On a recent trip to Honduras, I visited the ruins of an ancient Mayan culture. I saw the temple, and just outside it, the altar where they used to make human sacrifices to the sun god. Several times a year, they would round up a group of tributes and slaughter them on this stone. They believed that offering up a human life would save them from the scorching rage of their deity, instead yielding rain, crops and abundance. They would intentionally offer up the \u201cbest\u201d of the community\u2014the smartest, the strongest, the best athletes\u2014because, as our tour guide noted, what kind of god would want the losers?<\/p>\n
That sounds insane to us, right? Totally bonkers. Who would do that??<\/p>\n
And yet \u2026 in the 20 years since Columbine, there have been 230 school shootings in the United States<\/a>. Well. 231 now. When we look at those numbers, I don\u2019t know how we can scoff at the insanity of an ancient ritual\u2014that custom is really no crazier than the wealthiest country in the world letting nearly 3,000 kids<\/a>\u00a0die by gun violence every year\u2014many of them at school.<\/p>\n Every child killed in a school shooting is a sacrifice to the god of the gun, at the church of the NRA. I\u2019m not talking in metaphor. Our masses of dead children are a literal, actual blood sacrifice. Like the Mayans of Copan, we somehow figure that the death of these children is the price we must pay for our twisted notion of freedom; some capitalist orgy of abundance that can only come to pass when the bounty of this great land is protected by civilian artillery.<\/p>\n It\u2019s nuts. But we keep doing it. Marching the kids off to school like lambs to the slaughter, where their underpaid teachers double as human shields. Where they have a greater chance of dying by violence than in any other country in the developed world.<\/p>\n And still, the guns themselves are protected with religious fervor.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy enough to blame the NRA. Or the gun manufacturers and investors, or anybody that profits from the industry. We can blame politicians, whose cowardice and fealty to the gun lobby continues to block common-sense legislation that most Americans support. But there\u2019s a hard truth we rarely name:<\/p>\n The Church also plays a role.<\/p>\n \u201cBlood atonement,\u201d or sacrificial atonement, is the idea that Jesus had to die to somehow save us from the wrath of God. This dangerous notion lies at the heart of popular Christianity; and as the Christian narrative has shaped our nation\u2019s culture in many ways, this problematic theology may be found at the root of many of our shared evils. For instance, our attachment to the death penalty, even when all other civilized nations have evolved past the barbaric practice. Or in the idea of corporal punishment, the once popular and still accepted idea that a child might somehow be saved by violent discipline.<\/p>\n Our love of war might be traced back to the same doctrine; our belief that might makes right, and our ability to so often justify force over diplomacy. We can also cite the many-layered issues within our criminal justice system, one that is rooted more in retribution than restoration. Within all of these greater social issues, we find imbedded the same notion of God as raging tyrant\u2014not a loving, nurturing creator, but a callous deity demanding blood, blood, and more blood \u2026 in return for the gift of NOT damning us to eternal hellfire.<\/p>\n When Church has been made comfortable by its place at the center of things, those inside it too rarely question the narratives and images we\u2019ve been given. The Church was meant to exist at the margins, and to challenge the empire. Instead, it has set up shop in the heart of capitalism, adopting the same measures of worth, the same secular parameters of \u201cjustice.\u201d But the notion of a punishing God is not entirely biblical, nor is a transactional understanding of atonement. Like many of our misguided western Christian notions, it comes from a surface reading of a few choice scriptures, taken out of context of the wider gospel. It is not a true reporting on who God is; nor of who we are meant to be.<\/p>\n But we keep coming back to this altar. Believing somehow that the cost of freedom is more blood, more death. If we can\u2019t see how twisted that is, or how closely linked our backward theology is to our violent wreck of a social system, then we need to go back to the beginning of something and start over.<\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s not that easy. We can\u2019t go back. There is no unwinding this carnage; no gifting the babies killed in American classrooms back to their broken parents. There is no worthy apology.<\/p>\n But maybe there can be atonement.<\/p>\n As in so many other instances where the Church has done great harm, the Church also has power to do great healing and transformation. In fact, we have a responsibility to do so. To dig deeper, to ask harder questions; to live for complicated relationships and not easy answers. We are called to put our faith to work around advocacy and action; organizing for change that will reduce guns from their idol status to the inanimate objects that they are. The Christian community has not historically shown up for this fight. As people who claim to follow a revolutionary nonviolent savior, it\u2019s time to change that. But first, we\u2019ll have to reclaim a nonviolent gospel.<\/p>\n The sins of the past cannot be undone, but maybe atonement is possible. Once we learn that true restoration, and the true love of God, comes not with more blood\u2014but with much, much less.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night, my 8-year-old sat down with an atlas and an open browser and decided where he\u2019s going to live when he grows up (Nashville); where he\u2019s going to college (Vanderbilt); and what he\u2019s going to major in (mechanical engineering and baseball). He wants to invent things and solve global problems. I know he\u2019s little […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1154,"featured_media":9272,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[822,9,10],"class_list":["post-9260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gun-control","tag-progressive-christianity","tag-spirituality"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/333\/2019\/05\/bullet-dark-firearm-1260563.jpg\")
<\/p>\n