Pray away the guns

Many people who call themselves Christian, and think they represent all Christians, believe that, when communities are living by God’s word (which they understand, unequivocally, from God’s mouth to their ears, so to speak) then that community will not be punished with terrible things. Thus, they reason, if there are terrible things happening, we just need to get back on the right path, and those things will go away. That’s the argument being made by a lot of people about gun violence.

It’s a kind of bastardization (as Kenneth Burke would say) of the Jeremiad. The Jeremiad is a rhetorical narrative—our culture was once in touch with God, and following God’s laws, and we were prosperous and happy and there was no disagreement; but, we have fallen from God’s law, and now we are suffering bad things (especially disagreement, but also violence), and so we need to purify our culture from practices that God condemns, and then our problems will be solved.

The Jeremiad depoliticzes political issues. It makes all policy issues not issues about what policies we should have but issues of personal will and out-group presence.

The American fascination with the Jeremiad is usually attributed to second generation New England Puritan preachers saying that things were great with the first generation–who were pure of heart–, but now they’re bad because people aren’t pure enough. What’s really odd about that argument is that the first generation wasn’t good. They saw people drop like flies. They bickered over everything, and sued one another like the lawyers they were. A large part of The History of Plymouth Plantation was about their lawsuits.

There never was a golden age in American Protestant religion when people weren’t dying, killing, suing each other, and, for that matter, buggering various animals (the most entertaining part of The History of Plymouth Plantation). The Jeremiad is a historical narrative (people followed God and things were great, now we don’t, and things are terrible) that is indefensible as an argument about history.

MAGA is a Jeremiad, especially when connected to notions about how when “In God We Trust” was on our money things were better, and crime has been going up ever since we banned prayer from schools (it hasn’t, and we didn’t).  But, okay, let’s run with that argument. Things were better when there was slavery? Things were better in the 50s?

One thing I think we should ask white Christians engaged in Jeremiads about how we need to go back to when America was great, in the fifties, is: could they please explain how that time was better? What, exactly, was better, and more in line with what God wants, about segregation, about a time when people posed cheerfully in front of a castrated, flayed, and burned black body? Was that when America was great? When a man could rape his wife, even if they were legally separated, and he could know he would suffer no consequences? When employers could pay POC and women less for the same work? Where is that in the Bible? When “conservative” rhetoric could criminalize the very people employed in order to break unions?

Christians engaged in Jeremiads about how times were better and we used to follow God’s law are generally engaged in what I like to think of as narcissistic ethics (the world is good or bad as it is good or bad for them and people like them) and what others have called naïve realism (something is true if it seems true to you). Personally, I don’t think either of those is much in line with what Jesus said, but I’ll set that aside just to emphasize that, if you try to engage someone making this argument about how things were better when you could have a picnic while lynching a black man who hadn’t done anything, they’ll talk about abortion or gay marriage.

This isn’t an argument about history; this is a statement of personal commitment to an irrational political agenda that is supposed to stand for a relationship with Christ.

It also a statement of personal commitment to an irrational narrative of causality. The dumb version of the Jeremiad says that things used to be great because people used to follow God’s law (and there is a short and ahistorical list of what that meant—we prayed in schools [no that didn’t happen everywhere], we had “In God We Trust” on our money [the history is pretty complicated], but appalling practices from those “good old days” are cheerfully ignored), and now things are all bad (they aren’t).

Thus, people who believe this false narrative say, the bad things that are happening to us are not because of policies for which we have voted, or the politicians we have voted to put in place, but because we have stopped following God’s laws, and so those things will go away if we all become more righteous.

Here things get a little murky. There are people who believe that gun violence is a scourge God has put on us because we allow abortion. (So, why wasn’t there this level of gun violence before abortion was outlawed?) Thus, the white supremacist Trump supporter drinking deep of toxic masculinity who could easily get a weapon that would enable a mass shooting is just an agent of God, not a consequence of white supremacy, toxic masculinity, the eliminationist and victimization rhetoric he regularly consumes.

A person who says he is engaged in mass shooting because he believes his actions to be what right-wing pundits say he should do (like Jim Adkisson) has nothing to do with right-wing rhetoric. It’s about lack of prayer in schools. But, the same people who claim that right-wing shooters aren’t inspired by right-wing rhetoric will blame any shooter who can be labeled as leftist on leftist rhetoric (James Hodgkinson).

In other words, if there is a shooter, the first move for mainstream “right-wing” media (by which I mean Fox, Limbaugh, and the other main sources of information for many people—the most mainstream media there is) is, if possible, to say the person was a “lefty.” If that isn’t possible, say he was mentally ill, an anomaly, and it would have been prevented had there been good guys to shoot him.

But you also get the argument that he was an agent of God because bad things happen when we do not follow God’s law.

People say we politicize gun violence when, after a shooting, we want to talk about policies about guns, and many of them mean that because they sincerely believe that, if we all just believed what they believed (which they describe as having faith in Christ) then no one would do anything bad. They believe that we can pray away the gay and we can pray away the guns.

They believe that gun violence would simply end were we a culture in line with their vision of Christ. Therefore shooting isn’t a political issue (that is, one that could be solved through a change in policies), but an issue of personal faith and cultural commitment. Gun violence can’t be solved through policies about guns, but only by a spiritual rejuvenation.

Note, however, that they don’t think they can pray away abortion. Abortion is a political issue that can be reduced, they believe, through a change in policies. (It can, but not the policies they’re advocating.) They say they think gun violence is bad, and they say think abortion is bad, and so they are working (and have been working for years) to change the policies on abortion.

That’s because, they say, abortion is a violation of God’s will. And gun violence isn’t?