“Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we’d baptize terrorists.”Many have expressed outrage at the sentiment, although the ultra-conservative talk-radio wünderkinder were quick to defend her remarks in their own mindless way.
For me, she offers a harrowing look not only into a possible geopolitical nightmare (a Sarah Palin presidency, which I am grateful is never likely to happen) but into a network of beliefs that already animate American public life and its odd relationship with Christian faith. Palin's remarks force the question in its most blunt way: if Americans should be reviled by what Joe Carter at thegospelcoalition.org calls the assimilation of "one of the means of God's grace to an act of torture," how is it possible that they should not be reviled by torture itself?
How can it be okay to perform an act whose comparison with baptism is repulsive, especially upon a person Christians hope one day to baptize?
William Cavanagh's Torture and Eucharist argues convincingly that within the Christian sacramental rites an act of formation occurs that allows to reimagine the world, our place and the place of others in it, and the God in whom all of these subsist. Our enemies are those whom God has condescended to make his friends; we ourselves are enemies before God whom God has graciously reconciled to Himself.
Baptism puts to death the enmity that we have with God and raises us to life as friends of God and one another. The prospect that a baptized person could ever point a weapon at another person is a fierce moral contradiction, never to be celebrated even if it were necessary. That the threat of terrorism has ever necessitated that a person be tortured seems doubtful to me (in large part because I have real doubts about whether it actually delivers the goods); but even if I'm wrong about that, torture is at best only a measure of the dreadful consequence of the failure of politics in the modern world. In that failure, the torturers are not unimplicated.
I do not deny the necessity of lethal force in the case of terrorism. Nor do I deny that at times it is not possible to be just in our actions to prevent the innocent from suffering at the hands of terrible people. But evil people do not arise in vacuums; nor are our judgments about that evil immune from deception and self-interest. The libido dominandi afflicts us as much as those we name our enemies. Politics is not always possible, but sometimes we are the problem. American military operations kill innocent people; this is an indisputable fact. We are bound to protect the innocent, even though we cannot always be sure who the guilty are. In this complexity, baptism stands as the hope of a future judgment that will end the agony of our enslavement to our and others' sin. Baptism proclaims reconciliation as the destiny of the world and the sinfulness attending every combat action. Baptism heralds a coming kingdom in which things receive their right names. It announces a peace before which the armament of the world will one day be exposed and powerless. And it summons us to ongoing repentance as the mode of that kingdom's engagement with the kingdoms of this world.
Terrorism is the modern geopolitical evangelism; torture is its corresponding sacrament. The irony of Palin's remarks is that they are not the slightest bit exaggerative in the world she inhabits. That she could claim that world as Christian testifies to thee failure of Christian witness to our enmity with God and to God's gracious love to those whom we call our enemies. Her remarks are a summons to repentance for a world we have failed to bring to God: "We were with child, we writhed in labor, but we gave birth to wind. We have not brought salvation to the earth, and the people of the world have not come to life" (Is. 26:18).
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