I stopped short on this headline on a Religion New Service story: Poll shows support for torture among Southern evangelicals. The story was about a poll released in Atlanta at a conference Evangelicals for Human Rights co-sponsored. It said that 57 percent of the white evangelicals interviewed said torture can be often or sometimes justified when interrogating suspected terrorists. When a thoroughly leading question was asked - that "the U.S. government should not use methods against our enemies that we would not want used on American soldiers" - the result changed so that the majority said torture was rarely or never justified.I wonder how Catholics would have responded.

Paul Moses is the author, most recently, of The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia (NYU Press, 2023). He is a contributing writer. Twitter: @PaulBMoses.

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