Stuart Connelly's Blog - Posts Tagged "gun-control"
Downward, Christian Soldiers
Okay, it's been simmering for awhile, but the feeling will not go away. Time to go on record: this Giffords assault feels like a watershed moment to me. The time has come for this nation's fundamentalists to have a real "come-to-Jesus" meeting. Pulling maps that feature crosshairs off political websites is not the same as looking deep into the mirror and saying, What is it that I stand for as a human being?
I was recently speaking with Clarence B. Jones (the co-author of our new book Behind The Dream) about Martin Luther King's private side and some historians' concerns about King's personal behaviors. Jones told me, "Nothing I ever heard Martin say or saw him do was in any way inconsistent with his 24/7 commitment to the belief that our people should be free."
Inconsistency, at least with respect to morals, is a synonym for hypocrisy. It should be poison in politics. Somehow, people can praise Jesus and bomb abortion offices in the same day and still sleep at night. They can look at insurance as tyranny but attempted assassination as pilgrimage. And the rest of America may condemn the violence, but they never seem to point out the underlying philosophical contradiction.
As Buddy Blue once sang, "My two main men are Jesus and ol' John Birch." But he was mocking you, and somehow I get the feeling if you Tea Party members ever stumbled across his brilliant Gun Sale At The Church you wouldn't get the joke.
So I'm throwing down the gauntlet here: Fundamentalist voters, members of the Christian Coalition, Glenn Beck enthusiasts, Sarah Palin reality show viewers, pick a side. You clutch the Bill of Rights in one hand and the New Testament in the other. Time to drop one. Because if you are both Christian and some kind of amateur strict Constitutional constructionist, you have an inconsistency problem of very large proportions. (Members of the Far Right who are not Christians would certainly be excused from this exercise, though they seem to me to be exceedingly few and far between.)
Guns do one thing. They kill.
Christ taught us to love one another, turn the other cheek, forgive.
Time to get right with Jesus, Smith and Wesson.
Right now, in the privacy of your own mind, choose the make and caliber of the weapon you own that's closest to your heart, then choose your favorite Jesus of Nazareth quote. Got them? Now decide which is more important to you - your God or your Glock. If you had to give up one or the other. You know, Sophie's Choice... gun to your head...
Can you decide? I'm not going to get my hopes up. I suspect when I check back later in the comments section, most of you will take the opportunity to argue loudly with my premise. Because you've been led to believe you can have both Christianity and violence. But inside, you know that's a lie. A lie perpetrated by opinion leaders in the media and the political stage who prey on average Americans to get what they want: glory, fame, attention, book deals someone else can write for them, wealth, power. All at your expense.
Because there is one area I am certain Jesus and people like Sarah Palin share completely: they lead tremendous numbers of people in a direction of their own choosing. They are shepherds. The difference is the direction the sheep are moving together. The far right are the sheep who think they have a divine right to pack heat. And you don't even know you're being flocked.
The intersection of guns and god is really that both subjects deal with the fears people have. Genuine, understandable fears about death, insignificance, powerlessness. Bad interpretations of founding documents and scripture by the powerful simply attempt to soothe those concerns over. But at a dear price, as the events in Arizona last week can attest.
I was recently speaking with Clarence B. Jones (the co-author of our new book Behind The Dream) about Martin Luther King's private side and some historians' concerns about King's personal behaviors. Jones told me, "Nothing I ever heard Martin say or saw him do was in any way inconsistent with his 24/7 commitment to the belief that our people should be free."
Inconsistency, at least with respect to morals, is a synonym for hypocrisy. It should be poison in politics. Somehow, people can praise Jesus and bomb abortion offices in the same day and still sleep at night. They can look at insurance as tyranny but attempted assassination as pilgrimage. And the rest of America may condemn the violence, but they never seem to point out the underlying philosophical contradiction.
As Buddy Blue once sang, "My two main men are Jesus and ol' John Birch." But he was mocking you, and somehow I get the feeling if you Tea Party members ever stumbled across his brilliant Gun Sale At The Church you wouldn't get the joke.
So I'm throwing down the gauntlet here: Fundamentalist voters, members of the Christian Coalition, Glenn Beck enthusiasts, Sarah Palin reality show viewers, pick a side. You clutch the Bill of Rights in one hand and the New Testament in the other. Time to drop one. Because if you are both Christian and some kind of amateur strict Constitutional constructionist, you have an inconsistency problem of very large proportions. (Members of the Far Right who are not Christians would certainly be excused from this exercise, though they seem to me to be exceedingly few and far between.)
Guns do one thing. They kill.
Christ taught us to love one another, turn the other cheek, forgive.
Time to get right with Jesus, Smith and Wesson.
Right now, in the privacy of your own mind, choose the make and caliber of the weapon you own that's closest to your heart, then choose your favorite Jesus of Nazareth quote. Got them? Now decide which is more important to you - your God or your Glock. If you had to give up one or the other. You know, Sophie's Choice... gun to your head...
Can you decide? I'm not going to get my hopes up. I suspect when I check back later in the comments section, most of you will take the opportunity to argue loudly with my premise. Because you've been led to believe you can have both Christianity and violence. But inside, you know that's a lie. A lie perpetrated by opinion leaders in the media and the political stage who prey on average Americans to get what they want: glory, fame, attention, book deals someone else can write for them, wealth, power. All at your expense.
Because there is one area I am certain Jesus and people like Sarah Palin share completely: they lead tremendous numbers of people in a direction of their own choosing. They are shepherds. The difference is the direction the sheep are moving together. The far right are the sheep who think they have a divine right to pack heat. And you don't even know you're being flocked.
The intersection of guns and god is really that both subjects deal with the fears people have. Genuine, understandable fears about death, insignificance, powerlessness. Bad interpretations of founding documents and scripture by the powerful simply attempt to soothe those concerns over. But at a dear price, as the events in Arizona last week can attest.
