So there was another church shooting.
But this was not just any church. This was a Unitarian Universalist Church. Right, the folks who accept pretty much everybody with love, who feed the hungry, shelter refugees, stand up for free speech, support equal rights for queer folks and women and racial minorities. They were in the middle of a children’s play, for cryin’ out loud. God have mercy.
And this was no ordinary shooter. This was a middle-aged, straight, white, conservative male.
Excuse me for “profiling,” but I’d be a fool to not notice and care that this is how conservative, elite males are normed into society: to always blame someone else, to take their frustration out on other, weaker people, to turn to violence when they face hardship. I’d be a self-hating fool to not be scared and outraged by this.
He bought into the hateful homophobic rhetoric that passes as theology in conservative churches these days. He couldn’t stand that some people in some church no one was making him join were tolerant and happy. He wanted to punish people at the church that had made local news for being welcoming to gays and lesbians and for hosting PFLAG meetings.
He attacked the church as a way to lash out against liberal movement “ruining the country.” Killer Jim Adkisson told a police officer that if “he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office.”
This was a bona fide hate crime against liberals. LIBERALS. Our political identity is now clearly a basis for discrimination and oppression (and if you think this is the first time this has happened to liberals, study Pinochet’s Chile or histories of the labor movements in this country).
This killer was under economic pressure. He was frustrated because he was out of work. And he took it out on those he saw as liberals.
Too bad it’s the conservative oil men and bankers who have ruined the economy. Too bad it’s the filthy rich neo-cons who couldn’t care less if his job gets shipped overseas, if his union is broken, if his country shirks its responsibility to provide decent health care for its citizens. Too bad the people who actually brought about his frustrating situation will likely not notice and certainly not change the way they run the world in any single way that would make life any better for someone like him.
Too bad his murders will only make life harder for the very people who could make his life easier. Bad, bad for us. Very bad for us who already fight an uphill battle to end the death-dealing Empire and supplant it with life-giving Resurrection. Now the very co-beneficiaries of our struggle are coming after us.
Maybe, just maybe, there really are “bitter” people out there who “cling to guns.” Maybe they don’t cling to religion like we thought. Maybe we’re not being “elitist” by point this out, but rather we’re engaging in self-defense. Maybe our political action for economic justice and an end to the causes of such bitterness is self-defense, too.
The only thing he got his politics right on was the guns: if we had power in this country, we liberals would have passed gun-control laws that might have prevented someone like him from murdering people like us. How silly of us.
Take note, my friends. It has always been dangerous to be prophetic, to stand up for justice, to live out the Kin-dom of God no matter what the Powers say and threaten and do. But it’s clearly not getting any easier.
Be brave, friends. Mourn, and be brave. We still have so much work to do.
