I am still trying to comprehend the massacre in Newtown Connecticut. It seems to be an evil committed by a young man who was quite possibly mentally ill. He used an arsenal of weapons kept by his mother, a woman who ensured that he was able to handle weapons, and who he killed before he went on his rampage. He may have been evil. He may have been mentally ill. He may very well have been both, but more importantly he was well trained in the use of firearms and very well armed.
This is not an article about gun control. However after seeing the effects of these types of weapons on civilians in this country and US military personnel and Iraqi civilians in Iraq I wonder about the wisdom of allowing just anyone to own a military grade assault weapon and enough ammunition to lay waste to a town. No, this is my criticism of fellow “Christian” ministers that attempt to reduce all the ills of our society and crimes of individuals to the lack of government enforcement of their religious views in public schools.
In the wake of the massacre certain religious-political leaders on the political right. Former Arkansas Governor and current Fox News commentator Mike Huckabee, who dropped out of the seminary that I graduated made this comment:
“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools…Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”
Not to be outdone failed former pastor Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association said on his radio program:
“The question is going to come up, where was God? I though God cared about the little children. God protects the little children. Where was God when all this went down. Here’s the bottom line, God is not going to go where he is not wanted….God would say to us, ‘Hey, I’ll be glad to protect your children, but you’ve got to invite me back into your world first. I’m not going to go where I’m not wanted. I am a gentlemen.”
Personally I think that the comments by both men do a grave disservice to God and God’s people. Men like these and their political hack allies use such language to attempt to blame everyone but the culture of death that their worldview helps promote. A culture that makes it easier and cheaper to obtain a military grade assault weapon than health care, that glorifies a perplexing blend of vigilantism and militarism mixed with apocalyptic religious views is not healthy. It is not Christian. It is not Pro-life. Of course the people of Newtown will also have to deal with the cultists of radical hate, Westboro Baptist Church as those professional religious hate spewers attempt to protest the funerals of the victims.
The fact is that there is little linkage to what these men preach and the facts. If there was such a direct correlation one would think that the liberal-secular humanist countries of Western Europe would have astronomically high rates of gun violence. You would think that the same would be true of other countries as well. But the fact is that the United States has one of the highest gun violence and deaths per 100,000 of any country in the world. In fact our rates of death by guns dwarf those of any Western European countries, most Asian countries and are only exceeded by countries of Central America that are wracked by drug violence, much of which is enabled by the consumption of drugs by Americans, or countries wracked by full scale civil war. The fact is that in most instances you seldom see school shoots and mass murder on a scale seen in this country in Western Europe, most of Eastern Europe, Japan, Korea or other industrialized societies, most of which are far more secular than the United States.
If we want to look at history we can find that in almost any era, even in the days where American Christians dominated the political and moral landscape of the country that we were a country in love with guns and enamored with gun violence. The big difference now is the amount of firepower easily available to anyone that can afford it, or in the case of the latest maniac took from the mother that he murdered with her own weapons.
To be so crass as the seminary dropout turned political hack Huckabee and the professional hate monger Fischer to blame this on the lack of prayer in schools, or that “God will not go where he is not wanted” is nothing more than worst kind of religious abuse. It is shameful and it makes a mockery of the Gospel. God goes exactly where he is not wanted, and died on a Cross for it. In the midst of Good Friday and for that matter all Good Friday experiences, especially that horrible Friday in Newtown, God is there, not in power but in suffering, his name Emmanuel, “God with us.”
Peace
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 