“An enemy did this,” he replied.
The servants asked him, “Do you want us to go and pull them up?”
“No,” he answered, “because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.” (Matt. 13:24–30)
Most of the ugliness in the human narrative comes from a distorted quest to be like God. To know good and evil and to rid the world of evil.
In the Gospel of Matthew (13:24–30), Jesus talks about how the wheat and the weeds all grow together in this world, and we often want to rip up the weeds—or take out the “bad guys.” But that is not ours to do. Only God can do that.
Murder often begins with a hunger for justice, lust with the recognition of beauty, gluttony with our enjoyment of the delectable gifts of God.
It’s important to note that the greatest seduction is sometimes not the “anti-God” but the “almost-God.” Poisonous fruit can look delectable, which is why it’s so dangerous. Even things like “freedom” and “peace” and “justice” can be deadly pursuits if they are not rooted in Jesus. It’s beautiful things that tempt us. It’s beautiful things that we die for and kill for. And it’s beautiful things that we market, exploit, brand, and counterfeit. Nations fighting for peace end up perpetuating the very violence they seek to destroy.
Memorial to the Lost
WASHINGTON NAVY YARD (SEPTEMBER 16, 2013)
The Washington Navy Yard shooting occurred on September 16, 2013, when a lone gunman fatally shot twelve people and injured three others at the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) inside the Washington Navy Yard in southeast Washington, DC. The attack lasted just over one hour and ended when the shooter was killed by police.
It was the second-deadliest mass murder on a US military base. These are the names of the victims lost that day:
Michael Arnold, 59 Mary Francis Knight, 51
Martin Bodrog, 53 Frank Kohler, 50
Arthur Daniels, 51 Vishnu Pandit, 61
Sylvia Frasier, 53 Kenneth Bernard Proctor, 46
Kathy Gaarde, 62 Gerald Read, 58
John Roger Johnson, 73 Richard Michael Ridgell, 52
It may well be that the difference between murderers and saints is that murderers think the evil of the world is outside of themselves, while saints think the evil of the world is inside of themselves. Most of the folks who have done terrible things in the world were convinced they were ridding the world of evil—but they only added evil to the world.
True worship is when we let God change us and make us more like God. Idolatry is when we try to change God and make God more like us.
The things we worship and adore and love change us. We begin to act like them. That’s why heroes and role models are so important. If we raise our kids to admire people with guns—like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, Bruce Willis in Die Hard, Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, and more recently the Punisher, Iron Man, Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, Liam Neeson in Taken, and Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde—then our kids will start to act like the heroes they adore. This is why saints are so important. They are the heroes of the church. They show us what God is like, and you won’t find many gun lovers among the saints. One old saying says, “It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshiping, we are becoming.” What dominates our imaginations begins to determine our character.
For Christians, Jesus is the one we adore and worship and hopefully begin to act like. And the great saints are simply people who remind the world of Jesus, who have been transformed by the one they worship and who give off the fragrance of Jesus in the world.
What’s just as important as whether or not we worship God is the character of the God we worship and what our worship of God does to us. Does it make us more loving, more concerned about life, more compassionate for the marginalized? Or does it make us more aggressive and angry and self-righteous and violent?
I (Shane) met someone a while ago who told me he was an atheist. As he described to me the God that he didn’t believe in, I told him, “I don’t believe in that God either.”
We believe in a God who would rather die than kill. We believe in a God whose last words are grace and forgiveness for the people who are killing him. We believe in a God who interacts with evil without becoming evil, who exposes our violence to heal our violence, who endures death to save us from death. We are atheists to the god of war and believers in the Prince of Peace.
If the NRA is a religion, as J. Warren Cassidy suggests, then we want nothing to do with the god they worship.
Addicted to Violence
It’s been said that America’s original sin is racism. Perhaps we could even name it white supremacy. The fruit of that sin is violence. Racism and violence go hand in hand. When we stop seeing the image of God in other human beings, they become disposable. We call them savages or animals or three-fifths human. And violence always follows. We can see that from the earliest days of this nation. The blood still cries out to God from the ground.
Dehumanization can lead to violence, kind of like how lust can lead to rape, or how greed can lead to exploitation. We saw the violence and racism in Charlottesville, and we see it in obvious and subtle ways all over the country. Even our national anthem is a war song—bombs bursting in the air. Given our nation’s track record with violence, it is not that surprising that respectfully kneeling during the anthem as a public lament of the loss of black lives can still be called unpatriotic or anti-American.
We are addicted to violence. We are infected by it like a disease. And it can’t go untreated.
Right now, the US spends over $600 billion per year on the military. No other country is even close to that expenditure: the US spends more than the next seven countries combined.10 We spend over $20,000 per second on defense. Fifty-three cents of every discretionary federal dollar goes to the military (compared to fifteen cents helping to alleviate poverty).11
BEATING PLOWS INTO SWORDS
(Note) Of the thirty-one aircraft carriers in the world, nineteen belong to the US. In fact, the USS New York (a transport ship that holds military vehicles and troops) is a story opposite of changing swords to plows. The government took metal from the World Trade Center and made the ship’s bow stem, along with the bow stems of the Somerset and Arlington, from it. One ship for each 9/11 crash site. If only there were something else we could have used that steel for.
USS New York [Bob Kopprasch / Wikimedia Commons]
A lot of countries have military bases, and a few have bases in other countries besides their own. Russia has eight bases in other countries. Britain has seven in other countries. France has five. The United States has 662 military bases outside the United States, in thirty-eight other countries.12 Ninety-five percent of foreign military bases are from one country—more than any country or empire in the history of the world.13 And there are still politicians whose number one priority is strengthening the military.
The Pentagon spends more in three seconds than the average American makes in a year. The Pentagon budget consumes 80 percent of individual tax revenue.14
The US military spends over half a billion per year on advertising.15 In a four-year stretch, it paid $6.8 million to professional sports teams to honor soldiers, including staged patriotic events.16 Paying for solemn moments of remembrance—from tax dollars.
There are twenty-seven thousand people employed in recruitment, advertising, and public relations for the military.17
When it comes to weapons of mass destruction—the big guns—check out these numbers. There are roughly fifteen thousand nuclear bombs in the world. Only nine of the 196 countries of the world have nuclear weapons. Ninety-three percent of them are owned by two countries: the US and Russia. About half of all the nukes in the world are owned by one country alone: the US.18 We have nearly seven thousand nuclear bombs, an
d there is only one country that has ever used a nuclear bomb on people. It was us. And we did it twice in one week, killing one hundred thousand instantly and tens of thousands more in the weeks that followed. Just like our guns, our bombs keep getting bigger and bigger. We now have bombs that are eighty times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb. Cumulatively, our nuclear arsenal is equivalent to fifty thousand Hiroshima bombs.19
Fifty nuclear bombs could kill 200 million people (the combined populations of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany).20 We have 6,800 of them. How many times do we need to be able to blow up the world?
It’s like something off that Hoarders reality show where folks stockpile things—like ketchup packets or toilet paper or cats—only this is worse. It is a national epidemic.
We have a problem. We have a pathological, spiritual illness. We are addicted to violence. And our weapons have become our idols. Our nation has more guns than any other nation. Spends more money on its weapons. Sells more weapons. We’re the only country that’s killed one hundred thousand people in one blast, and it can feel like we’d do it again.
If we don’t do something, it is going to kill us. It is going to erode our soul.
When you hoard anything, it starts to create a toxic environment. Especially when what you are hoarding is dangerous to begin with. It weighs us down: $17.2 billion per year just to maintain the stockpile of weapons we have.21 We are wasting money and lives.
Experts estimate that gun violence is costing the US economy over $100 billion per year.22 The World Health Organization puts that number even higher, at closer to $155 billion annually.23 That’s just paper money. The human toll has no price tag.
Hoarding—whether that means stockpiling guns or stockpiling bombs—turns us into something we do not want to be, something we don’t even recognize. Something that is not good for the world.
More guns and more bombs are not making the world safer. Saying more guns will solve our gun problem is sort of like a drunk saying he just needs more whiskey, or like thinking that the solution to a flood is more water.
We end up creating a world that we do not want to live in. “The doors of hell are locked on the inside,” C. S. Lewis said.24
As you can see, the gun problem runs deep. We have said from the beginning that what we have is not just a gun problem but also a heart problem. No matter how good our laws are, no law can heal a human heart filled with hatred or racism. No government, even the best one, can solve the human predicament of sin and the way it so often expresses itself in violence.
Violence is killing us. Over and over we have picked up the sword and died by the sword. The US is fighting wars in seven countries as of March 2018.25 And in one year (2016) we dropped over twenty-six thousand bombs. Listen to that again: in one year we dropped 26,171 bombs. That’s seventy-two bombs per day, or three per hour.26 We have made the world a very fragile place.
It’s easy to see why Martin Luther King Jr. became so passionate about nonviolence and spoke so powerfully against the big guns of war: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” King called America the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”27 He said that every time he told young people that violence would not solve their problems, they asked why the government kept using violence to solve its problems. He had to speak consistently against violence, whether it was being used by protestors in the streets or politicians in the Pentagon. King also noted that every time a bomb goes off overseas, we feel the second impact of it here at home—as schools go bankrupt, kids go without health care, veterans die on our streets, and entire blocks of our cities look like war zones of abandoned factories and houses. President Dwight Eisenhower nailed it: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”28
If we live in a nation that idolizes its weaponry, we must recognize that we are the ones who are suffering—from our idols and from our fears. We are killing ourselves, and the soul of the nation is at stake. The lives of our children and grandchildren are at stake. It’s time to name our love affair with guns and violence as a form of idolatry. We’ve trusted in something other than God and the promise that love will cast out fear.
The good news is, it is never too late to repent.
The word repent may also sound extreme or antiquated, but we like it since it really means to “rethink” how we are living and where we are headed. In the words of GPS systems, we need to “recalculate” where we are and where we are going so that we can arrive safely at our destination—or in this case, our destiny.
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Exorcising Demons
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
—Ephesians 6:12
WE’VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME on the physical reality of guns, and there is something amazing about seeing actual metal transformed. We also want to see streets transformed. And a world transformed.
The battle against violence is not just about guns. We could get rid of all the guns in the world, but people would still find ways to kill. There is a spiritual dimension. No matter how thorough our gun laws become, no law can change a human heart. That’s why this is not just a political battle.
Just as there is a spiritual dimension to our adoration of guns that is a form of idolatry, there is also a spiritual side to violence and our obsession with it. We want to suggest that it is literally a form of demonic possession. Hang with us.
It’s hard to think about violence as only a physical reality in the world we live in, though it is surely that. We want to suggest that there is something happening in the spiritual realm, what the Bible calls the “authorities” and “powers” and “spiritual forces of evil” (Eph. 6:12). Maybe that kid who said Satan invented the gun is more right than we thought.
You may not be a person who thinks much about things like angels and demons. You may not even think that you believe in them. You may think of them like you think about dragons or fairies. But when you look at these mass shootings—Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Pulse, Las Vegas—there is something so hauntingly evil, it goes beyond anything we can rationally understand. Maybe you move a little closer to acknowledging that there are “spiritual forces of evil” that can compel us to do unreasonable things. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched, even for the skeptics, to consider that the Charleston shooter was compelled by a dark, evil spirit. We are not going to let him off the hook or make an excuse for the evil he did. We are not trying to explain it away; rather, we are trying to show how dreadfully enigmatic it is.
If some of the forces that we are up against are spiritual, then changing laws alone is not enough. We’re thinking specifically of Pastor Larry Wright. During one of the worship services at his church in North Carolina, an armed man came in, carrying a gun and ammo. Pastor Wright fearlessly invited him to the altar, and the armed man surrendered the gun to a deacon. Then, Pastor Wright invited the man to stay for the rest of the service and went on to finish his sermon. At the end the pastor gave an altar call—an invitation to come to the altar for prayer, where people can commit their lives to Jesus. The man came forward for prayer that night.
Memorial to the Lost
CENTURY 16 MOVIE THEATER, AURORA, COLORADO (JULY 20, 2012)
On July 20, 2012, a lone gunman opened fire on an audience at a movie theater’s midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises. Multiple weapons were used, including an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle, a .40 caliber handgun, and a 12-gauge shotgun. Twelve lives were lost and many others injured. The incident lasted less than ten minu
tes. Here are the names of those who died that night:
Jonathan T. Blunk, 26 Matthew R. McQuinn, 27
Alexander J. Boik, 18 Micayla C. Medek, 23
Jesse E. Childress, 29 Veronica Moser-Sullivan, 6
Gordon W. Cowden, 51 Alex M. Sullivan, 27
Jessica Ghawi, 24 Alexander C. Teves, 24
John Thomas Larimer, 27 Rebecca Ann Wingo, 32
GATHERING AROUND THE FORGE
(Note) When RAWtools transforms guns, we often have an entire worship service with prayers and songs and testimonies. We realize that the battle against gun violence is not just about policies and legislation; it is also about healing hearts. Walter Brueggemann says, “Bringing pain to speech creates energy; not bringing pain to speech brings violence.” We invite people to consider the hostilities that exist in their own hearts—whether they own a gun or not. One of the things we’ve done is invite people to write the hostilities of their own hearts on paper and throw them into the fire. Sometimes we even use “flash paper”—a special combustible paper used by magicians and circus performers that burns up without leaving a trace. It’s pretty fun. It’s also deep. Guns are just the outward manifestation of a much deeper illness—they’re the symptom of the disease.
“I saw in his eyes hopelessness, hurt, pain, despair,” explained Pastor Wright. “I came down and prayed with him and we embraced. It was like a father embracing a son.”
The man was escorted by police to a facility for treatment. Eventually he returned to the church to apologize, perhaps even to worship and feel the love. It turns out that he is a veteran who has struggled with PTSD and mental illness and has had trouble affording his medication. He was also a convicted felon who was given a gun.1
We don’t want to conflate mental illness with demon possession. Nor do we think other church shootings could have been prevented by prayer in the same way.
Beating Guns Page 16