Connecticut, et al.

On April 16th, 2007 there was a shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech that claimed the lives of 32 people.  At the time, I was the Vice President for Academic Services at Bethel, and the next day (5/17/07) I gave the following devotional at a meeting of the faculty.  It seems relevant given the events of today in Connecticut.

12 years ago today I was at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, where I was working on my Masters Degree. I remember wondering if America was under some sort of attack, thinking how remarkable it was that the attackers got all the way to the center of the country in Oklahoma City, where the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building had been blown up and 168 people killed. In the days that unfolded after that, almost more shocking than the event itself was to learn that it had been Americans who committed the atrocity. 

8 years ago tomorrow is the date of the Columbine shootings—again Americans, this time teenagers whose minds had been warped into some kind of sick alternate reality where the actual shooting of 13 students seems almost to be the logical conclusion of the hatred and sociopathic behavior that preceded it.

Sure there’s 9-11 that came as ideological attack from outside our nation. But we do pretty well at attacking ourselves from within. Maybe there’s not the obvious civil war like we hear about from Iraq where the car-bomb-a-day pace has been kept up for a surprisingly long time (and shows no signs of letting up). But here our “freedoms” do a pretty good job of keeping us enslaved and at war with ourselves: capitalism, freedom of the press, entertainment. These are the pillars of American society, and there’s nothing wrong with them in and of themselves. But unchecked they lead predictably to greed and materialism, partisanship and relativism, the glorification of violence and pornography. These are not what our country was founded on, but they are what we feed on today—these “freedoms” for which the terrorists supposedly hate us.

It may sound like I’m poised to go off on some political tirade, but I’m not. The project of modernity, by which political policy and technological progress would bring about some sort of utopian society, was reduced to silliness in the 20th century. The post-modern world was not shocked on Monday when another gunman went nuts down in Virginia. Angry, yes; grief-stricken, yes. But not really shocked. The world is messed up. It is not a safe place. And try as much as we will, we’re not going to make this world a safe place by enacting more regulations. Having to put your toothpaste in a Ziploc baggie at the airport might stop one kind of potential evil but that’s a drop in the bucket.

And perhaps the most surprising thing about this for us Christians is that God doesn’t seem overly concerned about our safety. Remember the Christian girl and her powerful witness at Columbine High School who was one of the victims? And the stories of faith that came out of September 11 tragedies. And I’m sure there were Christians among the victims in Virginia too. I don’t find in Scripture that it is God’s goal for us that we are all safe and untouched by tragedy; I don’t even find that it is his goal for us that we are all kept happy. I find in Scripture that God desires above all that we be made holy, that we increasingly take on the character of Christ, and that we infect the world, not with some kind of superficial religiosity, but with the transforming power of the Gospel.

I believe with all my heart that Bethel has a role to play in this. Tonight I have to give a little speech at the Founders’ Banquet that is being given to those who regularly contribute financially the College. I’m going to do another variation on the one-string banjo theme I’ve been pushing for awhile now, and that is that we strive to instill in all of our students that no matter what their majors, they have a calling, a role to play in the Kingdom of God which Jesus proclaimed to now be among us. And in that sense, we have a lot of influence in seeing the transforming power of the Gospel infused throughout society.

Frederick Buechner is a writer I like to read. He’s not very well known because he’s a bit too religious for the secular market, and a bit too secular for the religious market (those are the kind of writers I’m drawn to). He defines vocation as that place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep needs.

April is a hard month; it always is. Springtime takes forever to get here; we’ve been going hammer down for months; students are squirrelly; contracts for next year come out and rarely do we feel that we’re paid what we’re worth. It is the natural reaction for almost everyone (myself included) to look at everyone else and think “if they would just shape up and do their jobs right, everything would be a lot better”. It’s April. The hardest month of the year in the academic cycle, and this cycle has certainly been the hardest one I’ve been part of. I should have known better than to start off the year at Faculty Retreat with a reflection on pain and suffering. Next fall’s talk will be about wealth and prosperity! 

 I hope in the midst of April, you can still sense a deep gladness. One of the world’s deep needs is reflected in each of our students and their futures. What will they become? How will they influence society? What a great vocation to be in! 

I’m sure you heard about the 76 year old Romanian Engineering Professor in Virginia—he himself a survivor of concentration camps. After hearing the gun shots in neighboring classrooms he tried to hold off the gunman by putting his own body against the door, giving his students a chance to jump out the windows. Talk about a love for students. 

Let’s pray.

I still agree with most of what I said there.  It may sound like I'm not in favor of gun regulation, but that isn't quite true.  I don't think it will solve the problems, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that it will help (I'll save the argument for that position for another day).  That saddest reality of this is that since that massacre in April of 2007 until this one in Connecticut today, there have been these other mass shootings in our country (taken from this website):



September 27, 2012. Five were shot to death by 36-year-old Andrew Engeldinger at Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis, MN. Three others were wounded. Engeldinger went on a rampage after losing his job, ultimately killing himself.

August 5, 2012. Six Sikh temple members were killed when 40-year-old US Army veteran Wade Michael Page opened fire in a gurdara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Four others were injured, and Page killed himself.

July 20, 2012. During the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, CO, 24-year-old James Holmes killed 12 people and wounded 58. Holmes was arrested outside the theater.

May 29, 2012. Ian Stawicki opened fire on Cafe Racer Espresso in Seattle, WA, killing 5 and himself after a citywide manhunt.

April 6, 2012. Jake England, 19, and Alvin Watts, 32, shot 5 black men in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in racially motivated shooting spree. Three died.

April 2, 2012. A former student, 43-year-old One L. Goh killed 7 people at Oikos University, a Korean Christian college in Oakland, CA. The shooting was the sixth-deadliest school massacre in the US and the deadliest attack on a school since the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.

October 14, 2011. Eight people died in a shooting at Salon Meritage hair salon in Seal Beach, CA. The gunman, 41-year-old Scott Evans Dekraai, killed six women and two men dead, while just one woman survived. It was Orange County’s deadliest mass killing.

September 6, 2011. Eduardo Sencion, 32, entered an IHOP restaurant in Carson City, NV and shot 12 people. Five died, including three National Guard members.

January 8, 2011. Former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in the head when 22-year-old Jared Loughner opened fire on an event she was holding at a Safeway market in Tucson, AZ. Six people died, including Arizona District Court Chief Judge John Roll, one of Giffords’ staffers, and a 9-year-old girl. 19 total were shot. Loughner has been sentenced to seven life terms plus 140 years, without parole.

August 3, 2010. Omar S. Thornton, 34, gunned down Hartford Beer Distributor in Manchester, CT after getting caught stealing beer. Nine were killed, including Thornton, and two were injured.

November 5, 2009. Forty-three people were shot by Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan at the Fort Hood army base in Texas. Hasan reportedly yelled “Allahu Akbar!” before opening fire, killing 13 and wounding 29 others.

April 3, 2009. Jiverly Wong, 41, opened fire at an immigration center in Binghamton, New York before committing suicide. He killed 13 people and wounded 4.

March 29, 2009. Eight people died in a shooting at the Pinelake Health and Rehab nursing home in Carthage, NC. The gunman, 45-year-old Robert Stewart, was targeting his estranged wife who worked at the home and survived. Stewart was sentenced to life in prison.

February 14, 2008. Steven Kazmierczak, 27, opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, killing 6 and wounding 21. The gunman shot and killed himself before police arrived. It was the fifth-deadliest university shooting in US history.

February 7, 2008. Six people died and two were injured in a shooting spree at the City Hall in Kirkwood, Missouri. The gunman, Charles Lee Thornton, opened fire during a public meeting after being denied construction contracts he believed he deserved. Thornton was killed by police.

December 5, 2007. A 19-year-old boy, Robert Hawkins, shot up a department store in the Westroads Mall in Omaha, NE. Hawkins killed 9 people and wounded 4 before killing himself. The semi-automatic rifle he used was stolen from his stepfather’s house.

God help us all.

King Arthur and Stanley Hauerwas

For several years, son #1 has been trying to get me to read his favorite novel, The Once and Future King.  I finally picked it up a couple of weeks ago, and just finished it yesterday.  I think it was John Adams who said about Don Quixote that he was sad that it ended; that was not my reaction to Quixote, but it was to The Once and Future King.

It is the retelling of the King Arthur legend, and counted by some to be the greatest fantasy book of all time (though I'm not sure how one objectively measures such things).  We get to follow Arthur from his boyhood with (the future) Sir Kay and their lessons from their tutor, Merlin.  Then Arthur pulls the sword from the stone and so inherits the throne of England.  He finds the situation in England to be one where might makes right, and so has the idea to channel all of this "might" into chivalry, in which knights go about fighting for justice.  The greatest of his knights is Lancelot, and an interesting love triangle forms with these two and Queen Guenever.  I say it is interesting, because each of them really likes the other two in the triangle and feels a kind of loyalty and allegiance to them.  But of course it leads to their undoing.

There is another kind of undoing, though, that interests me more in the story.  There is a period during which chivalry flourishes.  The bad guys have been silenced, and England is a much nicer place to live.  But it is a peace that is purchased through the superior strength and might of the Knights of the Round Table.  Might still seems to be winning; it is just that the good guys are now the mightiest.  Arthur struggles to get out of the cycle of violence and replace it with the rule of law, but when individuals are kept in some sort of check, violence erupts again in groups or nation-states.  "There were no laws for that."

At the end of the book Arthur wonders, "Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hearts?"  He decides that even very charismatic leaders could not get the whole population to do something that was radically out of character for them.  "A leader was surely forced to offer something which appealed to those he led?  He might give the impetus to the falling building, but surely it had to be toppling on its own account before it fell?  If this were true, then wars were no calamities into which amiable innocents were led by evil men.  They were national movements, deeper, more subtle in origin."

Enter the second half of my title.  I've also been reading Stanley Hauerwas's essays in his War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity.  What is it about America that sees war as the answer to every problem?  Of course that's a complex issue, but Hauerwas thinks one thread of the answer lies in our "secular" state that has substituted national identity for religious identity, and so war becomes a liturgical act.  War for us has become a way of remembering fallen heroes and legitimating ourselves.  He says, "For Americans, war is necessary to sustain our belief that we are worthy to be recipients of the sacrifices made on our behalf in past wars.  Americans are a people born of and in war, particularly the Civil War, and only war can sustain our belief that we are a people set apart" (27).  Such language comes out clearly in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:  "It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced... we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."

But then where does it ever end?  We have to show that we can fight and die for country to preserve our "freedoms" just as the previous generations did, otherwise they would have done so in vain.  So we use good violence to combat bad violence.  And King Arthur can tell us that in such a situation, violence wins.

I don't think I've ever called myself a total pacifist.  I've never quite been convinced that the secular state should never resort to violence in dealing with those who just want to set the world on fire and watch it burn (though I suspect such cases are much rarer than official intelligence reports suggest).  But if it is ever proper for a country to use violence to achieve its goals, let's please not call it a Christian country (I'm not so sure that countries are the kinds of things that can be Christians anyway...).  I am convinced that the way of Christ is not the way of violence.  I'm sure some of you disagree and have your favorite Bible verses to prove your case.  I can throw some of my favorite verses back at you.  That only proves the point I made in a previous post (here) about the under-determination of Scripture.  Instead, let's settle this like men: read The Once and Future King, and then we'll talk about it.

Independence Day Part II

Last year Jonathan Foreman wrote another declaration of independence (of sorts):

When success is equated with excess
The ambition for excess wrecks us
As the top of the mind becomes the bottom line
When success is equated with excess
If you're time ain't been nothing but money
I start to feel really bad for you honey
Maybe honey put you're money where your mouth's been running
If you're time ain't been nothing but money

I want out of this machine
It doesn't feel like freedom

(chorus)
This ain't my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I'm tired of fighting for just me
This ain't my American dream

When success is equated with excess
When you're fighting for the Beamer, the Lexus
As the heart and soul breathing the company goals
Where success is equated with excess

I want out of this machine
It doesn't feel like freedom

(chorus)

Cause baby's always talkin 'bout a ring
And talk has always been the cheapest thing
Is it true would you do what I want you to
If I show up with the right amount of bling?
Like a puppet on a monetary string
Maybe we've been caught singing
Red, white, blue, and green

But that ain't my America,
That ain't my American dream

(chorus)

Independence Day

231 years ago, Thomas Jefferson penned these words:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."

He went on, then, to give a long list of grievances like keeping standing armies among them, taxing them without their consent, depriving them of trial without a jury, and so on. So we became the United States of America. On Memorial Day I gave a list of my conflicting allegiances to the most powerful nation on earth (find them here).

Happy 4th of July!

USA

Memorial Day weekend offers the opportunity to display some of the tangled web of thoughts and feelings I have regarding the land of the free and the brave. Here are a few of them:

1. I consider myself a citizen of the world more than a citizen of America.


2. When I say "we" in this list, I'm identifying myself as one of the Americans.


3. I'm not very patriotic.


4. I got misty-eyed when visiting the Statue of Liberty.


5. I'm often embarrassed when seeing Americans in other parts of the world.


6. I'm glad I have an American passport.


7. I like having ice in my drinks.


8. At the USA - England soccer match I went to, I was embarrassed that the only crowd chant we had was U-S-A, U-S-A.


9. I think baseball is way better than cricket.


10. I don't believe that God likes us more than other nations.


11. I'm rather cynical and pessimistic about the motivations of most people in federal government.


12. I found new respect for our nation's governmental system reading Founding Brothers.


13. Capitalism is the worst form of government-sponsored economic systems--except for all the others.


14. I'm embarrassed that MTV is the most widely watched network in the world and that Baywatch is the most widely watched TV show in the world.


15. I fear that we're getting worse at public education rather than better.


16. Our system of elections is messed up.


17. I have respect for soldiers who laid down their lives for our country.


18. The mighty American military does not make me feel proud or safe.


19. I wish we as a nation could bless those who curse us.


20. Freedom of speech is a very good (and important) thing.

Happy Memorial Day!