nobel committee named Liu as the recipient of this year’s award.

Fifteen Nobel peace laureates, including retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former US President Jimmy Carter, and the Dalai Lama, urged the G20 group of nations to press China at their November meeting to free Liu. The appeal fell on deaf ears, as did a similar request from President Obama, last year’s peace laureate.

The Liu episode underscores in dramatic fashion both the ubiquity of human rights in international affairs and the constraints on a movement in which nation-state sovereignty and national foreign policy interests still dominate world events.

In a provocative and contrarian new book, “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History” (Harvard University Press, 2010), Columbia University professor Samuel Moyn outlines the moral and political dilemmas in which the movement currently finds itself, describing his subject as “the place of human rights in the history of moral opinions and modern schemes of progressive reform.”

Moyn takes a revisionist and decidedly minority stance compared with more conventional histories of human rights. Generally, historians mark the beginning of human rights with the revolutions—American and French—of the late 18th century, with traces leading back to the Bible and Greek philosophy and forward to the 1945 formation of the United Nations and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

President Jimmy Carter

But Moyn rejects these usual starting points, instead positing the 1970s, and especially the crucial year of 1977, as the true moment of the birth of the human rights movement. “In the 1970s,” Moyn writes, “the moral world of Westerners shifted, opening a space for the sort of utopianism that coalesced in an international human rights movement that never existed before.” The paradigmatic year—perhaps the movement’s zenith as well—began in January with Jimmy Carter’s inaugural address in which for the first time an American president made human rights a centerpiece of American foreign policy, and ended in December with the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International, the organization that pioneered and embodied a transnational understanding of human rights.

Moyn’s dating of the full-fledged human rights movement to the 1970s rather than 1776, 1789, or the 1940s is dependent on two things: the failure of other universalistic systems or utopias such socialism, anticolonialism, or democracy promotion wedded to laissez-faire capitalism, and the transcendence of the nation-state as the site for and enabler of human rights.

In Moyn’s view, as long as rights were linked to nation-state citizenship, as in the American and French revolutions, and to the nation-building of the anticolonial movement or the narrow foreign policy interests of the Cold War and the neo-conservative pro-democracy movement, then human rights could not be realized in a morally full and transcendent manner as a transnational ideal. The “central event” in the creation of human rights was the recasting of rights “that might contradict the sovereign nation-state from above and outside rather than serve as its foundation.”

During the revolutionary era of the 18th and 19th centuries, rights “were very much embedded in the politics of the state, crystallizing in a scheme worlds away from the political meaning … [they] … would have later. The ‘rights of man’ were about a whole people incorporating itself in a state, not a few foreign people criticizing another state for its wrongdoing. Thereafter, they were about the meaning of citizenship.”

Similarly, Moyn writes that the “true goal” of the prospective United Nations as it was being hammered out in the post-World War II era was less about enshrining the rights of individuals over against the state than it was about establishing a balance of power among the states. In the end, he says, the idea of human rights, despite being bandied about primarily as wartime anti-Nazi propaganda, entered the final plans of the UN “as a negligible line buried in the proposal for an Economic and Social Council without any serious meaning.”

Eleanor Roosevelt with Universal Declaration

Nor did human rights emerge, he notes, as some historians have suggested, as a response to the Holocaust. “In real time, across the weeks of debate around the Universal Declaration in the UN General Assembly, the genocide of the Jews went unmentioned, in spite of the frequent invocation of other dimensions of Nazi barbarity to justify specific items for protection, or to describe the consequences of leaving human dignity without defense.” Moyn acknowledges that “human rights crystallized as a result of Holocaust memory, but only decades later, as [they] were called upon to serve brand new purposes.” He speaks of the “increasing Christianization of human rights after World War II,” but characterizes the 1950s human rights rhetoric of Popes Pius XI and XII as “a throwaway line, not a well-considered idea” and “an empty vessel that could be filled by a wide variety of different conceptions.”

The bulk of Moyn’s extended essay is devoted to three moments in contemporary history and how they not only created the framework for but also, in his view, impeded the development of human rights: the creation of the United Nations, the rise of anticolonialism, and the development of international law. In a chapter called “The Purity of the Struggle,” Moyn traces the emergence of the human rights movement in the 1970s, paying critical attention to Russian and Eastern European dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel, as well as President Carter’s foreign policy efforts (though without mentioning Patricia Derian, who served during the Carter administration as the nation’s first assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs), and crediting “the supreme importance of political Catholicism in Eastern Europe” and Amnesty International as a central player.

Human rights exploded in the 1970s, Moyn writes, “in direct relation to the breathtaking marginalization of the UN as the central forum for and the singular imaginative custodian of the [human rights] norms. For this outflanking of the UN, American internationalism during World War II and its postwar remnants provided no precedent. It was Amnesty International [AI] above all, whose origins Moyn situates in “Christian responses to the Cold War,” that “made this move most decisively.” In the wake of the failure of the Tehran conference of 1968 marking the 20th anniversary of the Universal Declaration, the need for a new kind of mobilization on behalf of human rights became apparent, and AI provided the model. Indeed, Moyn writes, “almost alone, Amnesty International invented grassroots human rights advocacy, and through it drove public awareness of human rights generally.”

Yet it seems too much to argue that the movement had no real antecedents and somehow sprang full-blown from Jimmy Carter and his speech writers, or Vaclav Havel and Charter 77, or the founders of Amnesty International. It is interesting to note that in a bibliographical essay on additional research that appears at the end of the book, Moyn goes only so far as to acknowledge the work of many other scholars as a “quixotic search” for the deep roots of human rights. For those interested in “claims” about the deep Christian sources of human rights, he refers readers to philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s 2008 book “Justice: Rights and Wrongs” (Princeton University Press).

Reinhold Niebuhr

Religion, nevertheless, runs through Moyn’s account like a red thread, sometimes notable in its impact, sometimes negligible, sometimes less than clear, and sometimes negative, as when Reinhold Niebuhr, the great apostle of internationalism and realism in foreign policy, criticized any proposed injection of human rights into the Dumbarton Oaks framework for the UN on the grounds they would be meaningless. “Nor would the Dumbarton Oaks agreements be substantially improved by the insertion of some international bill of rights which has no relevance, and would have no efficacy in a world alliance of states,” Niebuhr argued. “It is nonetheless true,” Moyn writes, “that against Niebuhr’s advice advocacy groups kept human rights on the agenda in the winter of 1944-45.” Moyn also notes the collaboration of the NAACP, under the direction of W.E.B. Du Bois, with Jewish and Christian organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the Federated Council of Churches “to return the idea of human rights to more prominence in the prospective [UN] charter.”

Moyn is telling a large and complex story concisely and often persuasively, even if he does not give enough credit to alternative versions. But there are many times when the reader wants more details and more context, especially about the role of religion, even though Moyn acknowledges that in the US “it was religious groups who were probably the most active in the campaign to raise the profile” of human rights. At least one reading of his argument suggests that US religious groups—especially the “old-stock Protestants” of the Federal Council of Churches and Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Committee, along with philosophers such as Jacques Maritain (“rights talk seems to have been dominated by Catholics,” Moyn observes at one point), Protestant Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, Anglican bishop of Chichester George Bell, religious peace groups, and Christian layman and Republican foreign policy thinker John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, for whom a Christian concept of human rights was “the last best defense against the communist threat”—all played an important role in the post-World War II debates around the formation of the United Nations in keeping the idea of human rights alive, even if its fully formed version did not come to fruition until the 1970s, and by that time, Moyn says, human rights “lost the religious associations” that had counted for so much in the 1940s.

Lebanese-Christian diplomat Charles Malik

Moyn notes “the striking prominence of Christian social thought” among the three main framers of the Universal Declaration. In different ways, he writes, Christianity defined the worldviews of lawyer John Humphrey, who directed the UN’s Human Rights Division for two decades; Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik; and Eleanor Roosevelt. Even Amnesty International, which Moyn considers critical in the development of a full-blown, transcendent and untainted human rights movement, had its roots in Christian peace movements, including Quakers, Pax Christi and the World Council of Churches (although Moyn observes that neither Pax Christi nor the WCC “had made human rights a central idea.”)

“It was in the atmosphere of the crisis of utopias old and new [in the 1970s] that human rights broke through,” Moyn writes. The stalemate of the Cold War, the end of the anticolonial movement for self-determination—in short the failure of politics fired a longing for a movement and a meaning beyond nation-state politics. What distinguished human rights consciousness in the 1970s was that its appeal to morality “could seem pure even where politics had shown itself to be a soiled and impossible domain,” says Moyn. “Morality, global in its potential scale, could become the aspiration of humankind.”

But what might be called the pure human rights moment of moral vision passed from the scene almost as quickly as it had arrived, and human rights advocates were forced, Moyn argues, to confront the need for a political agenda and a programmatic vision. “If human rights were born in antipolitics, they could not remain wholly noncommittal toward programmatic endeavors, especially as time passed.”

In an epilogue on “The Burden of Morality,” Moyn looks at the new constraints and obstacles facing the movement, because despite transnational treaties aimed at protecting human rights, the nation-state did not wither away and human rights rhetoric—though not necessarily human rights realities—became another tool in the arsenal of national diplomacy.

One of the major issues facing human rights groups today is how to combine the political rights that fueled such groups as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch with the social rights—work, housing, food—that were also a part of the formulation of human rights in the 1948 Universal Declaration. Slowly, Moyn notes, there has been an amalgamation of the human rights movement and the humanitarian movement. Today, he says, “human rights and humanitarianism are fused enterprises, with the former incorporating the latter and the latter justified in terms of the former.”

Moyn is writing as a historian, not an advocate, so he does not address the still incomplete record of the human rights movement in responding to the so-called war on terror and the erosion of political rights with such legislation as the Patriot Act, the use of torture by the United States and other governments against alleged terrorists, or the possible violation of the Geneva Conventions or other international laws and norms in the name of national security. He does, however, observe that “human rights are not so much an inheritance to preserve as an invention to remake—or even leave behind—if their program is to be vital and relevant in what is already a very different world than the one into which it came so recently. No one knows yet for sure…what kind of better world human rights can bring about.”

To date, the human rights movement seems to have been singularly ineffective in offering or enacting the transnational utopian moral vision Moyn believes so distinguished it in the 1970s.

David E. Anderson, senior editor for Religion News Service, has written recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on artist Mark Rothko, drone warfare, and the ethics of sanctions.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: We have a profile today of a man who is spending his life trying to help bring about a more ethical America. He is Rushworth Kidder, a former Christian Science Monitor correspondent and columnist who founded and runs the Institute for Global Ethics. As he makes clear in his new book Good Kids, Tough Choices, Kidder wants to help parents help their children make ethical decisions and develop the moral courage to carry them out.

A familiar sight in Rockland, Maine is Rushworth Kidder leaving town. From his think tank, the Institute for Global Ethics, Kidder is on the road about half the time helping corporations, schools and other groups think about what’s ethical. This day-long session was at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.

RUSHWORTH KIDDER (speaking to group): So the whole thing is just to think about the characteristics of a morally courageous individual.

ABERNETHY: Kidder says at sessions like this one over 20 years he has talked ethics with 40,000 people. The first step is easy, he says: telling right from wrong. You ask, is this illegal? Against the rules? If not, another question:

KIDDER: We just call it the stench test. Does the thing just plain stink? At some gut level, instinctive way, is this just wrong? Suppose it passes that one. Go on to what we call the front page test: How are you going to feel if everything you did shows up on the front page of tomorrow morning’s paper, or these days on YouTube, on Facebook? And finally, the one I love to get to is what we call the Mom test. The Mom test is what would my Mom do in this situation?

ABERNETHY: Kidder says the most important thing parents can do for their kids is set a good example. He also says there are helpful ways to think about ethical choices, and he demonstrated some of them with a group of parents he invited, at our request, to talk about issues they face.

KIDDER: What do you do as a parent if it’s clear to you that one of your children has told a lie to you?

MOTHER: The three-year-old still tells the truth. The nine-year-old—lying is pretty prevalent. I’d say daily to weekly. It’s been quite an issue.

ABERNETHY: Kidder says younger children lie, but don’t cover it up. Older kids do both.

KIDDER (speaking to parents): There’s a piece of research that describes the fact that, if we’re not careful, by the age of eight kids become—and this is the phrase the researchers used—“fully skilled lie-tellers.” That’s a frightening phrase.

ABERNETHY: Kidder says all cultures identify the same five core values.

KIDDER (speaking to parents): Everywhere we go and do this work, and I’m talking about around the world, we’ve worked in about 30 countries on this kind of idea, we keep hearing people talk about the same thing: honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion. There’s no difference between the values held by people who say I am deeply religious and those who say I have no religion whatsoever. This really goes deep.

ABERNETHY: The hardest ethical choices, Kidder says, are not between right and wrong but between right and right, when two or more core values conflict. He told the story of a girl whose friend told her she was anorexic, but swore her to secrecy. Then the girl discovered that her friend’s condition was life-threatening.

KIDDER: Wow, you’ve just dumped that teenager or that middle-schooler right in the middle of a right-versus-right dilemma, where everything about truth-telling is hugely important. You don’t tell the truth, somebody may be dead. On the other hand, you don’t break a promise.

ABERNETHY: Kidder urges parents of young children to drill right and wrong into them. With older children he encourages discussion—recognizing potential conflicts before they occur.

KIDDER: Just having the opportunity in some ways to talk about these things ahead of time with kids, just to begin to get at some of the right-versus-right kinds of questions that come up, you’re at least giving a child a way to understand that oh yeah, these things happen.

ABERNETHY: Of all the ethical issues the group raised, the most troubling was how to handle computers and new social media like Facebook.

FATHER: We’ve had five or six kids sitting in our living room, all on their computers, not interacting with each other.

MOTHER: On weekends in the afternoon we don’t allow any media—and that’s TV, computer, anything—because we need to disconnect.

MOTHER: I am petrified the day that she gets on Facebook. She’s not using email yet, but it’s certainly going to be an issue, and it’s scary.

KIDDER (speaking to parents): This is third grade you’re talking about?

MOTHER: She’s in fourth grade. I have full intention of reading emails before she even has an account. If you’re going to have this account it’s going to be monitored.

FATHER: The power is there to change the world. On the other hand, can it be used for things that are not great? Absolutely, and we’ve seen examples of that: kids, you know, having their sexual preference put up online and committing suicide and things like that.

KIDDER: There is now so much power and so much immediacy in the technology that a single unethical decision put into the system can have consequences that it never could have had 30, 40, 50 years ago.

ABERNETHY: Kidder argues that identifying and choosing what’s right always carries the need to act. He calls that “moral courage,” and one of the group gave an example. Her daughter saw some kids picking on another child on the school bus.

MOTHER: So she is a very quiet girl, but she actually kind of stood up and said, “Hey, stop doing that. That’s bullying,” and I said, “What happened?” She goes, “Well, they didn’t hear me so I had to do it again.” It made me very proud of her. It was something that hopefully was based on our values that she’s ingrained in her.

ABERNETHY: At dinner that night, two of the parents tried out on their two daughters the idea from the discussion of banning all electronic media on weekend afternoons. It did not sell.

DAUGHTER: Why?

MOTHER: They want their kids to be connected with the family again.

DAUGHTER: I feel really bad for those kids.

MOTHER: I kind of like that idea. I thought we should adopt something like that here.

DAUGHTER: I don’t understand. I mean, what would you do?

MOTHER: What about you, Jen? What do you think about that?

DAUGHTER: No. It’s not a good idea.

ABERNETHY: Whatever the resistance, Kidder looks at the power of new technology and sees an urgent need to anticipate its effects and prevent the worst of them. Indeed, he wants to make his Institute’s top priority now trying to create all over the US what he calls “a culture of integrity.”

KIDDER: I think our ethics is climbing. I think maybe the curve is sort of going up like that. I think our technology is going up like this. Unless we can ensure that there is a moral compass behind our uses of the new technologies, we run the risk of putting ourselves in grave danger. Will people look back at us today and say, “You discovered the digital age, and you frittered away the whole thing on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google, on those sorts of things. What on earth were you thinking?”

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According to news reports, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American charged with trying to use a weapon of mass destruction in the failed Times Square bombing, has told investigators he carried out the attempted bombing to avenge US drone attacks in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan.

Shahzad’s assertion adds more fuel to the simmering controversy over the ethics and effects of increasing reliance by both the CIA and the US military on unmanned drones to launch missile strikes against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, asked (“US pressure helps militants overseas focus efforts,” May 7) : “Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan—notably the Predator drone strikes—actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent? It is a hard question.”

The Times Square drone connection also follows on last year’s deadly attack on the CIA, when a suicide bomber, a Jordanian doctor linked to al-Qaeda, detonated his explosives at an American base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, killing himself and seven CIA officers and contractors who were operating at the heart of the covert program overseeing US drone strikes in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions.

CIA director Leon Panetta has called lethal drone technology “the only game in town” for going after al-Qaeda, and Obama administration officials have strenuously defended both the legality of the strikes in Pakistan as well as their effectiveness in killing suspected militants. They also deny the drones are responsible for an unacceptable level of civilian deaths.

“In this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning an attack,’’ Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, told an audience of international legal scholars on March 25, according to the Wall Street Journal (“US defends legality of killing with drones”).

Since President Obama took office, the CIA has used drones to kill some 400 to 500 suspected militants, according to intelligence officials, the Journal reported. The officials say only some 20 civilians have been killed—a figure critics sharply challenge. In 2009, Pakistani officials said the strikes had killed some 700 civilians and only 14 terrorist leaders, or 50 civilians for every militant. A New America Foundation analysis of reported US drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to 2010 says the strikes killed between 830 and 1210 individuals, of whom 550 to 850 were militants, or about two-thirds of the total on average.

More recently, an April 26 story in the Washington Post reported that the CIA has refined its techniques and made technological improvements that are reducing civilian deaths, and this week, in his joint news conference with President Karzai of Afghanistan, President Obama said, “I am ultimately accountable…for somebody who is not on the battlefield who got killed…and so we do not take that lightly. We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties not because it’s a problem for President Karzai; we have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed.”

Earlier this month, in a May 6 interview on National Public Radio, David Rohde, the New York Times reporter who was held captive for months by the Taliban in northern Pakistan, spoke about the US drone strikes and said, “I saw firsthand in north and south Waziristan that the drone strikes do have a major impact. They generally are accurate. The strikes that went on killed foreign militants or Afghan or Pakistani Taliban that went on around us. There were some civilians killed but generally the Taliban would greatly exaggerate the number of civilians killed. They inhibited their operations. Taliban leaders were very nervous about being tracked by drones. So they are effective in the short-term I would say…I don’t think the answer is, you know, endless drone strikes. The answer is definitely not sending American troops into Pakistan, into the tribal areas. That would just create a tremendous nationalist backlash. It has to be the Pakistanis doing it.”

Ethicists and religious leaders are beginning to challenge the morality of the drone program, arguing it violates international law as well as key precepts of just war theory. The Christian Century, for example, editorialized in mid-May (“Remote-control warfare,” May 18) that while the drone attacks have no doubt killed terrorists and leaders of al-Qaeda, “they raise troubling questions to those committed to the just war principle that civilians should never be targeted.”

Taking aim at one of the aspects of drone warfare that make it so popular with the military and with politicians—that it is a risk-free option for the US military because it avoids American casualties—the Century editors said: “According to the just war principles, it is better to risk the lives of one’s own combatants than the lives of enemy noncombatants.”

The “risk-free” idea is also being challenged. In a recent piece in the Jesuit magazine America (“A troubling disconnection,” March 15), Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at Catholic University, wrote that military (as opposed to CIA) drone operators suffer post-traumatic stress disorder at higher rates than soldiers in combat zones. “Operators see in detail the destruction and grisly human toll from their work,” she observed, and she quoted an air force commander who said, “There’s no detachment. Those employing the system are very involved at a personal level in combat. You hear the AK-47 going off, the intensity of the voice on the radio calling for help. You’re looking at him, 18 inches away from him, trying everything in your capability to get that person out of trouble.”

The Christian Century editors also noted that drone attacks on civilians have given militants a recruitment tool, citing an opinion piece by counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen and former army officer Andrew McDonald Exum published last year in the New York Times (May 17, 2009). “Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as the drone strikes have increased,” they wrote.

An even more emphatic critic of the use of drones is Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “Neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has been persuasive about its legal right to launch attacks in Pakistan,” she wrote in “Flying Blind,” an article also published in America magazine. “Even with the legal right to use military force, drone attacks must also conform to the traditional principles governing the rules of warfare, including those of distinction, necessity, proportion and humanity.’’

O’Connell argues that under the United Nations Charter, resort to military force on the territory of another state, in this case Pakistan, is permitted only when the attacking state is acting in self-defense, acting with U.N. Security Council authorization, or is invited to aid another state in the lawful use of force. “Pakistan did not attack the United States and is not responsible for those who did,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has no basis, therefore, for attacking in self-defense on Pakistani territory.’’

In addition, she contends that while al-Qaeda is a violent terrorist group, “it should be treated as a criminal organization to which law enforcement rules apply. To do otherwise is violate fundamental human rights principles. Outside of war, the full body of human rights applies, including the prohibition on killing without warning.”

The only basis for the United States to lawfully use force in Pakistan would be if it had the consent of the country’s political leaders. It is not clear whether the US has such a valid invitation, according to O’Connell.

“Pakistan’s president has told US leaders not to attack certain groups that have cooperated with Islamabad,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has done so anyway, insisting that Pakistan use more military force and threatening to carry out attacks itself if the government refuses. None of this can be squared with international law.”

As recently as May 12, the head of an influential religious party which is a junior partner in Pakistan’s ruling coalition denounced the most recent drone attacks as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty. “The recurring attacks on targets in tribal areas are blatant aggression against Pakistan and the military should shoot down intruding drones,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the Jamiat Ulema Islam party told reporters, as reported in the Gulf News.

The case of western Pakistan presents particular challenges, according to O’Connell: “There suspected militant leaders wear civilian clothes, and even the sophisticated cameras of a drone cannot reveal with certainty that a suspect is a militant. In such a situation international humanitarian law gives a presumption to civilian status.”

In an interview, O’Connell suggests that there is confusion about international law versus domestic national security law and that the scarcity of developed ethical analysis and discussion of drone warfare might have to do with the fact that the drone itself is “just a delivery vehicle.” The real ethical issue, she said, is “the greater propensity to kill” made possible by the “video game-like” quality of drone combat.

Gary Simpson, a theology professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota and the author of “War, Peace, and God: Rethinking the Just War Tradition” (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2007), acknowledges that although he hasn’t yet thought about ethics and drone warfare, “the ongoing evolution of weaponry always poses new questions. It changes the questions about proportionality”—referring to the just war principle that the benefits of war must be proportionate to the expected harm— “and the protection of one’s own forces over against the vulnerability of civilian populations.”

The House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held hearings in March and April on the rise of the drones, the legality of unmanned targeting systems, and the future of war, and US Naval Academy ethics professor Edward Barrett testified that while unmanned weapons systems “are consistent with a society’s duty to avoid unnecessary risks to its combatants,” and they can “enhance restraint” on the part of the soldiers engaged in virtual warfare, they also “could encourage unjust wars” and “could facilitate the circumvention of legitimate authority and pursuit of unjust causes.”

It will be interesting to see whether Congress and the White House continue to involve ethicists and religious thinkers in future deliberations on these issues. Last December, just before President Obama gave his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on themes of just war, the White House gathered religious leaders at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for what was described as a briefing and discussion of the morality of war, according to the Washington Post. White House staff members took notes for the president.

For now, the Obama administration insists the use of drones in Pakistan is imperative in the fight against terrorism, and Amitai Etzioni, an international relations professor at George Washington University, writing recently in the Joint Force Quarterly (“Unmanned Aircraft Systems: The Moral and Legal Case”), has enumerated many of the reasons and offered multiple lines of supporting argument: “The United States and its allies can make a strong case that the main source of the problem is those who abuse their civilian status to attack truly innocent civilians and to prevent our military and other security forces from discharging their duties,” he says, and “we must make it much clearer that those who abuse their civilian status are a main reason for the use of UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] and targeted killing against them.”

But others, such as Kilcullen and Exum, argue drone combat exacerbates the problem of terrorism and contributes to the instability of Pakistan. “Having Osama bin Laden in one’s sights is one thing,” write Kilcullen and Exum. “Devoting precious resources to his capture or death, rather than focusing on protecting the Afghan and Pakistani populations, is another. The goal should be to isolate extremists from the communities in which they live.”

Missile strikes launched from the comfort of Langley, Virginia, a half a world away from Waziristan, are unlikely to do that and thus, to critics, remain morally problematic.

David E. Anderson, senior editor for Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Afghanistan (“The Right War Gone Wrong”) and nuclear disarmament (“Trimming the Nuclear Arsenals”).

BOB ABERNETHY, host: As public outrage continues over Wall Street’s plans to pay multimillion-dollar bonuses to its top executives and traders, President Obama called such bonuses “obscene” and proposed a new tax on the country’s largest banks.  Meanwhile, the heads of the four largest investment banks were the first witnesses before a bipartisan commission investigating the causes of last year’s financial crisis.

A new book out this week called “Rediscovering Values” urges moral as well as economic reforms. Its author is Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine. Jim, welcome. As you look back at the causes of the so-called Great Recession, what are the most important ones that you see?

REV. JIM WALLIS: Well, I’m talking about rediscovering values on Wall Street, Main Street, and our street. We can’t just look at Wall Street. We’ve got to start personally, and so we talk about families and choices and local churches and what we can do in our lives, our neighborhoods, our communities.

ABERNETHY: I want to get into that, but first of all, the causes. Who’s to blame?

WALLIS: Well, I think we all have to look in the mirror here. These new maxims — greed is good, it’s all about me, I want it now — we see that on Wall Street. We see these bonuses that are being announced this week are really, I think, a sin of biblical proportions, clueless about what’s happening in a place like my hometown of Detroit where there’s thirty percent unemployment. But also my Depression-era parents didn’t spend money they didn’t have for things they don’t need. So I’m seeing a whole reevaluation going on. Underneath this economic crisis there is a values crisis, and I’m hearing a conversation, already in this first week, around the country about how we need a moral recovery to go along with the economic recovery.

ABERNETHY: And in that moral recovery, talk about some of the things that other people have talked about, as well as you, which is the huge gap between the richest and the poorest.

WALLIS: You’re exactly right, and, indeed, I learned that the two peak moments of the great gaps were the year before the Great Depression and now the year before this Great Recession, when things get so divided it breaks social contracts and covenants, and things begin to unravel and spin out of control. We trusted the Invisible Hand, you know, of Adam Smith, the market, to make sure things turned out alright. But the Invisible Hand let go of the common good, so I’m saying values like “enough is enough,” it’s “we’re in this together.”

ABERNETHY: So we consume less, we conserve more.

WALLIS: And we find each other. Don’t keep up with the Joneses; make sure the Joneses are okay. That’s a very different kind of conversation. So I see a new kind of “let’s learn from this.” A crisis gives us a chance to reset some things, so I see that happening. I’m talking to community organizers, Wall Street people, pastors. We’re having dialogues around the country. This is the beginning of a new conversation. You know, this is a chance to learn from our mistakes and find a moral compass for a new economy.

ABERNETHY: So you want individuals and families to be more responsible about their use of money, going into debt, that kind of thing. But it’s also going to take, if what you want is going to come about, it’s going to take massive change in government policy, right?

WALLIS: You’re exactly right. Right. This is a structural crisis and a spiritual crisis.

ABERNETHY: And so how is that going to come about?

WALLIS: Well, we need new financial regulations, a real holding Wall Street accountable here. You know, [my wife] Joy and I just fired Bank of America, because they had all this money, and we gave them grace, you know, in the meltdown, and now they are extending no grace to people who are being foreclosed upon. There is more money in these bonuses, these bank bonuses, than would be needed to resolve the foreclosure crisis. So the banks say they’re too big to fail, I’m saying make them smaller, so a lot of people could move their money. There’s even a website, moveyourmoney.info. You move your money to community banks that are serving the community, I think that’s a practical thing that people can do. It empowers people. Congregations, denominations could move the Methodist $15 billion pension fund. That gets Wall Street’s attention.

ABERNETHY: It is said that the high salaries that are paid on Wall Street, and to CEOs generally, and to a lot of performers and athletes, that these encourage people to work harder and that if you don’t pay them somebody is going to go someplace else. Are you really, are you proposing then a tax on everybody, not just Wall Street, but a big tax on people who are making above a certain amount of money?

WALLIS: You know …

ABERNETHY: A bigger tax, I should say.

WALLIS: At some point you cross a line, and they’ve crossed some lines here. I mean, to go from a ratio of CEO salaries to average workers of 30 to one, which is what it was thirty years ago, to now 615 to one, come on, I mean, we’ve crossed some lines here, and so we have to — Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, said when you’ve got no moral framework for the market, no ethical sensibility, the market devours other sectors and finally devours itself. Gandhi said the seven deadly sins are wealth without work — two of them — and commerce without morality. So we’ve crossed some lines here. How do we come back to some of our most basic, oldest virtues here? And I’m hearing conversations on Wall Street and right in my own hometown of Detroit that say, “We’ve lost our way here, let’s try and find it again.” And I think, yeah, some structural accountability, but also some spiritual transformation at the level of our family life and time with kids and all the rest. That’s what’s coming out of this. I think that could be redemptive.

ABERNETHY: Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine, many thanks.

WALLIS: Great to see you again.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Welcome. I am Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us. We take our look ahead now to the stories we expect to cover in the new year with the help of Jason Byassee of the Duke University Divinity School, where he directs its Faith and Leadership Project; E. J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, the Washington Post, and Georgetown University; and with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program. Welcome to you all. Jason, we have a recession. What’s going to happen to it, do you think, and what effect has it had and will it have on the churches, the denominations, the charities—all those people that you cover?

JAYSON BYASSEE, Duke Divinity School: I am struck by how you can’t have a conversation with a religious leader now without talking about what the financial downturn means for their organizations. This is across the board, from left to right, whatever position one has. What this means is that people are laying people off. They are cutting back on ministries. I wonder if this isn’t the story upcoming. Lots of our denominational infrastructures were built at a time when you could assume money would keep coming in. Well, it’s not now, and how do you do more with less? Nobody is quite sure how to do that.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly: Talking about doing more with less, the recession is also having a terrible impact on the people in the pews of all of these religious congregations, the people that these ministries serve. These people are hurting more than ever. They need help. They need resources. They go to the religious institutions, who are struggling. So it’s a real problem.

E.J. DIONNE, Brookings Institution: The entire not-for-profit sector has been hurt. Now, there is some hopeful evidence that sometimes some people actually step up and give a little more when they can to groups helping the very poor, because they have an even better sense than usual about “there but for the grace of God go I”—that possibility. The economy is going to be critical to so much of what happens this year. It’s going to be crucial politically to what happens in the 2010 elections. You can almost predict on a straight line if the economy feels like it’s getting substantially better by the midyear, President Obama and the Democrats are probably going to do better; if it feels like it’s not getting better it will be a large problem for them. That’ll have an effect on how we discuss all kinds of questions, including moral and religious questions, in the course of the year.

ABERNETHY: Jason, do you see people going into the ministry, or not going into the ministry, because of the recession? Do you see seminaries closing, churches closing?

Jayson Byassee

BYASSEE: The standard assumption is that when the economy is bad people go to school, because work is not good. The problem with that is, if you can’t sell your house then it’s pretty hard to move across the country and go to school. Lots of seminaries are trying to do more online education. I expect more of that to come. But there is enormous pressure, especially on small seminaries that aren’t connected to a big university, and dire predictions about how many of those may close in the coming years. That might not seem like a big thing until you realize, okay, where my minister was trained means everything for what I’m going to hear about God. This has an outsize ripple effect on institutions across the board and religion in this country, I think.

ABERNETHY: E.J., it is an election year again. What do you see as a result of that that will be of particular importance to believers?

DIONNE: I think, first of all, we may have the discussion on morality and the economy that was, I think, a little bit delayed, that people were trying to come to terms with what the downturn meant. I think there is going to be now a real look back and look forward as to why did we get into this mess—how much of it were practical problems, how much of it were about people not taking responsibilities seriously that they should have—the stewards of our economy, the people with a strong position in our economy. I think that debate will very much affect the elections. I also think we’re going to have a kind of after-effect of our big health care debate. I think what you saw among religious groups, particularly Christian religious groups, were a real difference between those who laid the heaviest stress on the moral imperative to getting everyone, or as many people as possible, covered through insurance, versus those who felt that the major emphasis on whether abortion is or is not funded and how in this health care debate. I think that’s going to have a continuing effect, because I think there is this running dialogue, certainly in the Catholic Church that I’m part of, but I think in all of our traditions, between those who believe the central emphasis of our religious group should be on a certain relatively narrow—though they would say very important—list of moral questions: abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research versus those who say that the emphasis should be on a much broader agenda having to do with social justice and how we organize our lives together in the economy. I think that discussion is going to very alive, made all the more so by the controversy of an election year.

LAWTON: It’s going to be interesting to see how involved faith-based activists get in these midterm elections. Certainly Barack Obama mobilized a very active campaign effort among especially moderate and liberal faith-based individuals. There was activity on the religious right as well against him. But will a Democratic candidate at the state level be able to get that same sense of energy? Will they come out? Meanwhile, the religious right is still really trying to figure out who they are, who’s going to lead them, and what they’re going to do. The Republicans are trying to figure out what do we do with this core of our party? So it will be fascinating to watch all of that unfold in the coming months.

DIONNE: Although I do think there’s one interesting thing that’s happened on the right, at least in the last year, which is I think the religious conservative voice has been less powerful than the voice of, whatever you want to call it, this Tea Party movement. There seems to have been a shift within the right from an emphasis on moral questions that the religious conservatives were focused on to this very strong anti-government strain. Now, obviously, there are overlaps on the conservative side, but I think this is a different sort of direction that we’ve seen on the right side of politics.

LAWTON: But we’ve seen, especially with the health care debate last year and the role abortion played within that debate, those social issues are still very important to a lot of people and will still come up, I think, in the midterm elections.

BYASSEE: Much more quietly, along with that I am struck by how many dozens of churches in my area can’t afford a minister any more because of health care being so expensive, and yet the left has somehow not managed to have the kind of energy in favor of expanding health coverage by any stretch that the right has managed to have against it, it seems to me, because of this confluence of leadership in opposition.

ABERNETHY: Kim, what do you see coming about the all the issues around gay marriage and what jobs homosexuals can have in the churches?

Kim Lawton

LAWTON: This is going to be a very important year within the worldwide Anglican Communion. The US Episcopal Church, which is the branch here of the worldwide Anglican Communion, has moved forward. The Los Angeles diocese has elected an assistant bishop who is a lesbian. The worldwide community had asked the US church please don‘t move forward on this. She would be the second one. Her election needs to be confirmed within the next few months before she would be officially installed in May, so that’s still coming up. But the world is watching in the Anglican Communion, and many people are not happy about this, so this is going to be really important. We’ve been talking for years about is the Anglican Communion going to hold together? I think this year could be very crucial on that question.

BYASSEE: It seems like the first election, you could make space for it being a naïve move, or a misstep move, if you were in opposition. A second one, you can’t make that claim any more. The striking thing to me about this election is not so much that Mary Glasspool is a lesbian, but do you really need three Episcopal bishops in Los Angeles? Again, is it a structure set up for a time when the money was flush, and now does it make sense any more?

DIONNE: I’ve thought about this the last couple of years, where we have focused so much of the debate on the issue of gays and lesbians. It strikes me that, within the Christian Church for 100-150 years there have been episodes of modernity confronting tradition and that, right now, the center of that debate is around issues related to gay rights. But when you listen to some of the conversation—why people are for or against gay rights—it’s really part of this much deeper struggle that’s been going on within Christianity for a long time of how much its task is to resist modernity versus how much of its task is to respond to modernity, if you will, in a more dialectical way, with some opposition but also embracing some of what modernity has to give us. I think this episode is just—there is a particular passion behind this, because this is obviously a major step in this long argument.

LAWTON: Another interesting aspect to this particular debate, when you are talking about the Anglican Communion, is the demographic changes of Christianity around the world. So you have Christians in Africa and Asia who have the numbers. There’s millions of Christians in Uganda and Rwanda and Sudan. These tend to be more conservative on some of these issues—much more conservative, especially on the issue of homosexuality, and where their place is in the international Christian family is very much up for grabs in this particular debate.

DIONNE: Indeed, Christianity is growing. I think it’s a great shock for people to realize that there are many more Anglicans in Africa than there are Episcopalians in the United States.

BYASSEE: There’s twice as many Anglicans in Sudan as there are in the United States—just one big country in Africa. I don’t think we’re anywhere near catching up with what this means, not only on social issues but on doctrine, worship life, and all the rest. What’s it going to mean, not very long from now, that Christianity is essentially an African religion and not a Western one, not a North American or European one?

DIONNE: You’re seeing that, to some degree, in the debate about global warming. I do think the environment is another area where we’re going to see continuing activism and debate within the churches. The presence of a very strong group of Third World Christians in all of the denominations is going to put the focus not simply on the issue of reducing carbon in the atmosphere, but also on what kind of compensation Third World countries will get, which became a very critical issue in the discussions in Copenhagen.

ABERNETHY: Let me move to another point, Kim especially. There is an investigation going on, or a review, or whatever is the right term for it, of Catholic nuns in this country by the Vatican. Where is that going, and when will we know what comes of it?

LAWTON: The Vatican says that it wants to look into the quality of life for US sisters. That has created a huge amount of consternation here in the US, as there are questionnaires that have been sent to different communities of sisters with a lot of questions. Many of them feel like we’re not going to answer some of these. So that’s going to be moving forward throughout this year, as that sort of give-and-take moves forward. Do they answer these questions? What do they say? How do they say it? What’s really behind all of these questions in the first place? That’s what a lot of people, not just among nuns but across the Catholic community, want to know. What’s really behind this study, this investigation?

E. J. Dionne

DIONNE: There’s a great danger here. I think this could prove a very, very divisive move inside the church. There is enormous affection toward nuns among people who are Catholics. Many of us owe enormous debts to them for our educations and for so many other things they did. They are among the most activist—that’s a bad term in the eyes of some conservatives—as in giving comfort to the poor, helping the sick, doing all the things the Gospel says we should do. And so they risk, I think, a real backlash, if they don’t handle this very carefully. I think they are already confronting it, to some degree. They’ve got to be very careful with the nuns. I’ve got some nuns that sent that message.

BYASSEE: It is an interesting question. If you have an enormously radical form of life, based on what Jesus said we should do, can you be liberal doctrinally? It sounds like the answer may be no, right? That’s a very risky answer…

DIONNE: The answer from the Vatican may be no. It’s not clear to me that there is, first of all, any consistent sort of liberal doctrinal positions, and to the extent that they are somewhat more liberal—for example, in asserting that perhaps there is a bigger role for women to play in the authority structure of the church—it shouldn’t surprise that perhaps that the nuns, who have taken so much responsibility for helping run the church, just might have a view like that.

BYASSEE: My wife, who is a pastor, would “Amen” your claim. I think that’s right.

ABERNETHY: Jason, you study and help identify future leaders in the churches. What do you see? Some of the familiar old names are no longer so familiar. Oral Roberts died. Where is it going? Who do you see out there who’s going to succeed the people we used to hear about so intensively with the religious right?

BYASSEE: One thing that interests me is that there’s less of an emphasis, if you’re a younger evangelical leader, on starting a parachurch ministry like Billy Graham did, and more of an emphasis on being a pastor. I’m not exactly sure why this shift has happened, but if you’re a young pastor, you’re charismatic, what you want to do is plant a church usually and grow it big and have that be where your ministry is. So I see a lot of pastors of enormous churches—in places like Seattle and Grand Rapids—who have churches of 20-30,000 people. You don’t hear about them in the national news yet. You don’t hear Rob Bell’s name. You don’t hear Mark Driscoll’s name. You’re hearing Tim Keller’s name in Manhattan more because he’s writing books that have gotten attention. Same with Rob Bell. But these are pastors who are sort of a half-generation after Rick Warren, or Bill Hybels at Willow Creek, who are going to have an enormous impact, because if you want anyone to catch a religious allusion in politics in 20-30 years, it’s likely to be because one of these pastors helped teach a congregation to hear the Scriptures, right? If people are going to be serving the poor, it’s going to be because churches like this—like Adam Hamilton’s church in Kansas City, Church of the Resurrection—encourage people to do that and made space and structure for them to do it. So I think that’s an enormous shift.

LAWTON: One thing I’m watching is, with some of the folks you just referred to that already have these big megachurches, what happens when those leaders—people like Rick Warren at Saddleback Church, people like Bill Hybels in Willow Creek, built these giant congregations—what happens when they retire, though? What happens to those congregations? It’s really hard to step in to a congregation that’s already in process. That’s something I’m really going to be looking at.

ABERNETHY: I want to hear, Jason, what you have to say, and E.J.—each of you—about kind of the state of religious life and of organized religion in this country today. How is it going? Is secularism pushing it aside? What’s happening?

BYASSEE: It does seem to me that the new atheist books gave a certain permission to people to claim that they are not religious, that you don’t have to have the default be, oh yeah, I’m a Christian, even though I don’t do anything. Now it can be no, I’m not religious, and that seems to be more socially okay. Of course, being biased people in religious institutions—I spend all my time with religious leaders for whom things are very vibrant, right—but I think we shouldn’t overlook the fact that there are a whole lot of people who aren’t engaged by the church and its ministries and would much rather they go away, especially at election time.

ABERNETHY: Sixteen percent, I think, identify themselves as having no affiliation. E.J., what do you see? How is the tide running?

DIONNE: I wrote a column some years ago that ran under the headline, which I openly took from The New Republic. The headline was “God Bless Atheists.” I think one of the things about this atheist challenge that’s actually good for believers and good for Christians is that it has created a debate on the fundamentals. I don’t mean by that fundamentalists; I just mean the fundamental tenets of does God exist? How do you know God exists? What is the relationship between God and humankind? These debates have gone on for centuries. A lot of what the new atheists say are new versions of very old arguments that have been taking place. I think it’s far better to surface these arguments than to have people either pretend to believe when they don’t, or have believers not have to confront really core challenges to belief itself. And so, at bottom, if you can say this whole debate may be providential.

LAWTON: I think we need to be careful, too, when you look at some of these numbers. A lot of those people who are unaffiliated—it doesn’t mean that they’re not religious or spiritual in some way. They’re just not necessarily associating themselves with a particular organization or institution.

BYASSEE: It does seem important that these numbers bump when there is an election that people are unhappy about. It seems like there’s been some behavior from religious people that they’re displeased by, so it seems like the 2004 election, in particular, got a bunch of people book contracts to write about how bad God is.

ABERNETHY: Kim, there are some Supreme Court decisions coming down of some interest.

LAWTON: I think this coming year will see some interesting decisions about the conflict between religion and the public square. One is the Mojave cross. Can there be giant crosses in public property? Another one that I find particularly interesting is that the Supreme Court will be looking at a case with the Christian Legal Society and whether a law school can—the Christian Legal Society has a student club and they also believe that gays should not be in their leadership or their voting members, because that’s part of their religious belief. Well, the law school where they were operating said, well, if you believe that, you can’t be part of an official student group, because we don’t discriminate based on sexual orientation. So you have this clash of religious values. On the one hand, you have people who want to exercise their religious beliefs. And then you have people who say this is a matter of human rights or civil rights. Then those start clashing. Who trumps whom? So that’ll be interesting.

DIONNE: That’s a hugely important and really fascinating case, because you’re dealing with, in a sense, two conceptions of liberty, two conceptions of whether people should be free to be gay, and no organization on the campus should discriminate against them, and one can see how one gets to that conclusion, versus the right of the Christian Legal Society to constitute themselves as a group that has a very particular view on homosexuality. I think it could be a very bitter argument, precisely because each side is going to claim—they’re going to have competing goods, as each side will claim competing notions of freedom.

ABERNETHY: E.J., quickly, what are you going to be looking forward to particularly in the coming year? What stories?

DIONNE: I am going to be looking forward to a continuing moral debate about how we should organize this economy and what got us into the mess we’re in, in the first place. I think it’s going to be a real test of whether Barack Obama’s efforts to tamp down the culture wars have us get along a little better, whether that will succeed. Like everybody else, I’m going to be looking at how the test of these last two years—how the last two years are judged by the voters in November.

ABERNETHY: I’m sorry, but our time is almost up. Many thanks to Kim Lawton, to E.J. Dionne, and to Jason Byassee. Happy New Year to each of you and to our viewers.

Photos by Suzanne Opton

Originally published November 30, 2007

War is, in some ways, the ultimate spiritual crisis.

By its very nature, it requires participants to perform acts that would be considered legally and morally wrong in civilian life. “Your whole life, regardless of religion, you’re told, ‘Don’t kill, don’t kill, don’t kill.’ Then all of a sudden it’s, ‘Here’s a gun.’ It’s hard to reconcile that,” says Linda McClenahan, a Dominican nun, trauma counselor, and former Vietnam Army sergeant who lives in Racine, Wisconsin.

In a 1995 study, 51 percent of veterans in residential post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment in a Veterans Affairs facility said they had abandoned their religious faith during the war in which they fought. In the same study, 74 percent of respondents said they had difficulty reconciling their religious beliefs with traumatic war-zone events. Battle creates moral confusion, and it can leave a soldier spiritually as well as physically wounded.

Unlike many other traumatic experiences, combat can cause “moral pain” arising from “the realization that one has committed acts with real and terrible consequences,” according to a seminal 1981 article in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY by Peter Marin. He was writing about Vietnam, but his overarching thesis could be applied to any military conflict. Profound moral distress is the “real horror” of war, yet its effect on those who fight is rarely discussed.

The difficulty of talking about the spiritual wounds of war was apparent in October when the Episcopal Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Mass., announced a four-day retreat at its monastery called “Binding Up Our Wounds,” for men and women returning from places of war. Nobody showed up.

A November report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association underscores the magnitude of the problem. After they return from combat in Iraq, one-in-five active-duty soldiers need mental health care. For reservists, the numbers were even higher: Two out of five need treatment. And one 2004 study concluded that veterans who avail themselves of mental health services appear to be driven more by guilt and the weakening of their religious faith than by the severity of their PTSD symptoms.

“In a war, in a firefight, you’re both victim and perpetrator at the same time,” says the Rev. Alan Cutter, general presbyter of southern Louisiana for the Presbyterian Church (USA) and a former Navy officer who served in Vietnam. “At its heart, a trauma, and especially a war trauma, leaves a wound to the human spirit. When I came back, my spirit was pretty well shredded and ripped.”

Marin wrote that moral pain or guilt erroneously remained a form of psychological neurosis or pathological symptom, “something to escape rather than learn from,” and he alleged that therapy failed to take moral experience into account. More than a quarter-century later, many experts feel little has changed.

“Once the category of PTSD was established in the early ’80s, that swallowed the veteran whole,” says William Mahedy, an Episcopal priest and former Army chaplain who has spent 33 years working with veterans in southern California. “Combat creates far more wide-ranging problems than stress.”

It’s not just the act of taking a life that raises the kinds of questions Mahedy says can only be addressed spiritually and philosophically. Witnessing death and suffering also goes to the heart of life’s meaning: Why did God, if there is a God, allow this? Why is killing the enemy not a sin? How can I be forgiven? Why couldn’t I save my comrade? Why am I alive when I don’t deserve to be? Psychology isn’t always equipped to answer such questions.

“Trauma can be characterized as a sense of betrayal of one’s experiences: life wasn’t supposed to be this way,” says the Rev. Jackson Day, an Army chaplain in the central highlands of Vietnam from 1968 to 1969 and now the pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Upperco, Maryland. “The faith parallel to that would be the statement, ‘God has let me down. I did my part, and God didn’t do his.’”

In his book ACHILLES IN VIETNAM (1995), clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay explored combat trauma through a close reading of the ancient text of the Iliad and his own experiences treating Vietnam veterans with chronic PTSD. Those with lifelong psychological injury, he argued, had suffered a betrayal of “what’s right” — of leadership, trust, the dead, the social and moral order — above and beyond war’s “usual” horror and grief. Those whose belief in God’s love was shattered by war suffered another betrayal: their worldview and sense of virtue were obliterated.

In Shay’s follow-up book, ODYSSEUS IN AMERICA (2002), he used Homer’s Odyssey to look at returning troops whose spiritual wounds incurred on the battlefield can fester and worsen at home. The conviction that virtue is no longer possible, given God’s abandonment, can result in a withdrawal from moral commitment.

Medical-psychological therapies, Shay wrote, “are not, and should not be, the only therapies available for moral pain. Religious and cultural therapies are not only possible, but may well be superior to what mental health professionals conventionally offer.”

In an interview, Shay, whose work at the Boston VA outpatient clinic has been primarily with Roman Catholic patients, elaborated. “My sense is that this is a fundamentally religious issue. It’s possible to package it as a mental health issue, but I think we lose out. Even people who have had good secular treatments for their trauma still feel a need for the religious dimension of it. I don’t think as a society we’re offering it.”

VA research suggests that veterans who have suffered a greater loss of meaning to their lives are more likely to seek help from both clergy and mental health professionals. Therapists, however, may hit a roadblock with treatment when they feel out of their depth on spiritual or religious matters, and most clergy are not trained in trauma response.

But all faith traditions offer resources to respond to trauma, such as the Catholic sacrament of penance and reconciliation, of which confession is a part.

One of Shay’s patients was ordered by his lieutenant to “take care of” 17 Viet Cong prisoners, an order he interpreted as “kill them.” His squad was reluctant, and so he began firing first, even egging the others on. What weighed most heavily on his conscience years later was not his crime, but his belief that he had led others into mortal sin. “My response was that we knew a number of priests who had been chaplains in war and who knew what this was about,” Shay says. “This is about the real stuff, not the sins you confessed to in parochial school, but murder, cruelty, rape. [Your faith] has the resources to respond to that in a way that will matter to you.”

What matters to one won’t always matter to another. It depends on what faith, ritual, sacrament, or person you have invested authority in, says Rabbi Harold Robinson, a retired Navy rear admiral and the current director of the JWB [Jewish Welfare Board] Jewish Chaplains Council. As a chaplain, Robinson found that the study of Jewish texts on war and self-defense served as a powerful resource in addressing spiritual injury. “I think you invest more of yourself when you try to study and understand something,” he says. “By grappling with the text you’re also grappling with yourself. It’s an interactive process, not one that’s just imposed.”

Other chaplains have used Psalm 23, which famously portrays God as a patient shepherd, or Psalm 31, whose speaker calls himself a “broken vessel,” and they ask where veterans see themselves in the psalm. Even people who are not religious might be open to the psalms, according to Major Samuel Godfrey, an ordained minister in the Pentecostal Holiness Church and a chaplain in Iraq for the Combat Aviation Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. Shareda Hosein, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and the Muslim chaplain at Tufts University, lists several passages from the Qur’an dealing with Allah’s forgiveness and guidance that she says she might use in counseling a Muslim soldier — from Sura 39, for example, which promises mercy for those who repent: “Say: ‘My servants who have transgressed against themselves! Despair not of the Mercy of Allah, verily Allah forgives all sins. Truly, He is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.’”

In early medieval Europe, warriors returning from battle were expected to feel shame, even when their killing was technically licit. A 9th-century penitential, according to THE MORAL TREATMENT OF WARRIORS IN EARLY MEDIEVAL AND MODERN TIMES by Bernard Verkamp, “stipulates that the man who is blameless in committing homicide in war should nonetheless seek purification, because of the shedding of blood, and stay away from the church for one or two weeks, and abstain from meat and drink during the period.”

For the ancient Hebrews, too, the shedding of blood was considered a source of contamination. The Book of Numbers dictated a seven-day period of segregation outside the camp for returning warriors and mandated the purification of fighters and their garments.

As founder of the International Conference of War Veteran Ministers, Father Phil Salois, a Catholic priest and chief of chaplain services for the VA Boston Healthcare System, has developed ecumenical liturgies incorporating verse by World War I poet and soldier Wilfred Owen, Bible readings, and prayers written specifically for services of reconciliation and healing. “I think it’s about redemption, to bring back meaning in their lives,” says Salois, who served as an infantry soldier in Vietnam. “We try to teach them God loves them no matter what happened to them. There is nothing that is unredeemable.”

Some Jewish veterans use the mikveh, or ritual bath, in their search for a rite of purification and rebirth. The Birkat Hagomel, a public prayer of thanksgiving (”Praised art thou O eternal God ruler of the universe, who has redeemed with kindnesses those who are guilty, and who has redeemed me with all manner of goodness”), can also be recited before a Jewish congregation by someone who has survived a life-threatening situation. The prayer requires a communal response affirming redemption. “Afterwards, it entitles everybody in the congregation to go up to you and say what happened to you? Are you OK? And to make human contact out of that moment,” says Rabbi Robinson.

But Robinson questions whether a truly communal purification ritual is possible, suggesting that the separation between those who serve in the military and those who don’t is too wide to bridge meaningfully, and there is no consensus about where purification finally resides. Is it with the doctor and the psychiatrist, or with the priest and the rabbi?

Yet community involvement is something Shay feels is crucial to the whole notion of a purification ritual. “It’s not a matter of pointing a finger at the returning vet,” he says. “It’s that we all need purification after battle. You have gone into danger and done some things that perhaps were truly terrible, but you’ve done them in our name, and it’s we who sent you to do those things.”

Some returning veterans experience great feelings of isolation, and communal rituals can offset their sense of aloneness and provide them with an opportunity to talk about their experiences. As Captain Jeffrey Cox, a Massachusetts National Guard social worker who returned from a tour of duty in Iraq in 2006, puts it, “Does anyone…know my story outside of the people I’ve served with?”

As the recent experience of the Episcopal monastery in Cambridge demonstrates, for those who have served — and will serve — in Iraq and Afghanistan, it may be a long time before anyone hears their stories. Salois recalls a Chicago retreat where four couples canceled the day it began. That was the first retreat a young Iraq veteran had attended. “He was very focused on what we said about our experiences [in Vietnam] and how we journeyed throughout the years. When it came time for him to speak, he said, ‘I appreciate everything you’ve said, but I’m not ready to talk about it.’ And I thought, well, it was 13 years before I started talking about this.”

“One can hope that the rest of us will accompany them when we can and follow them when we should,” Peter Marin wrote of the nation’s war veterans. Their recovery, we may need to learn again, is a collective responsibility.

Benedicta Cipolla, a writer in New York City, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Iraq, the ethics of torture, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: There were controversial developments this week in the debate over how the CIA interrogated terrorism suspects after 9/11. The Justice Department released details of a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report detailing chilling interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. The attorney general ordered an investigation of what happened and appointed a veteran prosecutor to find out.

Did CIA interrogators go beyond the guidance they had? If so, should they be punished, and should Bush administration officials who authorized the techniques also be punished? We explore the moral issues with Shaun Casey, professor of ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington. Shaun, welcome. Let me take you back to the atmosphere right after 9/11. There was tremendous pressure on the administration to prevent another attack, to do whatever was necessary, to find out whatever they could about whether there was going to be another attack. Didn’t that justify the interrogation techniques that were put into place?

SHAUN CASEY (Professor Ethics, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC): I would argue that it’s precisely at those moments of crisis that we need to rely on our moral and legal tradition and resist giving up things like respect for the dignity of the human person, and I think that moral tradition argues that no matter who the person is, as a result of that dignity, they shouldn’t be subjected to the kinds of torture we suspect went on.

ABERNETHY: And even if you’re pretty sure you might be able to save several thousand more innocent lives, that would not trump the dignity of the individual prisoner?

PROFESSOR CASEY: What’s interesting even at the time, and now we know for sure, such information did not exist. We did not extract through torture any information that directly led to preventing another similar sort of tragic event. So in essence no, I think we should resist, because we don’t possess that kind of advance knowledge.

ABERNETHY: Apparently the CIA tried hard to keep what was done within the guidelines that existed but that in some cases people did exceed those guidelines. Should they be punished?

PROFESSOR CASEY: Absolutely. I think if in fact we gave guidance to those interrogators, and they still violated those guidelines, there needs to be a moral accountability in order to reinforce this notion that we do respect the dignity of human beings.

ABERNETHY: And what about up the chain of command? If the investigations reveal that high officials, maybe up to the vice president and the president, authorized things that shouldn’t have been done should they be punished?

PROFESSOR CASEY: I think they should be held morally accountable, and that doesn’t necessarily mean criminalization or actual legal punishment, but I think in a democracy that espouses certain moral values we need to have accountability, not only of what has happened, but it also prepares us morally to face the future when we may find ourselves in a similar sort of situation when we’re facing a crisis and we face pressure to abandon legal and moral precedents that we’ve observed.

ABERNETHY: But if a new administration can have a criminal investigation of it’s predecessor and put people perhaps on trial, that creates an enormous partisan gridlock and nothing else would be done.

PROFESSOR CASEY: Well, that’s right, and I think that’s what the president is struggling with right now. We’re looking at simply about 10 cases where he is, actually where the attorney general has asked the prosecutor to investigate. At this point I’m not aware of any attempt for a comprehensive criminal prosecution. On the other hand, I would argue it might be better to think about a bipartisan commission that in a sense grants amnesty legally to all the participants so we can learn what really happened from the top of the system to the bottom, as a way not only of holding them accountable morally but also preparing us to face the future when we may find ourselves under similar circumstances, and I think that’s a way to in a sense take some of the air out of the partisanship which seems to be growing at this time.

ABERNETHY: You have read what you could of the CIA inspector general’s report in 2004. Quickly, can you sum it up? What did you find? What did they conclude?

PROFESSOR CASEY: They concluded that there weren’t a lot of rules in place, and they had to move very quickly to give guidelines, which they did. Secondly, they confessed that some of their own employees violated those guidelines. But perhaps most importantly of all they concluded they cannot say these enhanced interrogation techniques led to unique knowledge that could not have been gotten by other means, and so that really casts a light of doubt on the effectiveness of these techniques.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Shaun Casey of Wesley Theological Seminary.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In the ongoing national debate about the morality of torture, the question is whether it is ever the lesser evil. We want to identify the underlying principles in the debate, beginning with part of President Obama’s reply at his news conference last Wednesday (April 29) when he was asked whether he thought the Bush administration had sanctioned torture.

President BARAK OBAMA (at White House news conference): What I’ve said, and I will repeat, is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. You start taking short cuts and over time that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

ABERNETHY: But can torture sometimes be justified?

Jean Bethke Elshtain is a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School and at Georgetown University. She joins us from Nashville. Shaun Casey is a professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington. Welcome to you both. Shaun — never?

Dr. SHAUN CASEY (Professor of Christian Ethics, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC): I think the bulk of the Christian moral tradition says that torture is never morally permissible. If you go to Christian Scripture, you go to the wide arc of Christian social teachings, you get a very consistent historical answer that it is never right to torture another human being.

ABERNETHY: What’s the underlying reason for this?

Dr. CASEY: Well, you look at basic Scripture, you look at Jesus in the Gospels about love your neighbor as yourself, do not repay evil for evil, love your enemy—so there’s this sense that each person is created by God in the image of God and has an inherent dignity, and torture would render that dignity undermined.

ABERNETHY: And Jean, what are the underlying principles for you?

Dr. JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN (Professor of Social and Political Ethics, University of Chicago Divinity School and Georgetown University): Well, the underlying principle for me is what I would call an “ethic of responsibility.” That’s an ethic that is especially important when we’re talking about statesmen and stateswomen who often have the lives of thousands in their hands, quite literally.

ABERNETHY: So they have a different rule, a different ethic, a different moral standard than somebody would if he’s just acting as an individual?

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Not entirely different. We don’t want a huge chasm to emerge. But I would say that there are extraordinary circumstances when harrowing judgments must be made by those we tax with the responsibility of keeping us safe, and at those times there may be a “lesser evil” kind of calculation to be made.

Dr. CASEY: We have about a 60-year tradition of international law and domestic law that regulates the behavior of those who, in fact, are called to be our political leaders and there is a consistent prohibition of the use of torture. In fact, the United States has been a leading catalyst in that international movement, so I agree with that. But I think we have some rules that are in place that prohibit torture.

ABERNETHY: But beyond what’s legal is what’s moral. I mean, they’re not always the same, are they?

Dr. CASEY: That’s true, and as the president said the other night in part of the clip that you played for us, that he believes that a leader in his position who faces those harrowing decisions ultimately is going to decide on both, of the angels and on responsibility if in fact we as a country refrain from using torture.

ABERNETHY: So, Jean, the president then has this primary moral responsibility, would you say, of protecting the people?

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Yes, that’s why we have states. That’s the reason that people made the deal back in the 17th century to organize the state — to prevent capricious power and the slaughter of human beings willy-nilly. That’s the reason we have states and have leaders to protect us.

ABERNETHY: And do you think people generally, American people, expect that a president will, somebody has written, have, you know, has to have dirty hands?

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Well, the problem of dirty hands is a perennial problem in politics. What it means is that one can’t remain absolutely morally pure, that you take actions. You don’t know what the full ramifications of those actions may be. Now I fully agree, by the way, that torture is something that should be ruled out as a general norm. My concern is with certain very specific and tragic circumstances, if there are severe forms of interrogation that may well fall short of torture as we usually understand it but are certainly severe — whether those are permissible.

ABERNETHY: And Shaun, the classic argument for permitting an exception, an extraordinary circumstance is the ticking bomb scenario, you know, that somebody in your custody has information about when a terrible, terrible thing might happen that would cost the lives of thousands of innocent people. Under such circumstances, perhaps others, don’t the people in authority have the responsibility to do something extraordinary if they think that can give them information quickly?

Dr. CASEY: Well, the fist thing we should observe is that there are no historical examples of that being lived out in reality. That’s a hypothetical contrary to fact, that it never obtained in the real world. What I worry about is the lack of rules to govern that exception. Many people argue that because they can create a hypothetical case like this there should be no rules against torture, and I think that is a grave moral error. The problem is we never know if that information can be elicited by other means. There’s no way to verify that, indeed, torture is the only option in those cases. So what happens if you torture that person and you turn out to be wrong, the information proves not to be true? But what do you say then to the person who’s tortured at your hands?

ABERNETHY: Jean, you want to comment on that?

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Yes. I would say that the resort to extreme techniques would be used only after all other possibilities had been exhausted. It wouldn’t be the first resort; it would be the last resort, and again we’d have to be clear about what we’re considering torture here, because some of the most severe forms I think must be ruled out. But there are other forms of enhanced interrogation that, I think, under those extreme circumstances and as an exception, may well, under the ticking time bomb scenario, be resorted to.

ABERNETHY: There is a recent poll by the Pew Research Center that found that 71 percent of Americans — American adults — said torture can be justified often or sometimes or rarely. Only 25 percent said never. Is that influential to you at all?

Dr. CASEY: I think that shows the influence of the Rupert Murdoch school of ethics — that we’ve been watching Jack Bauer, where torture is routinely shown to be effective on our television screens. I don’t think we decide what is moral and what is immoral based on the latest Pew poll about American opinion.

ABERNETHY: Jean, and what do you think of investigation and perhaps prosecution of those who authorized what was done?

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Well, it strikes me that, number one, it would immediately be politicized in a way that would be egregious and unacceptable, and number two, there’d be the question of how far back you go. Extraordinary rendition began under President Clinton, for example. So I think that that kind of going back and second-guessing those who in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were dealing with shock and horror and fear about another imminent attack and were asked by CIA operatives in the field whether certain things were permissible—it strikes me that the best thing for now is to go on and to make clearer what we expect from those who are interrogating even high-value targets and operatives of Al Qaeda, for example.

ABERNETHY: Shaun — investigation, prosecution?

Dr. CASEY: We need a thorough moral accounting of what’s gone on. We’ve had an air of moral permissiveness in the last administration under which tens of thousands of innocent people have been tortured — not simply the special Al Qaeda cases. We need to find out why that happened. We need to find out who was accountable in order to build a very tall wall against this kind of behavior. We need to empower the folks who do the interrogating with very bright lines about what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable. At this point that, in fact, is not clear.

ABERNETHY: But, quickly, would you come out saying that there could be sometimes an exception to the “never” position?

Dr. CASEY: No.

ABERNETHY: No. Never?

Dr. CASEY: Never.

ABERNETHY: Thanks to Shaun Casey and Jean Bethke Elshtain.

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Thank you.

The ancient Roman Colosseum, known historically for violent gladiator battles, animal combat, and public executions, has become a symbol for international protest against capital punishment.

Over the past decade, every time a convicted person receives a stay of execution or a government abolishes the death penalty Roman officials change the Colosseum’s night illumination from white to gold.

It happened in December 2007 when New Jersey abolished the death penalty. It happened again this March when Governor Bill Richardson signed a bill to repeal the death penalty, making New Mexico the 15th US state to do so, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The special lighting was recently repeated on April 15, when Richardson and other New Mexico representatives, including Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe, were honored at a Colosseum ceremony marking the state’s repeal. Richardson also met with Pope Benedict XVI and spoke at a news conference in Rome organized by the Sant’Egidio Community, an international lay Catholic organization opposed to capital punishment.

Richardson, who is a Democrat, a Catholic, one of the most prominent Hispanic politicians in the US, and a one-time supporter of the death penalty, told the Associated Press in February he was struggling with his position but his views on the death penalty had “softened.” He pointed to the work of the Roman Catholic Church against capital punishment, indicating that discussions with Archbishop Sheehan had influenced his own considerations.

But Richardson also cited as a factor the financial cost of imposing the death penalty. In doing so he highlighted one of the most striking recent developments in the death penalty debate: economic arguments against capital punishment have become as important as religion or ethics, and they are now regularly invoked by opponents of capital punishment. Because life without parole is cheaper for the state than the death penalty, the repeal of capital punishment, they say, will allow more resources to be channeled to survivors of the victims of crime. In New Mexico, according to the legislative finance committee a death penalty case costs approximately $20-25,000, compared to $7-8,000 for a non-death penalty murder case.

For many death penalty opponents, New Mexico’s repeal was the result of years of hard work. The bill was first introduced 12 years ago, but it always faced challenges in the senate’s judiciary committee. “It was heartbreaking,” says the Rev. Dr. Holly Beaumont, a Disciples of Christ minister and legislative advocate for the New Mexico Conference of Churches. She represents the conference on the New Mexico Coalition to Repeal the Death Penalty.

Over the years faith-based death penalty opponents in New Mexico remained resolute, says Beaumont. “We weren’t going away, and the legislature knew that we would be back again.” She attributes their ultimate success to the multi-layered nature of the coalition, a collaboration of faith communities, the families of murder victims, Death Row exonerees, and other “people of conscience.” The coalition focused on reaching and educating those who had not yet made up their minds about capital punishment and pointed its advocacy efforts directly at the Roundhouse, New Mexico’s state capitol building and the home of its legislature.

In addition to New Mexico, a number of other states around the country have been dealing with death penalty repeal this year. A coalition of religious leaders, lawyers, and the families of murder victims is supporting passage of a pending bill to abolish the death penalty in Colorado, where this month the House of Representatives voted down capital punishment by a one-vote margin, and lawmakers say they will use the money saved (estimated at about $1.4 million per death penalty case) to solve hundreds of “cold” murder cases. The Colorado bill now heads to the state Senate, where it is expected to pass.

New Hampshire and Kansas have also considered anti-death penalty legislation this year. In New Hampshire, the House voted to end capital punishment, but the governor has said he will veto any repeal. In Kansas, where repeal was advocated primarily as a way to save money, the effort stopped short of a vote and the issue is scheduled for more study. According to the Wichita Eagle, each death penalty case costs an average of 70 percent more than each non-capital case. The paper also suggests that Kansans will be watching to see how nuanced the stand on capital punishment held by US Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican and a Methodist covert to Roman Catholicism, will be in his coming bid for governor.

In a recent vote Montana state senators supported a plan to replace the death penalty with life in prison with no parole. But at the end of March the judiciary committee of Montana’s House of Representatives rejected the proposed abolition bill. The prospect of wrongful executions of innocent people and the expense of capital legal procedures were both major factors for those who supported the bill. According to Republican Senator Roy Brown, a pro-life Catholic and recent candidate for governor, supporting a ban on the death penalty was consistent with his anti-abortion stance. But Republican judiciary committee vice-chairman Ken Peterson, a Mormon who opposed repeal, said the Book of Mormon and “eight books in the Old Testament” support the death penalty.

All of these efforts to repeal the death penalty seem to be getting a boost from the current economic crisis and are evidence of renewed interest in the argument that the death penalty costs considerably more than sentencing murderers to life in prison. Many legislators seem especially interested in financial arguments this year. In Maryland, for example, an Urban Institute study estimated that the average cost to taxpayers for reaching a single death sentence is $3 million, about $1.9 million more than the cost of a non-death penalty case.

Still, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, a Catholic, urged the state Senate to repeal the death penalty outright on moral grounds, characterizing capital punishment as “an issue that touches the very soul of who we are as a republic, who we are as a people” and as “one of the defining moral quandaries of our times.” He called on lawmakers to consider the “higher things” on which our “free and diverse republic was founded” and asked the legislators: “Will we be a society guided by the fundamental civil and human rights bestowed on humankind by God?”

But Maryland lawmakers amended the repeal bill and decided instead to make the state’s death penalty statute among the most restrictive in the nation, limiting capital cases to those with DNA or biological evidence, a videotaped confession, or a videotape linking the suspect to a homicide. Even though the Maryland House of Delegates appeared ready to end capital punishment entirely, O’Malley urged them to accept the restrictions and “the innocence reform bill” because, as Maryland Citizens Against State Executions (CASE) concluded, “it moves our state in the direction of more justice,” and it will save lives.

Last year close to 70 leaders from various faith communities signed a letter to calling on the Maryland General Assembly to abolish the death penalty. This year the Ecumenical Leaders Group in Maryland formed an Interfaith Coalition to End the Death Penalty, encouraging leaders of faith communities to host death penalty events at their places of worship and asking them to talk about the death penalty during services. Sermon stories were made available on the CASE Maryland Web site.

Nearly half of CASE Maryland’s member organizations are religious groups, including Quakers, Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians, and ecumenical ministries. In addition to sermon suggestions, the group’s Web site includes an open letter to pastors, clergy, and congregational leaders making the case for abolition of the death penalty in light of the Christian faith: “Christians of all faith denominations have long held that the death penalty violates the sanctity of human life, eliminates the opportunity for redemption, and its application is not consonant with the example of Jesus’ forgiveness of injustice.”

Indeed, one of the strategies of the successful repeal movement in New Mexico was also to concentrate on themes of restoration and restitution rather than retribution. Supporters emphasized that passing the repeal bill offered the opportunity for killers to repent of their actions and eventually achieve some sort of reconciliation.

New Mexico’s repeal legislation will take effect on July 1. During the 2010 legislative session, the New Mexico Coalition to Repeal the Death Penalty now says it will focus its efforts on support for the education of children who have had a parent murdered and increased funding to the New Mexico Crime Victims Reparation Commission for services to families of murder victims, among other issues. Future steps also include a bill that provides restitution to the families of murder victims.

While Beaumont acknowledges the role the current economic crisis played in swaying New Mexico legislators this year, she still stresses the importance of trying to “change the world view” of defenders of the death penalty, asking them questions and engaging them in conversation that will get at “when was the last time you changed your mind about some deep ethical issue, and what was it that caused you to change your mind?”

“You will never convert someone you hold in contempt,” says Beaumont, who regrets the misuse of Scriptures and the lack of what she calls “good biblical interpretation” in the death penalty debate. “We’ve done so much damage that people aren’t listening anymore,” she says. “They do not want to hear Scriptures that enlighten the world we live in because they are used to hearing Scriptures that have been used as a weapon rather than to empower and guide.”

But it may be that, in a recession, money will trump moral argument as states continue considering repeal of the death penalty. As the Boston Globe recently editorialized, “Almost every state is facing a deficit, and getting smart about corrections budgets is an unexpected side benefit. Abolitionists will take whatever argument they can.” It went on, however, to reassert the more conventional arguments against capital punishment: “The death penalty is not a deterrent to most deadly crimes. It is applied unevenly. It places the United States among the world’s most brutal regimes. And there are 130 other reasons: the 130 death-row inmates who were exonerated by new evidence. Their deaths would have carried an awful price tag.”

Despite all the arguments—economic, biblical, or otherwise—for repeal, and increasing attention to death penalty abolition in legislatures across the country, it still needs to be noted that the state of Texas, long the nation’s leader in executions, continues on pace this year to execute perhaps more than twice as many criminals as in 2008, when 18 Death Row inmates were put to death.

Elaine de Leon, an intern at Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly from January-April 2009, is receiving a Master’s degree in Theological Studies in May from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC.

Wendell Berry

The first thing that becomes apparent in times like this is how imaginary the economy is. Not imaginary in the sense of fake, necessarily, but in the sense of the way economic realities depend on how reality is imagined. So much of the panic selling of stocks, for example, is based on perception of reality, which then becomes the reality. When billions of dollars of wealth can vanish overnight, it becomes apparent how imaginary wealth is.

All of this is another way of saying that economics and theology have a lot in common. Both deal with how larger reality is conceived. Capitalist economics sometimes tries to deny this by separating questions of “fact” from questions of “value.” We are told, for example, that a market is “free” as long as transactions are informed and voluntary. It does not matter what people value; the economist claims neutrality on that question. All that really matters is if a transaction is free in the above sense. Regulation is usually considered an interference with freedom.

But of course this negative definition of freedom as freedom from interference is a deeply value-laden, theological notion. It assumes a view of the human person as essentially an individual, and it views the human will as sovereign and uncorrupted. Both of these ideas conflict with Christian theological notions of the human as essentially interrelated and in need of the healing of the will by God’s grace. For the Christian, true freedom is not just a lack of interference but is defined positively as an ability to flourish by being connected to God and to our fellow humans who are made in God’s image.

So the questions being raised now about regulation and deregulation and “interference” with the freedom of the market are theological questions, and the theological answer, I think, is that there is no such thing as a value-neutral “free” market. The question is always: “What kinds of economic arrangements lead to true human flourishing and freedom?”
Wendell Berry

We usually turn to the state to regulate the market when crises hit, but I don’t think the modern bureaucratic state is capable of giving real answers about true human flourishing. The best the state can do, as we’ve seen, is try to protect large financial interests. The state has been systematically undermining the interests of workers for a long time now, while politicians, especially on the right, distract the working class by emotional appeals to anti-immigrant sentiment and issues like gun ownership and reverence for the flag.

We have to begin, therefore, to create economic spaces that are not based on profitability and freedom from interference for those in power. There is just no way to avoid the deep theological questions about what makes humans really flourish. The churches should be cooperating with others to imagine and create economic spaces where true human flourishing can take place. The fair trade movement and providing markets for local farmers are a couple of examples. These create personal contact among people, where economic transactions take place within a community of people who are not simply trying to maximize self-interest, but are concerned for the flourishing of all parties involved. One of the lessons of the global economic meltdown, it seems to me, is that a stable economy is always essentially local, as the American writer and farmer Wendell Berry has been saying for years.

The Eucharist provides a resource for Christian imagination and practice here, because it connects people throughout the world but is always essentially local, a people sharing heavenly food around a table. The Eucharist is a kind of consumption whereby we are consumed by a larger body, the Body of Christ, in which, as Paul says, when one suffers, all suffer together, and when one rejoices, all rejoice together.

–William T. Cavanaugh is associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the author, most recently, of BEING CONSUMED: ECONOMICS AND CHRISTIAN DESIRE.

The recent economic debacle should cause us to reread, or perhaps read for the first time, the Christian theological tradition and how it inextricably relates economic exchange to morality (our quest for the good) and to God.

Alfred Marshall

British economist Alfred Marshall, well known for his Marshallian scissors of supply and demand, once said that the modern science of economics “puts man in the saddle.” In other words, all that now defines economic exchange is what humans decide. “Man” takes the place of God in driving history. Perhaps the wild speculation in the stock market that has come to a ruinous end for many (recall that some economists were predicting the Dow would reach 36000 by 2005 — do they still have their jobs? — and the impending fluctuations, where some would try to outguess the market and receive windfall profits, only accentuating the fluctuations) might cause us to reconsider Marshall’s wisdom.

What would it mean to think of economics in terms of God and the good? It would mean in part, I think, that we would take more seriously the problem of usury, which is often mischaracterized. Usury occurs when anyone thinks he or she can have an unlimited growth of money without it being related to validly productive enterprises. It is a sin against God’s created order. The vice of usury is greed, wanting a maximization of profit without relating it to any fruitful created product. Profit is permissible, but within a context of production that is good and can be rightly ordered to God. Once we have a system where an enterprise such as a corporation can be productive, that is to say, its workers produce quality products that serve the common good and better the lives of their neighbors and even turn a modest profit, and yet the first obligation of the CEO of that corporation is not to those workers or those neighbors but to the maximization of shareholders’ profit, then we have an improper disjunction between work, productivity, and money.

Diligence, loyalty, and work are no longer rewarded. What gets rewarded is speculation. We lose any relationship between what is produced and how it is rewarded.

We have seen this in the stock market, where there is little to no correlation between a corporation’s stock price and its earnings. I am no economist, but this seems to me inevitably to produce something of a Ponzi scheme that eventually comes back to haunt us. The individuals who benefit from this are not those who do the work, but those who speculate. They do not purchase goods. They purchase “time” — a speculative possibility of what might be in the future — and try to “sell” it to others, knowing that not all can benefit. The bubble will eventually burst.

As long as business, finance, and the “art” of management fundamentally serve only this one principle of economy, maximization of profit, we may very well continue to have such wild fluctuations every one or two generations, as we now seem to be experiencing. The result will be, as it currently is, that we will socialize the losses while we continue to capitalize the gains. Everyone becomes responsible to pay out when the Ponzi scheme fails. Only those who got in and out early reap the profits. The winners benefit at the expense of their neighbors’ good.

I don’t claim to know how to fix this, but I do think we have to rethink the role of the corporation, its managers, and its commitment to locality: to workers, neighborhoods, schools. Perhaps churches, synagogues and mosques could at least begin there, reminding people of God’s intentions for a profit related to the goodness of creation’s fruitfulness. They all share a fundamental assumption that unlimited growth for its own sake is usurious and that God gives us the opportunity for economic exchange in order to “sanctify” or “make holy” God’s name throughout creation.

What we have seen among CEOs as well as individual households is certainly unholy. It should at least be named for what it is. Greed, we have discovered, is not good.

–Steve Long is professor of systematic theology at Marquette University and the author of many books, including DIVINE ECONOMY: THEOLOGY AND THE MARKET.

The Seven Virtues

Ethics in the economy depends on character, not calculation. It depends on being a good person, not on “stakeholders” or other utilitarian considerations. The word “ethics” comes from the Greek word for “character,” and such an approach through what humans could aspire to be dominated Western — and for that matter Eastern — thinking for millennia. The old and honored approach is called “virtue ethics”: Be thou just, loving, prudent, courageous, temperate, hopeful, and faithful, said the ancients, and you will not make loans to people who cannot possibly pay or request bridges to nowhere from people who can. We are called by God to be virtuous — that’s the religious way to put it. But you can, instead, name the seven virtues the Seven Secular Commandments and note that an economy cannot get along without a modicum of all seven.

–Deirdre N. McCloskey is UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES: ETHICS FOR AN AGE OF COMMERCE.