Gun-Grabbers Nationwide Rejoice at News of San Jose Mass Shooting. What Should Christians Say?

Don’t bother sending “thoughts and prayers” to anti-gun activists today. News of the San Jose mass shooting made this the best day of their lives since … the last mass shooting. Like Red Chinese organ thieves or vampires, anti-gun activists are never more excited than when a madman mows down multiple helpless, unarmed Americans.

For activists, each mass killing is a toddler’s Christmas morning. They can’t wait to unwrap the package. In their shiny, expectant eyes, they hope for a white male Republican evangelical Christian. Will Santa come through this time? Or will the box contain a lump of coal, in the form of a jihadi Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (“His motives remain unknown”) or a Bernie Sanders supporter (“This is for healthcare!”).

Not Sin but an “Epidemic”

So far few facts are clear. (For instance, the killer’s ethnic and religious background.) The man reported as shooter, Samuel James Cassidy, was an employee at the VTA railyards where he gunned down 8 civilians before getting shot himself. (After allegedly setting fire to his own house.) It sounds like a disgruntled employee, attacking his co-workers in a wicked act of suicidal violence. But we won’t hear much about morals. Instead, we’re already hearing from the White House about the “epidemic of gun violence,” as if mass murder were contagious, and gun-owners were the vector.

I think I can predict for you a good deal of what you will read over the next few days in the mainstream media. And what politicians will say. And what your own churches (unless you've been very blessed or very discerning) will say about the event.

Why am I sure I can do that? Because there's a template, a recipe, sitting on the computers of reporters across the country, and Democrat flaks, and massively funded antigun activists. Worse than that. A “We Condemn Gun Violence” document waits in the files of bishops, priests, and ministers. It's on all these people's hard drives along with MS Word's handy "Resume," "Thank You Note" and "Garage Sale" boilerplates. They just have to plug in a few simple facts, dates, and names, and Presto! Their document's finished, before the blood of innocent murder victims is even dry on the pavement. Their interchangeable statements will be posted in news stories, editorials, social media posts, and parish newsletters. They'll be quoted by lazy reporters, bleated in Tweets, and touted in speeches to Congress.

Astroturf Grass Roots Responses

The fact that these statements are almost impossible to tell apart from each other won't blunt their impact. Quite the contrary. The very prefab quality of this Astroturf replacement for grassroots public opinion is one of its strengths. From a distance, if you don't look closely, the monotonous sameness can resemble a consensus. An "awakening of common sense" in the face of "an epidemic of gun violence."

The blaring of just one boilerplate message from virtually every medium won't get dismissed as propaganda but cited as a groundswell. Millions of "joiners" eager to follow the herd wherever it leads will soon mistake the agitprop they imbibed for their own considered conclusions. They'll bleat "Four legs good, too legs baa-aad!" as eagerly as the sheep in George Orwell's Animal Farm.

And their shepherds won't lose much time. They don't have to waste their efforts on the real details of the crime. They'll pause, of course, to see if there's a racial, ethnic, or other Woke angle they can take. Was the shooter a "primary oppressor"? That's the term Intersectional Theory (which rules academia and has infiltrated our seminaries) uses to indicate "straight white male Republican Christian."

Cue the Pre-Programmed Agitprop

We'll see demands for background checks that already exist, which the shooter evaded. And calls for bans on totally unrelated guns. Bills will appear that outlaw accessories law-abiding hunters and target shooters find helpful, like silencers or scopes. The calls will go out for more "gun-free" zones, even if the shooting happened in such a free-fire zone where citizens walk defenseless. However many gun laws the shooter violated -- not being, it seems, the law-abiding type -- we'll find ourselves barraged with demands for more laws that target honest citizens.

Most of all, we'll be treated to dehumanizing and un-American rhetoric, which exposes the deepest worldviews of the elites who form our opinion, and police it on social media. The worldviews, too of the professors and teachers who train our young people. And worst of all, of many pastors at every level of churches of too many denominations.

Here’s where I can help. Some months ago I published a piece in one of America’s most interesting conservative journals, Chronicles. (If you’re not reading it you should be. It’s the first national magazine that ever published me as a writer, back in 1992.) In the piece, I offered pastors an alternative. Instead of the pre-fab drivel our Mainline Protestant, Woke evangelical, and Catholic leaders will offer after this killing, here are some authentically Christian reflections. I invite any pastor to deliver these remarks next Sunday, or adapt them in his bulletin.

“A Sermon for a Season of Violence”

To the Congregation:

Dearly beloved. Today we gather to pray together, to obey the words of Jesus, who asked us to share bread and wine, "in remembrance of me." In one of the paradoxes of our faith, such gatherings are bloodless reenactments of His redeeming death on the cross. In the midst of life, we remember death. Gathering as we do in the hope of life but under the shadow of death, we can take some comfort that we Christians are more prepared than the pagans to face moments of darkness, horror, and sin.

The people who fell last week were our neighbors, perhaps our friends. Besides being fellow souls walking with us through this vale of tears, the men, women, and children whom the killer targeted were our fellow citizens. People joined with us in the very special, particular bond that is America. Like us, they looked to government of ordered liberty to protect their inalienable rights. For that purpose our forefathers formed the United States of America. If you read the words of the men of faith who designed our nation, you would see that almost to a man these preachers and pastors saw in America something unique, fragile, and special.

A City on a Hill

They saw in these far-flung colonies the seed of a city on hill, a place where the people and not some prince, the citizenry and not some conspiracy of the powerful, would wield the levers of government. A place where the solemn power of the state would be wielded in the light, not in the shadows of court intrigue or bureaucratic lethargy. The light of which I speak is cast by a very particular source. It shines from the face of every human being, made in the image of God and redeemed by His very own Son.

In a dark and prophetic novel, 1984, George Orwell had the spokesman for a modern, godless tyranny describe a future in which the will to power would reign unchecked and citizens would be reduced to cringing, manipulated slaves. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever," he wrote. Orwell had seen the rise of the Nazi and Fascist regimes, which created vast industrialized mechanisms of genocide. He watched the misguided dream of socialism turn into the vast slave state of the Soviet Union, with its labor camps and murder squads. He feared that the whole world might succumb to one brand or another of totalitarianism. And he depicted that grim possible future with an attack on the human face.

The Face of the Image of God

One of the most ancient Christian devotions entailed meditating on images of Jesus' wounded face. Too many pastors this weekend will be offering sermons that lose sight of that face. Too many of our leaders will react to outrageous crimes like the one our community suffered, but forget the human face--the faces of the victims, individual citizens with dignity, value, and inalienable rights. They'll forget the face of the killer, a man who is either deranged or wicked. They won't speak of the outrageous, sickening sin that man committed. They won't remember the rights of each of the victims he assaulted. Instead they will speak in broad, vague generalities about the "problem" of "gun violence," as if inanimate objects were jumping out of stores and killing people. As if the tools we Americans use for hunting, sports, or self-defense were viruses, which we must address as a public health crisis, with quarantines, masks, and lockdowns.

Politicians will speak in broad, vague generalities about the "problem" of "gun violence," as if inanimate objects were jumping out of stores and killing people.

The modern temptation is great, to avoid talk of sin and forgiveness, of good and evil, of the rights of the human person and those who threaten them. Instead we should think of the vast, nebulous "community," whose well-being we measure in aggregated statistics.

A Termite in a Colony

Today both Mammon and Caesar would have us forget the face of Christ and our neighbor. They want us to see our country as more like a termite colony, or an anthill. In such collectivist species, the person is a replaceable, perfectly interchangeable, and the only fate that matters is that of the hive.

America's Christian Founders saw the deadly danger in such political systems. They feared the rule of tyrants and the rise of demagogues. They refused to worship Caesar and, like the early Christians, they put their lives on the line for their convictions.

Erasing the Victims

In the media, we rarely see the faces or hear the stories of the victims of mass killings like this one. For a few days, some will morbidly dwell on the scattered thoughts and hateful writings of the killer. After that, the drumbeat of groupthink that fills our opinion pages, and too many of our sermons, will return to its default mode: collectivist tinkering. The reporters and TV commentators, the legislators and ministers, won't ask what fatherless homes, overused psychoactive medicines, might lay behind a crime like this one.

Nor will they ask why the victims were helpless to save themselves, in the "gun-free" zone that the legislature created, which too often really means a "free-fire" zone, as citizens crouch helplessly behind couches or desks, waiting for the faraway police to at last arrive. No one on TV will talk about that outrage. No one will ask why these Americans were forbidden on pain of jail time to exercise a basic constitutional right to defend themselves, a right as fundamental as freedom of speech or the exercise of religion.

Instead we'll hear from the usual well-funded suspects about the latest scheme to render more citizens helpless with calls to "cure" the "plague" of "gun violence." When someone insane or evil, or equal measures of both, attacks our fellow citizens and strips them of their rights, it's simply not Christian to step back from their faces, forget their identities as persons, and instead think of ways to strip even more of our fellow citizens of even more of their rights.

It's also un-American.

A Time for Thought and Prayer

Today as we pray for the victims and their families, and even for the conversion of the man who inflicted this evil, we must recommit ourselves to cherishing, protecting, even safeguarding the rights of every American, including the most basic right it's even possible to imagine: the right, in the moment of danger, to defend himself and his family.

Amen.