Build Zion With Blood and Jerusalem With Wrong

Last night at our Quaker Peace Fellowship meeting we watched Taxi to the Dark Side.

Infuriating.

But as I was preparing for it, writing up the curriculum, as it were, I was struck by the difficulty of describing a dependence on torture as anything other than a kind of faith.

I offered this as part of the discussion material:

Relying on or accepting torture requires a kind of faith- a trust in something unprovable and unknowable and often contrary to given evidence: that torture will provide useful information. It becomes a system that takes human life in the name of that faith making that human life a sacrifice. In Christian theological terms this is idolatry....

The issue of faith goes further. It preserves our way of life. It keeps us safe. It is ultimately a good. That all seems to be part of the faith and hope in a system that uses torture (even as it wants to call it something else). Torture becomes an act of devotion to the god of that system. I could really drag out the metaphor, only I don't think it's a metaphor.

In any case, faith or hope seem like the wrong word, but in their inappropriateness, each seems like the perfect word. Others may want to call it something else. A negative faith. Sin. Despair.

Sure.

But I think faith has to be the first word to use so there is some dissonance, so we are confronted with our idolatrous relation to a system. (That is, if we are a people who have a sense of what faith might be.) If we have a misplaced faith, it ought to be called out as such. Only after we see that it is possible for it to be misplaced faith could something like sin or despair make sense. No?