National Religion

Violence is America’s religion

 August 28, 2015 / 2 Comments

Helen Ubinas writes in the Philadelphia Daily News that violence is our religion. We are alternately entertained and horrified by it and each day the weight of it all threatens to bury us all.

We talk so much about politics being our religion, about sports being our religion, about religion being our religion.

Jesus, look around: Violence is our religion. We worship at its altar.

It’s become our national devotion. We’re sad, we’re mad, we’ve been wronged, we want to get even, we want to go down in a blaze of deranged glory and we turn violent.

And how we react, or don’t react, to whose lives are affected by the violence has become more divisive than any religious or political view. Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.

The truth: No lives matter, because if they did, the moment to prove that was when a roomful of babies were massacred in a Connecticut elementary school or when nine faithful churchgoers were executed in a weekly South Carolina bible study or when the blood of generations of nameless, faceless young people stains city streets all across this country.

Posted by Andrew Gerns

The above post comes from The Episcopal Cafe (http://www.episcopalcafe.com/violence-is-americas-religion/) .  The title of the post "Violence is America's religion" is apt and accurate. To put this into religious terminology WE are practicing a form of idolatry. It's not only the idolatry of violence, it's the idolatry of The Gun. According to gun ownership advocates everyone needs to have one because that is where we can look for protection. Really?! To continue the religious theme; look at the Psalms and notice how often the psalmists look to God as their protection. They see God as a rock a word they use to designate protection. But the worshipers of Violence / Guns say that OUR protection is in an AK-47 or a handgun that holds 17 rounds in a clip and 18 with one in the chamber like the one that killed the reporters during a live on-air broadcast. Then there are the demi-gods of flag, country, and military. If you think these are not some of the "... other gods before me" that our Creator warns us about consider the holy days (i.e.. national holidays) or national scripture (i.e. the Constitution, and Declaration of Independence) that are reverentially held and celebrated. There is nothing wrong with these institutions as long as they are kept in perspective; as long as they are not worshipped, deified, or idolized (there’s that word idol again).

But now for some pessimism: If the slaughter of 20 children (babies really) in their school, if the murder of parishioners in there Wednesday night Bible study, if the killing of teenagers by other teenagers in our cities, the shooting of reporters on live television (and the list goes on) will not shake this country out of its easy acceptance of these idols nothing will. Since the killing of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. starting in the turbulent 1960s we, as a nation, have known that the easy access to and the over abundance of guns in this country is a problem (another religious word: an abomination) but we fail to recognize it. We fail to recognize it because we have become numb to the violence and pain. We see it for a time on the 24 hour news, we become tired of hearing about it, the top “Breaking News” story switches and we forget; until it happens again. We don’t see it as a problem or if we do we see it as unsolvable. No problem, not a problem that can be corrected so we do nothing. Is this where we are?  

See: Exodus 20:3 and Deuteronomy 5:7-9a.