GOD, GUNS, AND AMERICA

“GOD, GUNS AND AMERICA”

            I had another blog ready this morning, but the events in Las Vegas overnight compel me to write on the sacred power of guns in America.  Ever since the Ronald Reagan Revolution in the 1980’s, the worship of guns in American life has deepened and increased.  I was just reading an article on guns in American life in American Heritage Magazine from 1978, and its subject was the continuing power of guns.  In the article, its author John G. Mitchell indicated that we as a culture were in a fight for our souls over the availability of guns.   That fight is just about over – we have put guns at the center of our lives, as seen by the mass shooting in Las Vegas,  apparently the largest one in American history. 

            It joins a long list of such shootings – Pulse in Florida last year, Charleston, SC and Redlands, California in 2015, Aurora, Colorado in 2012, Virginia Tech in 2007, and many others.  And, of course , the kicker for me in pronouncing that guns are sacred in American life, came in 2012 when 20 of our children were gunned down in Sandy Hook, and there was no outcry in Congress.  It was as if I were back in Leviticus 20, where sacrificing children to the Ammonite god Molech was strongly prohibited.  Such a prohibition means that there was such Molech worship, and the gravity of such a rivalry between God and Molech meant that the death penalty was given to the offenders.

            Today in the initial reports we are not getting any mention of such a rivalry.  What we are getting are mentions about mental health, about terrorism, about “loners.”  Only a few commentators on the left dare to mention that today’s shooting and the ones that preceded it are a result of our worship of Molech, of our belief in the divine power of guns and the violence that they bring.   The Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, the re-militarization of our police by the Trump administration, the rise in the price of gun stocks today all point to this belief held deeply in American culture – we believe in the divine power of guns.   There is no other way to put it.

            There is no mention of the Las Vegas shooting being an act of terror, and that is chiefly because the shooter was white.  Our culture does not believe that white people do terrorism, that Dylan Roof’s mass killing of African-Americans in a church in Charleston was not terrorism but rather a sick individual.  This refusal to connect whiteness with terrorism points to why guns have been given Molechian, divine power in American culture.   Those of us who are classified as “white” have a deep fear of those classified as “black,” and we believe that we must have our guns to protect us from black people, especially black men.  The lies and propaganda of American history have sunk deeply into our collective white souls – those classified as “black” and as “native Americans” are the savages, and those of us classified as “white” are the victims.  The historical record is so clear on this that it begs the imagination – those of us classified as “white” are the perpetrators, not the other way around.  

            I felt this powerful, Molechian fear when Roy Moore of Alabama pulled out his gun last week at a rally before he won the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate.   It was a religious rite designed to speak to the deep fears of white people in Alabama and throughout the country.  I could hear the Mississippi Plan of 1890 to the Scottsboro boys of the 1930’s to the assassinations of the four girls in the Sixteenth Street Church in Birmingham in 1963 to the killings of Jimmie Lee Jackson, Jonathan Daniels, and Viola Liuzzo in 1965.  In these acts of terrorism, we must sacrifice our children and our people to the god of guns that made white America great – Molech is ever with us.  I shouldn’t be surprised – but I am – when a little over a week after this religious rite was performed in Alabama, Molech called forth one of his followers to kill and slaughter.

            I’m not hopeful on this, but I wish that I were.  The belief in Molech, guns, and America is just too deeply rooted in our cultural life at this point.  Even here, however, I must remember that a Palestinian Jew named Jesus moved the world with just a few women and men followers.  So, let us pray that the God we know in Jesus will make that kind of move in us, and I am grateful for those who are working heart and soul on this – that movement is our only hope.  Let us practice what we pray!   Otherwise it is the grim words from Leviticus 20 about Molech worship – God will give us the death penalty.