In his initial response to the shooting deaths of twenty six- and -seven-year-old students and six adults in Newtown, CT, President Obama called for "meaningful action" to end such tragedies. Many suspected that he was speaking of a political solution (a suspicion that he confirmed two days later). While a political solution is unlikely to have any real impact on the safety of our children, the President's call for "meaningful action" is one that Christians should rally around. If there is going to be any action taken in view of this heinous crime, it will come from those of us who bear the name of Christ. But are we willing to take the "meaningful action" that would make a positive difference?Thus far the political talk about ending mass killings of innocent people has centered around gun control. Not surprisingly, people who see the 2nd Amendment as fundamental to our freedom are resisting and will continue to resist any efforts by our government to limit access to weapons and ammunition. Such a reaction speaks to the fundamental problem confronting us as a people: abuse of our rights, real and perceived. While we may or may not have abused our rights under the 2nd Amendment, we certainly have abused our 1st Amendment rights. With far more detrimental effects, we have abused rights that are more perceived than real.
There are certainly genuine rights that belong to us as citizens of the United States. These rights should be protected and promoted by our government and our citizenry. But these rights, real rights, are abused when we insist upon maintaining them to the detriment of our neighbor. Have we, as Christians, displaced the call of Christ to love sacrificially (i.e., love in a way that may cost us something) with the American ideals of individual rights? Our long held insistence that we can have things both ways has eroded our witness and render us ineffectual in the public square. "Meaningful action" will only come about when we recognize that being faithful to our call as citizens of heaven to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Jesus invariably involves setting aside our claim on rights as citizens of a nation. For Christian Americans, we abuse our rights when we refuse to deny ourselves and set our rights aside for the sake of others.
We also abuse our rights as Christians in this world when we make use of rights to sin. While we must wrestle with the out workings of how to exercise our 2nd Amendment rights for the sake of our neighbors, there's a much clearer course of action for us when it comes to our 1st Amendment rights. While we enjoy the freedom as citizens of America to engage in a wide variety of expression, especially in our entertainment, much of what we engage in is clearly sinful. Have we let our 1st Amendment rights trump God's call to hate the wickedness and impurity of our world? How can we praise God with our lips and look upon His glory with our eyes while filling our minds with the base, despicable, and vile content found in everything from children's cartoons to first person shooter video games? We have not only stood by while our culture has immersed itself in violence, sinful sex, and wanton materialism for its entertainment, we've joined in with them as a celebration of our 1st Amendment rights. "Meaningful action" includes us as God's people ridding our lives of this cancer. "Meaningful action" calls for us to exercise our free speech to speak with passion and conviction for an end to such destructive expression.
If we are reluctant to exercise our Constitutional rights in a God-pleasing way, we are paralyzed when it comes to addressing the greatest contributor to the causes of mass shootings: the insistence on a right that does not exist in either our Constitution or God's Word. The so-called right to abortion (or "reproductive choice") has so undermined our understanding of the value of human life that there is no possibility of protecting lives until we rid it from our national psyche. No degree of restriction of 2nd Amendment rights and no amount of constraint of our 1st Amendment rights can change the way that we have come to view the sanctity of human life. If there is a clarion call to "meaningful action" by God's people by the mass shootings in our country, it is first and foremost to take a stand for life. How can we honestly mourn the deaths of twenty children and at the same time ignore the 4,000 or so children who died that same day through abortion? A nation that will not protect the lives of children before they are born can not protect the lives of children after they are born.
Despite the President's call, it's improbable that our government will take any "meaningful action" that will change our violence saturated, self-centered, and pleasure-driven culture. Any attempts to do so will meet will stiff resistance from people insisting on their rights - real and perceived - and be choked to death in the gridlock of a divided nation. But there is a greater call to action. God's call to act is the only chance that we have of changing things in our world. It's up to God's people in this nation to do the hard work of self-denial and self-sacrifice if any "meaningful action" will come out of our responses to the tragedies of Newtown, Aurora, Virginia Tech ... and wherever is next. How will we answer that call?
I was going to write a longer response, but for the time being I would like to throw a couple of things out there. First, some have been citing statistics lately that show a disproportionate correlation between these sorts of shootings and white males, who are raised to feel privileged in our society and when things go wrong feel a deep, self-evidently true conviction that the world should feel their pain. I suspect that this probably does play a certain role in the psychology of these incidents.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I would oppose any attempt to try to explain this sort of incident strictly in terms of sociological or psychological factors, and that includes linking it with a devaluation of life in our culture. This may also play a role, but what occurred here is something so much more acutely sinister. This wasn’t an act of disregard for life the way a drunkard might kill someone on the road; it was an intended, specifically malicious and sinister act. I believe part of the reason people are struggling to make sense of this sort of unimaginably horrible act is that we have tried to convince ourselves that there is no devil, so that we therefore don't need this religion stuff. There is no way, in my view, to "explain" why someone would want to cut down with a nearly military grade semi-automatic weapon a classroom full of children. This is genuine demonic evil.
Yet this is not to say societal and psychological factors aren't at play. I also think that we live in a generally fear mongering society which thinks in terms of conflict and fighting to resolve conflict (also the devil’s pleasure). But I am not sure about the link between abortion and these events. I have complained often that railing about abortion alone, without addressing with equal severity rape, human trafficking, poverty, racism, education, and so forth, is not really pro-life... However, while a wanton attitude toward abortions in our culture may be on the rise and thus indicates a devaluation of life, I don't know that a devaluation of life as such can really explain this sort of atrocity. Our culture at large is clearly horrified at this event. When we turn a blind eye to killings overseas or in movies or video games, this does indeed indicate at least a numbing to the killing of life. But the Newtown shooting goes so much further. We have in general convinced ourselves that the devil is a matter of superstition, so we seek explanations for this kind of atrocity in terms of psychological disorders or sociological factors and so forth. The devaluation of life is rather itself a symptom of the general secularization of culture (not in the Madisonian sense of separation of powers), the attempt to completely remove and extricate all religious or faith-based elements from all public society, and this ends up being internalized in private life. There is a connection, I think, between parents spending very little time with their children and the general disorientation of our culture from any sense of ultimate meaning that characterizes the secularization of a culture. It is this that I think has handed our culture over to the devil. In light of this, even violent video games and the devaluation of life are themselves only symptoms of a deeper problem.