Cavanaugh om tortyr och modernitet

Both attitudes toward torture - that we don't and that we must - stem from what is commonly called "American Exceptionalism" - the idea that the United States has a messianic role to play in assuring that history moves forward against the enemies of progress, liberty and reason.
In important ways, the United States has not really secularized at all. What has happened instead, to borrow a phrase from historian John Bossy, is that in the modern era the holy has migrated from the church to the state. By this I do not mean that Christian evangelicals had an inordinate influence on the Bush Administration. I mean that faith in the United States and in "secular" Western values can take on the status of a religious conviction, for the propagation of which the United States has assembled the largest military in history.

William Cavanaugh - Torture then and now: How should the Catholic Church do penance for the Inquisition?