When White People Worship Death, Black People Die.

How does a white person write about what’s going on in our country with the epidemic of the shooting of black men by police officers? With the latest shootings in Minnesota of Philando Castile  and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, I feel overwhelmed and inadequate to the task. How do I express my grief and my anger? How can I be fair to the millions of police officers who do an amazing job while still standing up saying that we have a serious problem. And if we don’t fix that problem, it’s going to get a lot worse.

What, then, is our problem? Of course, there’s racism, and that’s certainly a signifiant poison in the system. But it goes way deeper than that. St. Pope John Paul put his prophetic finger on the problem in his encyclical “The Gospel of Life” when he denounced our current culture of death. We have a morbid fascination with death that’s masked in the “need to protect ourselves.”

This, in my opinion, lies at the bottom of our current obsession with gun rights, protection, and the obsessive need to “feel safe.”  White people are afraid. Americans are afraid. Fear dominates everything. And, even more troubling, we let that fear become our idol and our god. We pile bloody guns, bloody corpses and bloody sacrifices to that blood thirsty idol. And we forget to respect, love and care for the very image of God, human beings themselves. And, fear dehumanizes and mutates into racism.

The thing is, more gun laws won’t stop the Death Cult. Better gun education never really helps, despite what people want to tell you. Nowhere is this more evident than this thought I saw on social media yesterday: When white people legally own a gun, it’s for “protection.” When black people do it, it’s considered an automatic threat. Everything is based in fear, loathing and hatred. And, no amount of gun laws will stop it. While I favor gun control, I also realize it’s a very small band aid to the larger problem.

Whatever  dominates our lives and our decision process is what we worship. We in America worship death. This has not always been the case. But our fears have now overtaken us and become our god. American white christians are the worst, I’m sorry to say. Our safety has become more important than our African-American brothers and sisters. We’ve deprived them of the image of God and they’ve now become things to us, things to be contained, stopped and shot.

If we say that we worship God, then fear must not govern our lives. While we are called to protect the innocent, we’re not called to protect at “all costs.” A national conversation on police brutality must happen. Being a cop is a stressful job–are the wrong people making it through? When I was a pastor, I often saw some of the nastiest, self centered people make it through the ordination process. They had no business being pastors (come to think of it, neither did I). I wonder if the same thing is happening in police training programs. Are we admitting men and women trained in the culture of death to protect us?

St. Pope John Paul encouraged us to build a culture of life. But we can only do that if we confront our personal idols and fears first. And, for white America, its the idol of privilege, cultural superiority and the lack of humility. We’re afraid of losing our cultural dominance and control. And those fears make us bow the knee to the bloody idol of death.

Perfect love casts out fear is not a hippie ideal that doesn’t work in a real life. It’s a statement of challenge, of revolution and God’s demand for total allegiance to a culture of life. The question is, do we have the courage to follow it enough to make dramatic change in our culture?

Or, will more black people die because we’re afraid?