{"id":4445,"date":"2015-12-08T11:55:21","date_gmt":"2015-12-08T16:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/?p=4445"},"modified":"2015-12-11T16:47:30","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T21:47:30","slug":"falwells-damage-and-our-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2015\/12\/falwells-damage-and-our-response.html","title":{"rendered":"Falwell’s Damage and Our Response"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"guns\"<\/a>by Carol Howard Merritt<\/a><\/p>\n

This post appeared first at the Tribal Church Blog<\/a><\/p>\n

I, like many people of faith, am reeling from\u00a0Jerry Falwell, Jr.\u2019s proclamations<\/a>\u00a0to his student body. Falwell encouraged the students of Liberty University (there are more than 100,000 of them) to arm themselves against Muslim terrorists.<\/p>\n

His rhetoric reminded me of a bumper sticker I see here in Tennessee: \u201cOnly a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.\u201d<\/p>\n

I went to a Bible school, where students sometimes imagined that they were the good people and everyone else was a bad person. It was a warped view, for sure. But at least we just passed out tracts and tried to get the \u201cbad people\u201d to repeat the \u201csinner\u2019s prayer\u201d after us. We didn\u2019t have a college president packing heat in his back pocket, providing free gun training courses, and inciting us to \u201cend those Muslims before they walked in.\u201d\u00a0Falwell has since clarified that he meant Muslim\u00a0terrorists<\/em>, but that\u2019s a very big and telling omission to make as you fire up a hundred thousand young people to arm themselves and kill.<\/p>\n

There are the obvious interfaith concerns with this. We work across faithful traditions, because we know that our Holy Wars have been far from holy. I hope and pray that in the days to come, there will be many voices encouraging love and peace toward our one billion Muslim neighbors.<\/p>\n

There is another aspect about the rhetoric that concerns me. I denounced Falwell on Facebook and had a lively discussion that quickly turned to a person\u2019s right to defend himself and his family.<\/p>\n

These streams represent the lies of patriarchy. For patriarchal ideas assume:<\/p>\n