A survey by the Pew Research Center found that some of the most supportive of torturous acts are also some of Christianity’s most pious.  54% of Christians who attend service at least once in a week said the use of torture against terrorist suspects was either “often” or “sometimes” justified.  In the survey, 19% of White non-Hispanic Catholics answered that torture can “often” be justified to gain important information.  White Evangelical Protestants accounted for 18%.  These two groups led all other groups in the survey, which also included mainline Protestants as well as religiously unaffiliated.

Ostensibly, this survey indicates that the more religiously-based one’s convictions, the less likely for torture’s incompatibility with them.  Suffering has followed, if not motivated, the Christian religious movement since a Jewish rabbi, hell-bent on reform, began to publicly speak his thoughts and opinions.

The most prevalent symbol of suffering is the cross itself, on which Jesus painfully respirated his final breaths.  The scourging that occurred before his murder and the extracted death that crucifixion entails (a ghastly crushing of the lungs by one’s own weight) provides a saddening irony over the matter.  It seems hard to fathom Christians finding a minutiae of justification for such primitive and egregious violations of international law and human dignity.  Christ’s divinity was emboldened by his staunch antipathy toward marginalization and barbarity.  And this is the ultimate point of Christianity: to mimic the man many view as the human incarnation of the divine.

Perhaps it is the sinister nature of Christ’s execution that somehow makes the heinousness of torture permissible.  Maybe even alluring.  Suffering is a theme in the Gospel-iterated life of Christ.  From the meditative trek lasting forty days and nights in the desert, to the emotional anguish experienced in Gethsemane, and to the torture leading up to his expiration atop Golgotha.  Christ’s life is filled with emotional and physical suffering.  This, to not to even mention the psychological suffering Paul describes in his epistles to a young and burgeoning religious movement.

But perhaps the most relevant of New Testament literature comes in the apocalyptic and grossly misread book, “Revelation.”  The allegorical imagery inspires the most impressionable of imaginations to foresee the forthcoming end of times.  However, Apocalyptic literature, of which “Revelation” is, and which was quite popular at the time of its writing, meant to inspire those that were oppressed and marginalized in the time of authorship.  Written during the time of Roman Emperor Nero, infamous for his august cruelty towards the nascent religious movement, “Revelation” has inadvertently inspired a romantic view of suffering that has lasted well into contemporary times.

The violence depicted in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ underscores, what at times can only be called, a perversion towards the truculent.  The fascination with suffering has kindled the imaginations of saints and laity for generations.  It is the unfortunate and unnecessary cross Christianity must bear, as they say, to seek redemption in the suffering of oneself or others.

But how does it come back to torture?  Why is it that evangelical Protestants are more likely to support the use of torture, and less likely to oppose it, even more than the religiously unaffiliated?  Why is there such a prevalent quest for suffering as if it were a necessary conductor for divine revelation?  The reason: suffering is part-in-parcel with Christian sensibilities. As such, the suffering of (theoretically) the most savage of individuals, and even the distress to one’s morality and ethical foundation because of this, is justifiable to those who view the United States as an appendage of Christ’s mystical body.

However, we must not be remiss to acknowledge that 31% of mainline Protestants uphold the conviction that torture can “never” be justified, which surmounts all groups surveyed, religious and non-religious alike.  This shows that there are Christians who do not cater to grandiose thoughts of sadism, much like those who cheered when nails were submerged into Christ’s flesh.  Only by looking past the romanticism derived from Christian notions of suffering can one understand the viewpoint of Christ: how detestable torturing is, and how God wants no part of it.

Neither should we, for that matter.

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