Drawing on the recent Pew survey on Christians and torture, which showed that evangelicals are much less likely to condemn it than are mainline Protestants, scholar Diana Butler Bass says it’s clear that Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodist, et alia, form the nation’s “moral conscience.”

In recent years, Butler Bass says, “mainline Protestants were also the religious group that most strongly opposed the Iraq War, rejected waterboarding, and expressed worry about the admixture of religion and politics at the nation’s military academies. In every survey, mainline Protestants see torture, violence, and military intervention as the strategies of last resort in national politics.”

Ultimately, the different evangelical and mainline Protestant views on torture hinge on theology, Butler Bass says.

“Evangelicals believe that Jesus’ death on the cross–with all its brutality–saves them. Put bluntly, an act of political torture resulted in their “personal salvation” and entry into heaven. Jesus’ death “substitutes” for the death of Christian believers and, in that his suffering, the rest of humanity is granted a reprieve for their sins. In a very real sense, God allowed the Romans to kill Jesus in order that God might accomplish a holy end. Hence, they don’t see torture as fundamentally bad. Indeed, some evangelical theologians argue that torture is redemptive–that one person may die for the sake of the whole community.”

In contrast, mainline Protestants believe:

“…that Jesus was a victim of political violence that revealed the essential ruthlessness of sin. And, in that demonstration, he also demonstrated that to “lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” instead of revenge, was the way to redeem the world. Mainline theologians switched the focus away from the violence-as-salvation toward self-sacrificial love as the route to human wholeness. They do not believe that Jesus’ suffering was good. They believe that it was a demonstration of the evil of a human political system that placed Caesar before God. Torture, as Jesus himself suffered, has no redemptive qualities. Salvation occurs as one loves one’s neighbor as one’s self.”

As Butler Bass writes, it’s rare to see theology having such immediate and profound social consequences.