To some, torture is a political issue. But to the Rev. Peg Chemberlin, it’s an issue of right and wrong.
“Torture, condoned and ordered at high levels of our government, has stained our national reputation, credibility, integrity and soul,” says Chemberlin, the 14-year executive director of the Minnesota Council of Churches. The corrosive effects of torture violate both national and divine law, she said in her Star Tribune blog.
Organized under the umbrella of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), a coalition of more than 250 religious organizations committed to ending U.S.-sponsored torture and cruel treatment, religious leaders congregated in June in the District of Columbia’s Lafayette Park to protest the issue. The organization believes President Barack Obama’s executive order banning torture is a step in the right direction but insufficient by itself. The protest was staged to urge Obama to create a Commission of Inquiry, to “fully investigate and disclose the conditions, decisions, policies and practices that allowed torture to proliferate,” Chemberlin says.
Chemberlin and NRCAT’s other religious leaders—such as Rabbi Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Dr. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America—met with Christina Tchen, director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
Chemberlin participated in the protest in her role as president-elect of the National Council of Churches, where she will represent more than 100,000 churches and 45 million constituents
nationwide. She will be officially inducted on Nov. 12 at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis.
As president, she will continue being a religious spokesperson in the political realm. Obama has appointed her to the 25-member advisory council on faith-based and neighborhood partnerships, assigning her to a one-year term on the Economic Recovery and Domestic Poverty task force within the council. “I plan to be engaged in many ways around alleviating domestic poverty,” she says.
But in the meantime she’ll continue to speak out on torture. “We felt it was important for the religious community to weigh in on what is clearly a moral issue,” Chemberlin says.
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