crucifixion
At the Altar of the Gun: High School Shootings and the Sin of Blood Atonement
PATHEOS, MAY 8, 2019 BY ERIN WATHEN
Last night, my 8-year-old sat down with an atlas and an open browser and decided where he’s going to live when he grows up (Nashville); where he’s going to college (Vanderbilt); and what he’s going to major in (mechanical engineering and baseball). He wants to invent things and solve global problems. I know he’s little and might change his mind a few dozen times. Then again, maybe not. Either way, he’s got many paths wide open to him, he’s enthusiastic about everything, and any way he goes, it will be fun to watch.
As he excitedly researched his future, I had one of those overwhelming grateful mom moments—at the miracle of this kid, and the utterly confounding wonder that I get to be his mom. Within all that, I also held a deep sadness for a mother in Colorado who had all that taken away from her yesterday. All of her dreams for her child, gone. Any number of imagined futures, vanished on the wind. Another day in America, another kid killed at school.
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 “best” of the community—the smartest, the strongest, the best athletes—because, as our tour guide noted, what kind of god would want the losers?
That sounds insane to us, right? Totally bonkers. Who would do that??
And yet … in the 20 years since Columbine, there have been 230 school shootings in the United States. Well. 231 now. When we look at those numbers, I don’t know how we can scoff at the insanity of an ancient ritual—that custom is really no crazier than the wealthiest country in the world letting nearly 3,000 kids die by gun violence every year—many of them at school.
Every child killed in a school shooting is a willing sacrifice to the god of the gun, at the church of the NRA. I’m 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.
It’s 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.
And still, the guns themselves are protected with religious fervor.
It’s 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’s a hard truth we rarely name:
The Church also plays a role.
“Blood atonement,” 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’s 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.
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—not a loving, nurturing creator, but a callous deity demanding blood, blood, and more blood … in return for the gift of NOT damning us to eternal hellfire.
If you believe in a God that needs blood sacrifice in order to preserve your soul from hell, then perhaps you are more comfortable with student lives being the “cost” of a nation’s freedom. I doubt most folks would make that connection at a conscious level, but it is beneath the surface and at work in our shared narrative.
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’ve 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 “justice.” 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.
But we keep coming back to this altar. Believing somehow that the cost of freedom is more blood, more death. If we can’t 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.
Of course, it’s not that easy. We can’t 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.
But maybe there can be atonement.
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’s time to change that. But first, we’ll have to reclaim a nonviolent gospel.
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—but with much, much less.
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Lent is over, Holy Week and Good Friday, but from yesterday's issue of the online Christian newsletter Patheos, Erin Wathen's essay with her own agenda is triggering on at least two levels.
One level, driven by school shootings by the deranged, and before Columbine it seems not to have been of concern to most Americans, is the political and social issue of gun availability and gun control. One can rant and rave on either side, and to those on each side, including myself, truth is clear and certain, rabidly so. But at this point in our history, including Constitution written, done, and interpreted, we can't even discuss it civilly, and our divide is as unresolvable as the age-old Israeli Palestinian conflict. Fact and future is that we are in for endless heartbreak because, counter to standard American optimistic naïveté, there is no accomplishable solution. And our mutual hatreds don't help. For all the social and other evils of my generation and my father's and grandfathers and those before, I am glad to have lived in a different America.
One level, driven by school shootings by the deranged, and before Columbine it seems not to have been of concern to most Americans, is the political and social issue of gun availability and gun control. One can rant and rave on either side, and to those on each side, including myself, truth is clear and certain, rabidly so. But at this point in our history, including Constitution written, done, and interpreted, we can't even discuss it civilly, and our divide is as unresolvable as the age-old Israeli Palestinian conflict. Fact and future is that we are in for endless heartbreak because, counter to standard American optimistic naïveté, there is no accomplishable solution. And our mutual hatreds don't help. For all the social and other evils of my generation and my father's and grandfathers and those before, I am glad to have lived in a different America.
The other level Wathen raises is theological, valid and points well taken albeit nothing new: Blood Atonement. Though conceived before the age of telescopes and evaporation of the firmament, we still cling to them; but the era of emperor-driven creeds is done and gone, and theological issues are not resolvable in today's non-universal, ungovernable Christianity that is diverse and lacking in unity, as rife with suspicion and animosity as what Constantine faced, each component with its absolute certainty and, at least for the (sniff) "mainline church" from which I observe, bound up in ages of Tradition with absence of awareness, questioning, challenge and doubt. "What do you think about this?" "Hey! I never noticed that, never thought about it, we've always done it, said it, that way."
Anyone who wonders whether our branch of the Movement is too sophisticated and progressive to hold atonement theology need only check out the lex orandi lex credendi of Cranmer's medieval eucharistic prayer, which is still our Prayer I, and also slightly softened successors, A, B, C, D and the three eucharistic prayers in Enriching Our Worship, where the theology is body & blood sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for forgiveness of sins and redemption of the world; based on Paul and the gospel accounts of the Last Supper. Blood Atonement? Lots has changed in our Time, is it, are we, tenable in the 21st century? Blood Atonement? Can these questions be asked from the inside? Maybe not inside all churches, and it probably depends on where one is. But at least in our branch of the Movement, where the lintel over the library door at one of our key theological seminaries is inscribed "Seek The Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Wlll", there are no questions that cannot be asked, no doubts that cannot be held, and no certainties that cannot be rubbished.
T
Anyone who wonders whether our branch of the Movement is too sophisticated and progressive to hold atonement theology need only check out the lex orandi lex credendi of Cranmer's medieval eucharistic prayer, which is still our Prayer I, and also slightly softened successors, A, B, C, D and the three eucharistic prayers in Enriching Our Worship, where the theology is body & blood sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for forgiveness of sins and redemption of the world; based on Paul and the gospel accounts of the Last Supper. Blood Atonement? Lots has changed in our Time, is it, are we, tenable in the 21st century? Blood Atonement? Can these questions be asked from the inside? Maybe not inside all churches, and it probably depends on where one is. But at least in our branch of the Movement, where the lintel over the library door at one of our key theological seminaries is inscribed "Seek The Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Wlll", there are no questions that cannot be asked, no doubts that cannot be held, and no certainties that cannot be rubbished.
T