The thought that is crossing my mind this afternoon on the Unitarian church shooting yesterday is that it isn't religious conservatives that are the big danger to a liberal social order, but secular ones. The sketchy portrait of the shooter was of someone who hated Christianity and hated liberal social policy. So, he took out his frustration on the most iconic of socially-liberal Christian groups.
Secular doesn't always mean liberal; many folks who don't go to church have old-school thoughts on mores. Those mores may be influenced by centuries of Christian thought, but culturally conservative thoughts on sexual issues are not uncommon in pagan non-Christian cultures. Such thoughts are all the more dangerous, since they frequently don't have the Golden Rule, love-thy-neighbor overlay of Christian thought to go with them.
Get a old-school pagan unchurched person angry, and you have a skinhead. We see a lot of that in Europe and we may have seen it yesterday in Knoxville.
[Update 7/29- Sorry, Yvonne. Loose choice of words. "Pagan" wasn't quite the word that I was shooting for, but it often gets used as a loose synonym for non-Christian. Sometimes the thesaurus doesn't get fully checked.]
Maybe. He was raised in church, had dark mood swings, burned through four marriages, all kinds of jobs and a lot of booze.
His fourth ex-wife he had threatened to kill went to that church.
This is not a man who is self-aware Mark.
He's white so he can be written off just as someone with an untreated mentally illness or ignorant neo-confederate. White guys are rarely seen as domestic terrorists even when they plan and target the vulnerable.
So he believed in the conservative rhetoric of elimination, read the peddlers of it, wanted and expected suicide by cop and found himself confronted by self-preserving people of love who take seriously the words of Christ - greater love hath no man than this...some may see that as heroic, but I think most of us would see that as being faithful.
He was a loner who defined himself by what/who he hated - niggers, gays, immigrants, liberals, Democrats (anyone who wasn't like him) but whatever demons of destruction he flirted with, his rambling self-definition isn't enough. Even loners don't exist in a vacuum.
He soaked up the rhetoric of elimination because it was the easiest way to define himself. But to blame just that is reductive, the levels of brokeness and evil in acts and tragedy like this can never be satisfactorily explained.
We honour this church and their pain by doing what they ask. Offer our prayers, the road to healing is a long and rocky one. And we pray for a murderer who is a soul in free-fall.
He soaked in this like he soaked in his drug of choice.
"That's how eliminationist hate works, regardless of its target: Its aim is to threaten and intimidate not merely the immediate target, but anyone who might think of speaking out on their behalf. This cuts the target off from the community support it might normally enjoy and leaves them feeling even more isolated.
What, really, is eliminationism?
It's a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination."
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2005/07/elimination-game.html
I, like this congregation, do not believe in the death penalty, it's too easy. Lock him up and never let him out. But while locked up, treat underlying illness, force him to confront his alcoholism, his suicidal ideation, the hatred and revenge that drives suicide by cop; have those UU liberals in their chaplains and congregates, visit him often with forgiveness.
Civil society has to set itself against violence. This was horrific, abhorrent and Paul tells us to "love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good." Paul didn't give political exceptions.
I pray the people of Tennessee hold fast to love of their neighbours, healers who will care of their woundedness, hold to the courage of Greg McKendry and the others who stepped forward, for the dead, the wounded and their families.
Posted by: Bene D | July 29, 2008 at 04:37 AM
Pagans are as outraged and distressed by this horrible killing as anyone is.
Skinheads and racists are not Pagans, and do not have the right to call themselves Pagans.
Posted by: Yvonne | July 29, 2008 at 11:55 AM
Mark, I don't understand.
This murderer was well churched.
Posted by: Bene D | July 29, 2008 at 10:40 PM