Progressives, Non-Violence and Gun Control

  Should a Christian store a gun at home for self-defense? As a probation officer, I was entitled to own a gun, but I decided against it. However, this wasn’t because I thought that it was wrong for me to have a gun. Instead, I just didn’t want the hassles associated with it.

In contrast, in a blog entry entitled What Would Jesus Say to the NRA?, progressive Christian, Shane Claiborne, argued that Jesus was against all forms of violence:

• Everything in Jesus' world, just as in ours, contends that we must use violence to protect the innocent from violence, which is the very thing Jesus came to help us un-learn through his nonviolent life and death on the cross. Surely, we think, if God were to come to earth, he should at least come with a bodyguard -- if not an entire entourage of armed soldiers and secret service folk. But Jesus comes unarmed. Surely, we think, if God were about to be killed he would bust out a can of butt-kicking wrath; but Jesus looks into the eyes of those about to kill him and says, "Father forgive them." The Bible goes so far to say that the wisdom of God makes no sense to the logic of this world, in fact it may even seem like "foolishness" (or at least utopian idealism).  

Claiborne mistakenly interprets Jesus’ prayer, "Father, forgive them," as His rejection of any punishment. However, it can’t possibly mean that. Jesus had talked more about the consequence of hell than did anyone else in the Bible!

More to the point, Claiborne insists the Jesus’ “nonviolent life and death on the cross” represents the rejection of any use of the sword. However, this is contradicted by many NT verses (Rom. 13:1-4; 1 Peter 2:14).

However, it’s necessary to acknowledge that Jesus’ cross is supposed to guide our conduct:

• To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps…When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. (1 Peter 2:21-23) 

Clearly, Jesus’ life models for us non-retaliation. However, does this say anything against  defending our families? Evidently, Claiborne thinks that it does:

• When soldiers come to arrest and execute Jesus, one of his closest friends defensively picks up a sword to protect him. Jesus' response is stunning: He scolds his own disciple and heals the wounded persecutor. It was a tough and very counter-intuitive lesson: "The one who picks up the sword dies by the sword ... there is another way."

Claiborne seems to think that any use of violence is unacceptable. However, should we never pick up the sword? Should we never own a gun or defend the vulnerable? This brings us to the question: What does it mean to pick up the sword? Certainly, we can’t take this statement literally. There is nothing wrong with literally picking up a sword. The criminal justice system picks up the sword. Their very role requires this (Rom. 13:1-4).

Nor can we maintain that Jesus swore off of all violence. He forcefully drove money changers out of the Temple (John 2:12-16; Mat. 21:12-13; Mark 11:15-17; Luke 19:45-46).

It’s therefore hard to maintain that Jesus had taught against all force or violence. In fact, the use of force was very much a part of the revelation of the Hebrew Scriptures. God had ordained certain wars. He had also mandated capital punishment, even before the Mosaic Covenant (Gen. 9:6), and there is no reason to believe that the cross changed any of this. In fact, Jesus even reaffirmed capital punishment:

• “For God said, 'Honor your father and mother' and 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.'” (Matthew 15:4) 

But what about owning a gun for the defense of one’s home and family? While God clearly ordained certain forms of violent judgment – wars and capital punishment – does Scripture make any allowance for self-defense? There is surprisingly little written about this in the Bible. Perhaps it’s not because self- and family-defense were not acceptable, but perhaps because it was such an obvious truth that it didn’t require biblical support. Perhaps the concept of self-defense was as acceptable as drinking water.

However, there are verses that do speak to this:

• "If a thief is caught breaking in and is struck so that he dies, the defender is not guilty of bloodshed.” (Exodus 22:2) 

Although murder was such a serious crime, defending one’s home and family took precedence!

Jesus Himself even seemed to endorse a forceful defense of one’s home. He likens the necessity for keeping watch spiritually with keeping watch over one’s home:

• "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. (Matthew 24:42-43; Luke 12:39)

According to Jesus, the homeowner has a perfect right to forcefully resist the thief from breaking in.

I am not suggesting that we all go out and buy a gun. Sometimes, the Lord is best served when we simply rely upon Him. If we do buy a gun, we need to note the very limited circumstances where lethal force is justified.

Guns are not only powerful instruments, they can also powerfully affect our attitudes and behavior. They can wrongly teach us self-reliance as opposed to God-reliance. Power can mysteriously wean us away from our real source of power, placing our focus on the things below instead of the Transcendent. Power can cause us to forget to love and seek first His kingdom and righteousness, knowing that if we do, He will watch over us (Mat. 6:33).

What then does it mean “to live by the sword?” I think that Jesus was referring to trusting in the sword – the wrong object.

Pop, Porn, Violence and Bigotry

Here in NYC, our Mayor Bloomberg is trying to ban the sale of large soft drinks. However, if he is interested in the welfare of residents of this city, perhaps he needs widen his net a bit to include pornography. CNN reports:

• Is the overuse of video games and pervasiveness of online porn causing the demise of guys? Increasingly, researchers say yes, as young men become hooked on arousal, sacrificing their schoolwork and relationships in the pursuit of getting a tech-based buzz.

• The excessive use of video games and online porn in pursuit of the next thing is creating a generation of risk-averse guys who are unable (and unwilling) to navigate the complexities and risks inherent to real-life relationships, school and employment.

• Stories about this degeneration are rampant: In 2005, Seungseob Lee, a South Korean man, went into cardiac arrest after playing "StarCraft" for nearly 50 continuous hours. In 2009, MTV's "True Life" highlighted the story of a man named Adam whose wife kicked him out of their home -- they have four kids together -- because he couldn't stop watching porn.

• A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that "regular porn users are more likely to report depression and poor physical health than nonusers are…Similarly, video games also go wrong when the person playing them is desensitized to reality and real-life interactions with others.

• The Annual Review of Public Health suggests a link between violent video games and real-life aggression: Given the opportunity, both adults and children were more aggressive after playing violent games. And people who identify themselves with violent perpetrators in video games are able to take aggressive action while playing that role, reinforcing aggressive behavior.

• Young men -- who play video games and use porn the most -- are being digitally rewired in a totally new way that demands constant stimulation. And those delicate, developing brains are being catered to by video games and porn-on-demand, with a click of the mouse, in endless variety.

• Guys are also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which tend to build gradually and subtly, and require interaction, sharing, developing trust and suppression of lust at least until "the time is right."

While the sale of soft drinks is being criminalized, every effort is enlisted to sexualize children. The media is touting it as normal and routine as eating a hamburger; the schools are promoting it under the guise of safe-sex ed or “discovering your sexuality” programs. Values clarification exercises are indoctrinate students into the dogma that there is no right answer. It’s just a matter of finding out what’s “right” for you. Considerations of conscience are over-ruled as the media elites tell us that you have every right to have an abortion because your body is yours alone.

Meanwhile, these same elites confidently demonize any who would restrict sex to marriage as “mindless” or “bigoted.” But perhaps the above findings give reason for hesitation about this “Brave New World” that our elites are trying to construct for us!

The Silence and Hypocrisy of the Media

Adolph Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by the fact that both the media and the universities capitulated entirely to his agenda, never uttering a whisper of protest. Today, the media personnel now carry a laptop and the new National Socialists have a different cause, but little else has changed:

• Pro-life advocates, pro-family organizations, and traditional Christians do not expect to get a fair shake in the media, but the dogged, seasoned journalists of the prestige publications have overlooked a disturbing new trend: an increasing number of left-wing activists claim that destroying or defacing other people’s property is part of their First Amendment “free speech” rights.

• After a… [Western Kentucky University] pro-life group got university permission to set up 3,700 crosses to represent the number of children aborted every day, a student named Elaina Smith placed condoms over each one. When a pro-life student confronted her, Smith complained, “I think it’s kinda weird that you’re allowed to express yourself, and I’m not.” Her art instructor, Kristina Arnold, gave her permission to deface the crosses as an “art project,” defended her actions, and may give her college credit for her act of vandalism.

• Earlier this month at Northern Kentucky University, pro-life students hung up baby clothes and marked every fourth one with an “X” – symbolizing that one of every four babies is aborted – only to have their work destroyed. One of the left-wing students who dismantled it, Kyle Pickett, told the Kentucky Post, “Tearing it down was expressing our right to free speech.”

• The actions follow another incident at NKU in 2006, when women’s studies professor Sally Jacobsen was fired after she incited her students to tear down a pro-life display of crosses. In an Orwellian turn-of-phrase she admitted, “I did…invite students to express their freedom-of-speech rights to destroy the display if they wished to.” Her behavior was doubly acceptable, Jacobsen claimed, because her feelings were hurt. “Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it,” she whined. “Some of my students felt the same way, just outraged.”

A feeling of disgust or outrage has now become an acceptable justification among our intellectual elite to act outrageously. Prior to this, we valued self-control, realizing that acting-out represented immaturity. However, acting-out has now become a virtue, if it is in favor of left-wing causes:

• On Tuesday, a group calling itself the “Angry Queers” threw rocks through 100-year-old stained glass windows at Mars Hill Church in Portland. Its crime? The pastor of another church, with which it happens to be affiliated, said homosexuality is a sin. The local pastor, Tim Smith, agrees but has reached out to the local homosexual community to find common ground.

LifeSiteNews reports that:

• Two versions of the e-mail have been sent to the media, one longer and slightly more incendiary than the other, but both apparently originating from the same group. In the longer version, the LGBT activists state they destroyed church property in the names of several local transgender people who have died, and “all other trans women” whose deaths they blame on “this cissexist, femmephobic, racist, and transmisogynistic society.”

If Christianity is at fault for these tragic suicides, the “Angry Queers” certainly have grounds for legal redress. However, the suicides and the other risk factors that seem to be endemic to the gay and transgendered lifestyles warrant the very warnings that the church is sounding. In view of the staggering costs associated with these lifestyles, it is lamentable that the media and the schools are encouraging them rather than warning against them.

The “Angry Queers” charge that:

• Churches are a major contributor to the culture that deems trans women of color to be disposable, as not worth keeping alive. Children who are forced to attend Mars Hill are indoctrinated in hateful dogma that teaches them their natural desires are an abomination that will damn them to hell. Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign does nothing in the here and now for queer kids trapped in abusive home or religious settings. And it never got better for Mark, Duanna, Paige, Agnes, Deoni, or the countless other trans women (especially brown trans women) who are regularly murdered.

• When Mars Hill moved to town, so-called “representatives” of the queer “community” from the Q Center met with officials from the church in order to have dialog. What we have to say to the Q Center is this: FUCK YOU, you don’t represent us. You are disgusting traitors who prioritize social peace and the bourgeois aspirations of rich white cis gay people over the more pressing survival needs of more marginalized queers. Fuck dialog with people who want us dead, the only dialog we need with scum like Mars Hill is hammers through their windows.

• We smashed Mars Hill because they make our lives miserable. We hope this small act of vengeance will strike some fear into the hearts of all of Mars Hill’s pastors, and warm the hearts of our friends and comrades (known or unknown). It may not get better, but we can certainly get even.

Sadly, they are attempting to “get even” with the wrong party. It’s like blaming the fire alarm for the fire. Instead, of fighting the fire, they are trying to extinguish the fire alarm system. Where then is the fire? It is in themselves and the self-destructive lifestyle they have chosen.

We are all sinners who need the embrace of the Savior. None of us are “disposable” objects but precious to the Lord. Instead, greater blame should be directed to the media which has been entrusted with the responsibility of shedding the light accountability into the darkness:

• No media source reported the homosexual activists’ intent to terrorize their political opponents, nor that they committed themselves to violence in perpetuity. In effect, Big Journalism’s gatekeepers collaborated with the extremists to make them look more mainstream.

• Can one believe for a moment if a pro-life organization – “The Fetus Fanatics,” let’s say – had thrown bricks through an abortion mill’s windows, dropped the f-bomb on any Christian who talked to the other side, then incited further violence, the media would be so docile?

• Reporters in the liberal media have detected 50 of the last zero acts of “pro-life terrorism,” and zero of the last four anti-Christian hate crimes. After a certain critical mass, one has to assume the oversight is intentional. 

• As these rage- and bigotry-fueled acts go unreported, and unpunished, one has to wonder: What will their perpetrators do next?

• Extremists have been invading and shutting down Right to Life meetings all year. Occupy Wall Street interrupted the March for Life Youth Rally in Washington, D.C., and threw condoms at Catholic school girls at a pro-life event at the Rhode Island statehouse. The campaign of intimidation is well underway.

Understandably, LifeSiteNews concludes:

• If we are already to that point, what will come next? The right to batter, maim, or kill someone whose speech might offend you? As remote as it seems, recent history teaches us the rationale for war creeps inexorably from defense toward preemption. If social mores allow you to attack someone after an offense, why wait until it is inflicted?

In the face of violence and injustice, the silence of the media must be interpreted as approval. Silence can only serve to withhold accountability and to encourage the escalation of the violence. Add to this the fact that, according to one estimate, 140,000 Christians are martyred yearly. However, the media is dead silent about this genocide.

Denial and Confrontation

If your friend consistently complains that s/he is mistreated by others, but you observe that s/he brings this “mistreatment” upon themselves by verbally abusing others, what do you do? Do you confront? If you care about your friend, you can’t simply enable them to continue denying the real problem. If you do enable, the problem will merely continue!

This is the thinking of Muslim reformer and former Dutch Parliamentarian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Although Islam tolerates no criticism, she believes that Muslims need is to hear the uncomfortable truth:

·        Muslims were responsible for eleven, and possibly twelve, of the sixteen major international terrorist acts committed between 1983 and 2000;

·        Five of the seven states that support terrorists, and as such appear on the U.S. State Department’s list, are Muslim countries, and the majority of foreign organizations on that same list are Muslim organizations;

·        Muslims were involved in two-thirds of the thirty-two armed conflicts in the year 2000, while only one-fifth of the world population is Muslim. (11)

In The Caged Virgin, Ali also cites many other problems endemic to Islam – problems which Islam is unwilling to confront. She therefore reasons:

• If nothing is wrong with Islam, why then are so many Muslims on the run?...Why do we Muslims move to the West, while at the same time condemning it?...Why is the position of women in Muslim countries so abominable? If we Muslims are so tolerant and peaceful, why is there so much ethnic, religious, political, and cultural strife and violence in Muslim countries? Why can’t or won’t we acknowledge the seriousness of the situation in which we find ourselves? Why are Muslims so full of feelings of anger and uneasiness, and why do we carry so much hostility and hate within us both toward ourselves and toward others? Why are we incapable of criticizing ourselves from within

Ali finds it ironic and unfortunate that while Muslims are fleeing the repressive silence in their home countries, they are finding the same silence in the West:

• Yet European governments are seriously considering limiting the freedom of the press to discuss Islam; some newspaper editors were fired for printing the cartoons. The tragedy for many Muslims is that their inability to criticize the dogma of religion in their own countries will be continued in Europe. (xv)

What do Muslims need? The same things that all of us need – the freedom to see, to speak and to choose! Is Islam is the true religion, then Muslims shouldn’t shun the light of scrutiny! Ali therefore hopes that the West will stop enabling denial and will reaffirm it principles of freedom and fairness:

• The West needs to help Muslims help themselves, and not support them in their illusion by avoiding the underlying questions…This change can only begin by subjecting the sources of Islam to thorough critical examination. (13-14)

How serious is the denial? Ali claims that almost all of their prayers ended with a pleas for the extermination of the Jews. She adds:

• Many madrassas imbue their pupils with an irrational hatred of Jews…Jews are consistently portrayed as instigators of evil. (38)

Such teachings are a sure prescription for ongoing violence. Closer to home, she cites the words of her own mother:

• When my sister and I were small, we would occasionally make remarks about nice people who were not Muslim, but my mother and grandmother would always say, “No, they are not good people. They know about the Koran and the Prophet and Allah, and yet they haven’t come to see that the only thing a person can be is Muslim. They are blind.” (x)

Blindness, however, is curable. It requires the open exchange of ideas and supporting evidences – the soil of the democratic experience - not threats of violence.