At Synod During the Charleston Shootings

I was in the Synodical bubble when the shootings took place. I heard about it, Synod wept and prayed about it, but I wasn’t available to watch the coverage or ponder the how the media processes it.

Yesterday, after church, I was able to watch the Sunday morning ABC News “The Week” and the narratives come clear. “What happened” is not in doubt. The politicians, law enforcement, mental health experts, journalists and college professors are being called upon to explain “how could this happen” and “why did this happen” and most of all “how come this is STILL happening?”

Science and Religion

A friend asked me to read a piece he had written about science and religion which I read through this morning. When we think about “science and religion” we think about Genesis and physics and Adam and Eve. The real frontier between science and religion runs as much through how we talk about the Charleston shooting, and every other catastrophe with human finger prints on it as it does through any classroom trying to come to grips with fossils and carbon dating. What emerges from the coverage and conversation are our assumptions about what we are, what we should be and how we imagine we will get there.

The Gospel of Self-Congratulation

The first thing I noticed in the coverage was Steve Osunsami’s  words that everyone was coming to the church with candles and flowers “all with one message, that Charleston and this nation are better than this.”

This is a naked religious statement of identity. It asserts not only that the shootings are “abnormal” for us as a city, nation or people, but that the way to combat it is a combination of self-affirmation/pride and shame.

We should note that in other places we admit and confess that “we” have a long history of racial violence. For many people who are older than myself, particularly African Americans this shooting brings up memories of past shootings and killings. Are “we better than this”? History doesn’t bear this out. Do we do this? Yes we do.

By declaring ourselves better than our track record we imagine that simply declaring it will help us improve our track record. “We” gets very slippery in this of course, which will lead us to other salvation narratives that come into play.

The Gospel of “Not My People”

Later in the broadcast it was noted that Roof was not from Charleston. Evil, it seems, has a zip code and Charleston, the victim, is we are led to imagine made up of higher moral quality persons than Dylann Roof. Is Lexington South Carolina where evil comes from? Can we eliminate evil by eliminating Lexington, walling it off or purging it of the sort of people we might associate with him from Lexington?

Somehow, however, we imagine evil comes in from the outside. Lately we’ve been looking to Iraq or Syria or some other place for evil to come from. Now here it is within our borders and we are horrified.

The Gospel of Political Correctness

After the shooting we grab the Facebook page and the web to see what they’ve said. An FBI expert wades in our a person having deep seated fears or hatred that gets justified by the group and they act out in this way. Racism, hatred, fear based violence can be attributed to a personal story and if we can make sure people grow up with the right ideas, with good parents, without fear then all of this can be avoided.

There is obviously a lot of truth to this, but there are thousands if not millions of people with horrible stories, filled with hatred and racism and they’re not shooting up churches. If we could rid the world of sad, hurtful childhoods does this now suddenly fill us with new motivation to do so?

The Gospel of Our Story of Progress

Later in the program Charlayne Hunter-Gault is asked to give some perspective.

“Haven’t we made progress?”

“Of course we’ve made progress”… “but this young man was not born when” … fill in important events in the global civil rights movement… “where does that come from?” … “our schools are not teaching our history…” “We have to teach them the history of struggle and how we overcame and how we have to continue to stand up to people who have these kinds of attitudes…”

“Our young people need to know that the AME Church was one where we have always, I come out of that church, my father was a minister, my grandfather was a minister, we have always fought back in equality in inferiority and said ‘we are first class'”.

What is beneath this is a person’s testimony of how they believe that they, and those around them, have achieved something better.

I can imagine a white person from the south in the 1950s talking about how they struggled against the setbacks of the “war of northern aggression” to build the kind of Jim Crow South that they imagined had progressed and achieved and being completely unable to imagine how the population of African Americans didn’t appreciate or value any of this.

She comes from a tradition of church, but she is not a pastor in that church. This isn’t because she is a woman. Some of the women that Dylann Roof shot were Reverends in that church.

I get the sense that the church was for some an institution that helped when it was needed but now since then we have progressed beyond it and it is no longer necessary. This is what makes the incident so inscrutable. “How could this happen?!”

What is Your Backdrop Story Through Which You Interpret These Events?

If you listen carefully you will hear, in the reasons we find for the shooting and the exhortations we present that are supposed to insure that “it will never happen again” our religious hearts. We expose our religious anthropology, our soteriology and our eschatology. We are upset often at others who have failed to follow our religion and so have thus let this terrible thing happen again. We must press our implicitly religious claims harder so as to bring in the kingdom, the kingdom we imagine we need and that will do even our enemies good.

The Buffered Self

Charles Taylor notes early in his story of secularization the development of the “buffered self“.

If we ask an ancient author “why did Judas betray Jesus” John 13 says that as soon as he took the bread Satan entered into him. This is not on our radar. Only a religious nut would say “why did Dylann Root kill all those people? Satan entered into him.”

No, the spiritual world is a Disney land of good feelings and self-improvement. We’re even suspect of it when it leads to the kind of forgiveness statements member of the church have been making.

All of what we need to fashion the world we imagine we want is available to us, at least potentially. The only things stopping us are our limitations on money, power, and other people who resist what we know to be the solutions.

The reason “Satan entered into Dylann Root” is such an offensive answer is because it suggests we have no remedy for this kind of thing. We have no power to prevent it. We have no ability to secure for ourselves what we want and imagine we deserve.

When I heard about the shootings I thought about the death of Christ. How he was killed for nothing he’d done wrong. How the members of that church had gathered in his name and were killed for it.

I don’t know which statement is harder to believe:

“We can do things so that this kind of thing never happens again”

or

“Satan entered into him and he killed all those people.”

I guess the answer to this depends on what your assumptions are not only of this visible world that we share but ideas of other layers and levels of this world.

I would love to imagine that this won’t happen again. I would love to imagine that we have the answer. I would love to imagine that we, as a species, can make it all stop. You might imagine that prayer is naive. I think that trusting in all of the solutions we imagine will fix things is naive.

Am I anti-science? Not at all. I am skeptical of the supposed goodness of human nature. Our track record speaks for itself.