I teach media at Regent University, and one of my students sent me this headline: “There have been more mass shootings than days in 2023, database shows.” As a student of the media, I am cautious about headlines. Their primary purpose is not to inform us but to unsettle us emotionally, pulling us into clicking on a link that drives ad revenue.
But since data doesn’t “do” anything on its own (people do things with data), I was curious about what “database” was “showing” these alarming statistics. As I clicked around, following the headline and its links down a few hypertext rabbit holes, I stumbled into the opinion warren of those dismissive of the call for prayers following a shooting. Instead of the comfort of prayer, these commentators said what God really wants is for us to use our heads and pass more gun-regulating legislation.
I have no idea about the faith or theological training of these commentators, but their theocratizing raised an important question: By way of law, what does God want?
When queried about what commandment in the law was the greatest, Christ responded: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matt: 22:36-40).
Looking at the Law that Christ referred to, that is, the Ten Commandments, we see a curious connection between all ten. Although they deal with dramatically different behaviors, adultery, murder and theft, not one of the Ten Commandments is concerned with what we should do to someone else who breaks the law. Instead, all the commandments are directed squarely at what we should do to uphold the law.
Does this mean that the Christian worldview is one without law? Of course not, and scripture, like the book of Leviticus, is replete with punishments for all sorts of crimes. But our present-day Western American view of the law, drawn from a Christian worldview, assumes that one can and must govern oneself. It is not built on reciting what God, the State, or anyone else wants us to do to those who break the law. The founders of this country had so much faith in the proposition that we, the people, could govern our passions and ourselves, they created a legal system that assumed we were innocent until proven otherwise, and the government that served us best was one that left us alone.
A Christian worldview also accepts the existence of evil as a real, present and ever-dangerous thing. It is precisely because Christians believe that evil exists that they also believe that we must govern ourselves and our passions. The relationship between self-governance and a good, lawful nation was once so well understood among Americans that the second verse of Katharine Lee Bates’ poem, “America” (which is more commonly known as “America the Beautiful”) was written as follows:
“O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.”
Self-control. Law. God’s blessings. See the connection?
Evil is not a phenomenon of lax legislation – it is the absence of good, and although a negative, it is as real as darkness, the chaos that pours into the empty space left when we fail to call on the better angels of our nature. Werner Herzog, the great German film director, put it well when he said, “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.”
I am not suggesting that there should not be laws concerning guns; not everyone does or should get a gun. There is no “divine right” to a firearm. But dealing with the sort of evil involved in a mass shooting, the evil that lurks in every corner of our broken natures, does not start with laws about ammunition clip sizes and gun shows. It starts with a societal-wide, top to bottom expectation that we must restrain our actions in accordance with their ordered function, and was must never decide to do something because it feels good or does or does not “trigger” someone.
Restraint of personal passions is hard work, an ongoing and drawn-out process that does not lend itself to the demands for quick, easy fixes. I try to avoid pessimism in everything, but I pray that we as a nation still have the fortitude to undertake this difficult work. Time will tell.
Any group of people, be it as small as a family or as large as a nation, whose members do not expect themselves to govern their passions is allowing, even inviting, evil to run amok. In my work in humanitarian media, I have seen the results of morally broken societies in country after country, ravaged people and places where greed, theft, adultery and envy are the order of the day. Though the location has varied from continent to continent, the one constant I have observed is that the evil loosed in these amoral free-for-alls always falls hardest and heaviest on the most innocent of heads. And that, I believe we can be sure, is something that God does not want.