Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, March 24, 2018

Where Is Your God Now?

Reading this expose on a different town that has suffered through gun violence gives an interesting perspective on what the author calls "Gun Fatalism."  Basically, the residents of this small Kentucky town don't believe that gun control measures would prevent school shootings.  There's that familiar sense of learned helplessness that permeates the gun control debate, but there is something else there that I find is pervasive among rural conservatives.

It's God.

The basic idea is that bad things happen because you turn from God and good things can only happen with God's grace.  Obviously the first part is a meaningless tautology.  If something bad happens, you can just throw up your arms and blame the lack of Jesus in the world.  It's not an explanation for what happened, it's a decision not to look for an explanation that might discomfit you.

The second part creates the idea that "nothing can be done."  Because God isn't there to prevent the insane and the evil from shooting up schools...well, what can you do about it?  Malcolm X made a similar point about the role of Christianity in creating passivity in African American populations.  The idea that heaven is your true reward means that you continue to abandon your responsibility to try and improve things on earth.  You give up your agency to God and allow the world to unfurl in all its chaotic and violent tumult. 

It strikes me that this isn't really what Jesus was talking about and may have contributed to the decision of Roman authorities to execute him.  This isn't about the Gospel, it's about a mindset that destroys human agency on the altar of "God's Will."  This is about the difference between the spiritual truths in the Bible and the narrow authoritarian mindset that focuses more on Leviticus than the Beatitudes.

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