Time to Topple the False God

by

Another shooting. More bodies on the ground. Another round of “thoughts and prayers” and political posturing. More families, more friends torn apart by the loss of loved ones taken too soon. Another gaping wound in people’s shared experience. People of faith cry out once more, “How long, O Lord?”

This time the Holy One answers: “Until you acknowledge your sin of following a false god.”

False god? Yes. For all its extraordinary gifts to the world in government, economics, the arts and sciences, the United States of America commits daily spiritual apostasy, claiming to be a “Christian” nation when in fact its true god is the gun.

Writer Garry Wills first put forth the idea that America worships the gun in 2012 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre claimed 20 children and six adults. In an article titled “Our Moloch,” Wills likened America’s addiction to guns to the Canaanites’ worship of the idol Moloch to which people sacrificed their children (Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5).

Current statistics from credible sources such as the Gun Violence Archive and the research website Five Thirty-Eight back up Wills’ five-year-old thesis. While mass shootings such as that which happened Oct. 1 in Las Vegas grab our attention because of their size, overall gun violence in America claims some 170 people each day. As we grieve what happened in Las Vegas, consider these current numbers from Gun Violence Archive:

During the first nine months of 2017, there have been 46,510 total incidents of American gun violence – an average of 169.74 per day. The total includes:

  • 11,574 gun deaths
  • 23,370 gun injuries
  • 271 mass shootings (defined by the FBI as "an active shooter trying to kill several people")
  • 1,508 unintentional shootings
  • 2,971 children/teenagers shot

Set against these statistics, the Las Vegas shooting proves to be a tragedy of degree in that so many people were killed and wounded at one time. Law enforcement reports say that Stephen Paddock, the shooter, had 23 guns with him at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, and another 19 guns were found at his home 80 miles away. One man with 42 guns – 33 of which had been purchased in the past year!

Las Vegas – as well as Orlando, Charleston, Virginia Tech, Newtown and more –shows that America continues to worship the gun, as Wills discerned five years ago. Yet the numbers tell only part of the story, because two other factors have emerged in the years between Sandy Hook and Las Vegas: the power of the gun over the American soul has deepened, and new research shows that our typical thinking about gun control methods probably won’t work.

On the latter point, Leah Libresco, a statistician and former news writer at the data journalism site FiveThirtyEight, writes in the Washington Post that her research showed typical gun control methods such as gun buybacks actually don’t reduce the number of shooting incidents. Only fine-grained approaches aimed at specific populations such as domestic violence perpetrators and victims have been shown effective against gun violence. Background checks can reduce the rate of shootings in many cases, but even such scrutiny allows dangerous individuals to slip past, as Stephen Paddock shows.

The staggering complexity of gun violence in America and the fruitless search for solutions both stem from the spiritual power that America’s gun worship has over our communal soul, as Wills wrote five years ago. Three points Wills made in 2012 still resonate:

  • Gun worship destroys our individual and collective reasoning. It requires us to deny that there’s a connection between the high rate of private gun ownership – equivalent to one gun for every man, woman and child in America – and the high number of gun-related deaths (see “Six Things to Know About Mass Shootings” by criminologist Frederic Lemieux).
  • Gun worship’s only transformative power is to turn all politicians into something akin to spineless jellyfish. As Wills writes: “None dare suggest that Moloch can in any way be reined in without being denounced by the pope of this religion, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, as trying to destroy Moloch, to take away all guns.”
  • Gun worship distorts our understanding of the Second Amendment’s true meaning. It claims that the right to “bear arms” gives individuals the authority to kill fellow citizens with military-style weapons. Quoting Wills again: “Even the Supreme Court has been cowed, reversing its own long history of recognizing that the Second Amendment applied to militias. Now the court feels bound to guarantee that any/every madman can indulge his ‘religion’ of slaughter.”

That “religion of slaughter” apparently motivated Stephen Paddock to kill 58 people and wound another 527 before he killed himself. Officials have used the word “evil” to describe the Las Vegas shooting. If we accept “evil” as a moral absolute, then surely Christian proponents of “good” must accept “the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” (“The Services of the Baptismal Covenant in The United Methodist Church,” courtesy of Discipleship Ministries).

Moloch has drunk enough of our children’s blood. It’s time – it’s past time – to topple the false god of gun worship in America. The blood of innocents cries out from Las Vegas, Orlando, Charleston, Columbine, from schools and theaters and street corners, just as Canaanite children screamed when sacrificed alive to placate a god of death. Our prayer of “how long?” depends entirely upon how quickly and strongly we’re willing to denounce America’s gun worship and pressure public officials to enact responsible legislation and law enforcement policies to protect lives.

Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.