The 'ethics' of torture

In Australia, public debate over the ethics of the 'war on terror' has recently focused on the situation of David Hicks to the exclusion of almost all else. While I find the treatment of Hicks - and the Australian government's long-standing unwillingness to challenge his detention - horrifying, it concerns me that Australians seem more worried about the specific case of Hicks than about the broader illegality and inhumanity of the situation at Guantanamo. This piece by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek is a powerful discussion of the issue of torture at Guantanamo - well worth reading.

History for the Church (3): The Big Picture

I have recently come across a number of on-line discussions of the question: Why don't men go to church? Given the stats - women significantly outnumber men in every Western denomination - such discussions are not new. Participants tend to suggest a number of reasons for this phenomenon, from the 'femininity' of worship styles ('men hate silence and soppy songs'), to feminism ('men are pushed around by women at church'), to the sexism of the church ('men object to the way women are treated in churches'). Suggestions such as these are hotly debated, largely by reference to personal experience. eg, 'I'm a woman and I hate soppy songs' or 'I'm a man and I love soppy songs'.
What such discussions almost never do, however, is consider the most basic of historical questions. Has it always been like this? If not, when and why did it change? Questions like these immediately force us away from micro-issues to a broader perspective. In this case, for example, a very little research will demonstrate that the gender imbalance in churches in the Western world started to become apparent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.* Interestingly, American settler churches were predominantly female almost from the beginning, whereas in Britain the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries appear to have brought about this shift. With this information, it immediately becomes obvious that soppy songs and feminism are unlikely to be highly significant factors in this change. Without proposing a definitive answer, this historical perspective suggests we might need to look to issues like industrialisation, changes in class structure, the development of new denominations and theologies, and the changing relationship between church and state. How have these changes affected the way Christians 'do' church? And, how have these changes affected what it means to be a woman or a man?
The value of considering this historical perspective lies not only in its power to explain the present. It also encourages us to look at broader, deeper meanings than those suggested by our own experience. For example, if we change our music or run 'men's-only' groups in order to attract men to church, we may indeed be successful. But we will not be asking the really difficult, and perhaps really important questions about whether our culture or the gospel determines how we as churches talk and think about what it means to be male or female, what it means to be part of a church, and how the two fit together.
This, then, is my next suggestion about the value of history for the church. In my last post I argued that looking at the past helps us ask different questions about the present. Here I am suggesting that looking at the past helps us answer questions about the present differently. History can alert us to the big picture, to the shifts in society and culture that influence us in profound but often imperceptible ways. It keeps us from allowing our own experience to dominate our interpretation of present events. At its best, it confronts us with the gospel, which is always preached and lived in a particular time and culture, to which it is always a word of both judgement and grace.

wilberforce and the evangelical left

I'm hoping to get back to my history for the church series soon, but in the meantime I noticed this interesting article, which discusses an issue I have referred to briefly: the use of William Wilberforce as a pin-up boy by evangelical lefties.