Since When Is An Act of Terrorism an Act of God?

A terrible thing happened in Orlando last night. I’m sure most of you already know; it’s the worst mass shooting in US history, with 50 people dead and many more wounded. And it was an attack against a gay bar.

As of the point of writing, it’s not known whether the LGBTQ community was being specifically targeted, or whether he was just looking for a place where there would be a lot of people and it happened to be this one. What I do know is that LGBTQ community is grieving. And also that this has become an opportunity for religiously motivated hate.

I haven’t gone out looking for the articles and the comments, the people saying that this is God’s judgment against homosexuals. That it’s a good beginning. That a Muslim has finally had the courage to do what we should have been doing from the start. That the gays had it coming.

I only know that they exist because friends of mine have come across this stuff, and have reported the harm that it’s done to them. To be honest, I knew it existed even before my friends posted about it. I knew the moment I found out that this tragedy had taken place at a gay nightclub. It was one of the first thoughts that I had: “I really hope I don’t have to read any of my fellow Christians justifying this abomination,” knowing that even if I never read it, the hatred would be there.

So I want to talk about religiously motivated hate.

I’m going to begin with a painful confession: I know what this hatred looks like from the inside. I went through a period in my Christianity where I was deeply, deeply angry at the culture. I saw threats on all sides, and Satan lurking in every billboard, in the songs on the radio, in the logo on a can of Coke. When I looked at the world I had been born into, all I could see was a culture of death propped up by systems of sin.

I did not think of this attitude as hatred. I thought of it as zeal, faithfulness, righteousness. After all, I didn’t hate any people. I hated sin, and evil, and the power of Hell. All of the things a good Catholic is supposed to hate.

Then 9/11 happened. I watched the Two Towers go down, and my immediate, uncensored reaction was a kind of awed elation. Like I was watching God’s judgment rain down on a city of sin. Those towers symbolized all the evils of decadent, corporate America, and they were going down in flames.

And then the pictures of the people on the ground, the bodies, the crying families, replaced the pictures of the burning towers and my conscience began to twig. Something was seriously, seriously wrong. I had allowed my desire for a world cleansed of sin and evil to transform into a hideous callousness towards human life. A tragedy had occurred, and I had only seen the destruction of a symbol.

This was sobering. It would take years for it to fully sink in, for me to get to the point where I could put a name to that terrible feeling that I thought of as a righteous desire to see God triumph over evildoers. It was hatred, and it was a poison eating at the foundations of my faith.

Ideologically motivated hatred (including religious hatred) is hard to spot in oneself because it begins with hatred of things that really deserve our anger. It’s reasonable to be angry about genuine evils: rapacious capitalism, rape culture, abortion, systemic racism, unjust wars, homophobia, what have you. Being upset is a natural, even healthy, reaction to the grave injustices that we encounter in the world.

The problem is that as soon as you take up an ideological banner of any kind, you start focusing a large part of your identity on being angry about one particular thing. And then you start to be angry about other things, less pernicious but still evil, that seem to bolster or undergird the thing that you were originally angry about. Slowly, you start to peel back layer after layer, trying to get to the root cause of the the problem that obsesses you, hoping to find a solution that will allow you to bring the injustice to a permanent and final end. But of course you can’t find such a solution, because these are problems that have always been with us, and which will be with us to the end.

In practice, this means that over time more and more things, and more and more innocent things, will come to seem like part of the grand system of evil. Eventually you get to the point where you think that vocal fry was invented as an ingenious scheme of the patriarchy, or that a Krispy Kreme donut campaign is pro-abortion because it uses the the word “choice” in a positive way. Like the old monk in Dostoyevski’s Brothers Karamazov, you can’t be in human society without seeing demons everywhere.

To outsiders, this behaviour is obviously and manifestly demented, but you can’t see it. You’re so focused on the evilness of some particular evil that you are no longer able to perceive the world properly. Your anger, however just it was to begin with, sours into wrath.

At no point in this process do you feel the kind of visceral animosity towards another person, or group of people, that we usually think of as “hatred.” This kind of hatred slides under the radar because you don’t feel like you hate anyone. What you hate is an abstraction that is absolutely worthy of hatred, and you hate it out of love for human beings.

That is, until one day you realize that your heart rejoices at the deaths of innocent human beings, because in some deranged sense their death signals a symbolic victory over the object of your hate.

I don’t know if this is what happened to Omar Mateen, the shooter in Orlando. There is evidence that he was a violent and unstable person before he converted to Islam. I do know that this is the attitude of many of the people who are crowing over these deaths, over this act of terrorism, because it happened to be directed against an establishment that catered to the LGBTQ.

And I know that it is not zeal, it is not justice, it is not a righteous anger or a cleansing fire. It is hatred, plain and simple, and it is damnable sin.