Image yourself in Sunday School singing, “Jesus kills the little children”. Yet again, I return to a national crisis we should know the answer to. There will be a next time. Because there always is. And Christians do nothing but empty-hearted hand-wringing. “Such a heartbreaking tragedy. 14 students & a teacher were killed in a mass shooting in Uvalde, TX, today,” tweeted Franklin Graham as the story broke.
God’s little sheep keep getting hurt. It’s the natural outcome of our demonically-twisted faith in God AND guns. “You’re supposed to have an AR-15. It’s biblical. So if you don’t have one, go get one,” an evangelical activist implores. “You can’t be a Christian if you don’t own a gun,” a parachurch honcho preached to an enthusiastic Texas church. The same God-fearing Texas where gun laws are the loosest in the country. And where a teenager in Uvalde, Texas got two semiautomatic rifles on his birthday and promptly emptied them into grade schoolers’ bodies. Twenty of the 26 victims were between the ages of five and six. A 15 year-old boy in Michigan was gifted a handgun for Christmas. He killed four students wounded seven. The Sandy Hook mass murderer fired 154 rounds in less than five minutes, claiming 26 lives – most of which were ages six and seven.
A school shooting survivor was asking, “do 2nd, 3rd, & 4th graders not have the right to feel safe at school?” After Uvalde, President Biden likewise asked, “as a nation, we have to ask: when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? These are phrased rhetorically – meaning the question prompts its own answer. Jesus frequently uncovered the truth by answering a question with another – as in Matthew 12, where he showed “that the logical consequences of an extreme adherence to the law lead to the absurdity of a sheep being hurt or dying simply because it is the Sabbath day. His rhetorical question is the message; it exposes the wrongness it addresses. That the Pharisees knew this truth becomes evident as they grew indignant and tried ways to evade Jesus’ underlying message. Because the real question is not literally the one posed, but rather a deeper question of ethical and spiritual ultimacy implicated by the first, which all understand as the real one to be answered. Pres. Biden comes to the point: When, in God’s name, will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?” Like the Pharisees who think they know all the correct answers, evangelicals know the true answer to the marriage of their guns and religion, and evade it.
Über-preacher James MacArthur exclaims, “there is a war on children! This generation of leaders, the immoral people that are engaged in this massive assault on children are going to have to answer to God.” (And this from a pastor whose church harbored a child molester on staff.) Evangelicals claim these tragedies occur because the wicked and evil have removed God from public schools. And while evangelicals like Franklin Graham decry the “sin-sickened” state of America, they are busy lobbying to make it easier for the same morally unfit people to use these super-soaker weapons.
“Across the country, parents are putting their children to bed, reading stories, singing lullabies— and in the back of their minds, they’re worried about what might happen tomorrow after they drop their kids off at school”, wrote President Obama in the wake of Uvalde. I can hear the echo of the Pharisees in Tucker Carlson’s cynical response: Obama was desecrating the memory of recently murdered children with tired talking points of the Democratic Party.
Obama prophetically defines the real war on school children, which has the answer already in it. Meanwhile, their lifeless bodies keep piling up. It’s spiritually incomprehensible to be both so-called “pro-life” and pro-gun. Evangelicals don’t have a gun problem. They are modern day Pharisees who have a Jesus problem.
“There was a time when we might have thought that the mass shooting of an elementary school would have been the final straw. Targeting tiny children in their classrooms, randomly gunning them down in front of their friends who had to witness the carnage, the horror endured by the families of the victims would seem to be the sort of thing that would shock the collective conscience.””
Not anymore; not with evangelicals. Evangelicals are all about helping ‘protect families,’ no matter how many kids have to die. And they just don’t give a shit.
From Under The Rubble 
This is good stuff. I am out to publicize the connections between the evangelicals and their unwavering support of the GOP and the resulting carnage to our children.
Almost worse than our worry about their safety, at least in my mind, is what a dereliction of their trust in us, their parents. We can’t even assure our children are safe at school anymore? Can you imagine what could possibly be going through their little minds while this is happening to them? Wanting their Mommies and their Daddies? I can hardly even thin of it. The Angels of Newtown (as I refer to them) were barricading themselves in their classrooms while they were listening to approaching gun fire! And we, as parents, can’t even reasonably assume they’ll make it home —- alive.
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Thanks for the benefit of your comment and for following my blog. I call what we have in our midst, the Caucasian Church of Determined Unbelieving. It is difficult for me to move past their spiritual void that is rightness without righteousness. A “biblical” worldview that sacralizes guns somehow misreads Jesus’ words, “suffer the little children” to mean that they should indeed suffer. The whole world is horrified at the American slaughter-fest caused by guns, excepting evangelicals themselves. We need more prophetic voices like yours.
Blessings
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The silence of evangelicals (my tribe) is infuriating to me. Even more so while they sing the praises of guns. Guns have become an idol; a stand-in for Someone long lost.
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