Guns, Again

I have a few more thoughts on the topic before I leave it for good, hopefully.

First, the Second Amendment absolutists remind me a lot of pro-choicers in the degree of their refusal to compromise. I made this point to Clara on the drive to Colorado for Christmas and my dad said the same thing in conversation there. Both pro-choicers and gun rights advocates seem to believe that the smallest concession will mean their entire undoing. For the pro-choice side this at least seems intellectually responsible. After all, once concessions are made lending humanity to the infant in utero the whole pro-choice project seems to collapse on itself. What in reality is the difference between a fetus at six months and one at six weeks, except that it looks grosser to kill it? Murky questions. Difficult to answer. Therefore, an absolutist case is consistent.

But there doesn't seem to be the same need for absolutism towards guns. It is intellectually tenable to be both pro-gun and pro-gun restriction. Second Amendment absolutists don't see it this way. You are either entirely for them, or entirely against them. Those who are lukewarm shall be spat out in disgust. I didn't see anyone arguing in the wake of Newtown or Aurora that we ought to round up all firearms, toss them into the ocean (think of the effect on the environment!), and head to Colorado to smoke some unprohibited weed and make dreamcatchers. Gun control advocates seemed to be advocating for. . . wait for it. . . gun control. Restrictions on sales of assault weapons, tougher licensing on all firearms, mandatory background checks. No one thinks that will be the panacea to end gun violence, but its at least good policy.

But Second Amendment absolutists double down. Their solution: more guns! And--this idea coming from an organization comprised largely of members of a party that thinks ever fewer teachers should make even less than they do now--an armed guard greeting our children in the morning. Dobroye utro, comrade! Modest restrictions on gun rights are an insane emotional response to a tragedy, but putting an armed individual at taxpayer expense in each of our nation's schools is coherent, cool-headed, and necessary.

Secondly, I saw a lot of commentary on facebook and elsewhere about how gun ownership keeps the government in check. The argument is that no government would dare go against an armed citizenry. And it was a valid argument in 1789 when the average farmer and the average British soldier carried the same gun. But can we really use this argument today? It is not as if in a possible uprising the government troops will don red coats and march to the beat of the little drummer boy. The government sees your high powered rifle and raises you a Predator Drone. Good luck in that battle. I am not saying this means guns should not be owned, but with the increasing gulf between military weaponry and that available to citizens it is hard to see mass gun ownership as being a deterrent to the government. My generation struggles to find the energy to move out of their parents' homes; can you really imagine us rising in armed rebellion? And over what?

Finally, I understand that there is no simple solution to this problem. Gun violence is an absolutely unwieldy topic. Most homicides in this country are committed with handguns, disproportionately by minorities in urban areas. An assault weapons ban would have no effect on that. I don't think that any proponent of gun control thinks that it would. Nor do I think that this is merely a matter of freedom. We exchange freedoms all of the time to live as members of a civilized society. I am not free to marry multiple people, drive without license and registration, walk around naked, and any other type of socially or legally restricted behavior. We accept these in return for the stability and ability to flourish that the social contract offers. Are unfettered gun rights an indispensable part of the social contract?

Last week on facebook there waged what I like to call The Battle of the Founding Fathers. Who could find the best quote by a venerable old revolutionary about gun rights and show people that this is a part of our national fabric. And so I saw a lot of quotes about armed citizens keeping the government in check and such things. Another friend posted a quote by John Adams, excerpted from Charles Murray's recent book Coming Apart: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." My friend asked whether since we are no longer either a moral or religious people can we really expect these freedoms to have their intended effect? It is a valid question and one to be mulled over in this debate in which it often seems that conservative Christians are the strongest voice in the pro-gun lobby.

Jesus told us that it was the meek who would inherit the earth. I guess he forgot to mention that they would only do so well-armed.

Guns

It was predictable that in the immediate aftermath of the horrifying event at Newtown people who have long wished for stricter gun control laws capitalized on the event to argue that now was the time to make that happen. And, I have to say that I agree with them.

Now, to anticipate some objections. First of all, I know that it was a severely deranged young man who killed all of those people and people just kill people. I get it. There were murders before guns, murders would still happen if guns were outlawed. But the fact is, a 20 year old kid had access to an AR15, which pretty much no one ever needs to have. I know, I know, zombie apocalypse, Red Dawn style Soviet invasion, nuclear war, governmental collapse and all of those extremely likely scenarios when individuals would benefit from assault weapons seem right around the corner, but let's be honest, when the founders wrote the second amendment, did they have an AR15 with quick reload in mind? Besides, my dystopian vision of the future, not to mention the real direction of our culture, is more Brave New World than 1984.

People are evil. I agree. I'm a Calvinist for goodness sakes. But shouldn't we work to mitigate evil where at all possible? Perhaps a short accounting style question: is there more net good from allowing individuals to buy assault weapons or net bad? Dudes having fun on a Saturday afternoon versus kids dying in a school. Let's put that on the moral scales. 

A second objection, the real issue here is with identifying mental disease and being able to get people the treatment that they need. I agree. Let's do that, too. This isn't a zero sum game, where we can only do one thing. Why can't we restrict guns and give teachers better training in dealing with depressed and otherwise troubled students? I read a blog post by a university professor who has attended mandatory faculty-wide training in disaster response but has never received any training in dealing with troubled students. What is more likely to happen: massive tragedy on campus or having depressed students in your class?

A third objection: tragedies are not good times to make far-reaching policy decisions. I totally agree again (as I cough under my breath, "Iraq"). But I'm not saying that we should ban guns altogether, but that we should make it a bit harder to buy them. One suggestion I have heard is to treat gun ownership like vehicle ownership and driver's licensing: have training, take a test, register with the state. Close the gun show loophole that allows guns to be purchased without background checks. I don't understand why restrictions would be a bad thing. I am generally in favor of the free market, but guess what, it sucks here. The free market cares about one thing only: making money. Moral calculations have to be made by human minds, not invisible hands.

I own a gun and plan on getting into hunting next year which will necessitate the purchase of another. Would I be offended if I had to register my new 308 with the state? Are you kidding me? I can't believe I don't have to. When my brother gave me a shotgun for my wedding (there is a joke there somewhere) I looked up the laws about registering and realized that I didn't have to register my gun. How crazy is that? If he had given me a scooter, you're damn right the government would know about it, but registering guns encroaches on freedom. I have yet to read the conservative case against license plates.

When people used to complain about the Patriot Act and the wide use of surveillance it granted the government I joked that that's only a bad thing if you have something to hide. The government can listen in on all of my phone conversations if they want to, but they would be mostly bored. I don't care if they know I think turning The Hobbit into three movies is an abomination and that I drive back to Colorado for Christmas on Friday. My point is, the Patriot Act was a problem if you already had something to hide. I didn't, so it didn't make me nervous. On the contrary, it made me feel quite sorry at the idea of some poor governmental operative tasked with sorting through my text messages. Gun restriction works in the same way: the good gunowners have nothing to fear and the bad ones will be stopped at the door. (Note: It is a tad ironic that the same party who pushed through the Patriot Act and defends it as a necessary policy, finds it completely within the pale for the government to have extreme liberty in surveillance of communication but no liberty at all in telling us how many high powered guns we can own. We are all selective in our big government beliefs.) (Another note: yes, I have heard of the black market and know that bad people can buy guns through illegal means. However, none of the people who have carried out the recent mass killings procured these weapons through the black market. Secondly, so what? What is the point here? You would rather the blood money for the gun sales to maniacal killers go through a legitimate dealer with a booth at a gun show than a black market dealer with the trunk of a Chrysler?)

At some point we have to ask ourselves what we are trading in exchange for our freedom. And is it worth it. Is a world with ever more guns the world we want our kids to grow up in? (Read Alan Jacobs's excellent post on the idea of arming teachers, which, like most everything he says, I agree with wholeheartedly.) I am not a gun guy, but I have no aversion to them. I own one and will probably own a few others here in the next few years. But I don't and won't own them because I am afraid. In any crazy post-apocalyptic scenario, I just hope I am already dead. I don't want to fight other people for oil or troop across the South killing zombies. If someone breaks into my house to steal they can have it. If they break in to hurt my family I will be glad to have a gun, but the chances of that happening are infinitesimally small.

I believe in the Second Amendment (I also think we are likelier to see the First overturned before we are the Second). But a right to bear arms is not an absolute right. It is not a first principle right, like the right to life and liberty. And when it starts to infringe on those first principle rights, it needs to be reconsidered.

Gene Robinson and the Gay Jesus

The other night I was suffering from an eye infection and was thus up late enough to watch The Daily Show, which for those keeping tabs, airs at 10 p.m. Stewart's guest on the program was Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopalian bishop from New Hampshire. (I encourage you to watch the video here to be able to understand what I have to say.) Robinson always struck me as a genuine gay man, but not much of a genuine Christian. He believes in a feel good God who wants us to be happy on our own terms, and has therefore constructed a theology that tells him that is also what the Bible says. (Note: there are plenty of other Christians, including myself, who often do the same thing.) For those who have read it, it doesn't say that or even imply it anywhere. Bonhoeffer said that when Christ calls a man he bids him come and die, and that is about as good of a synopsis as I have heard.

One wonders, listening to Robinson, if he has actually read the Bible. He attributes the following statement to holy writ in the interview: where love is, there is God also. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a huge Tolstoy fan, but so far as I know, he was not one of the canonical authors.

Now, I don't really want to write about gay marriage here for two reasons: the topic is far too vast and I have far too many conflicting feelings to squeeze it into a blog post, and secondly, what jumped out in this interview to me wasn't Robinson's attempt to bravely face the applause of our nation's elites, but the way he talked about Jesus at the end of the interview.

I will make one brief comment before passing on to Robinson's idea that Jesus himself might have been gay. When we talk about love we need to decide if what we mean by love is also what the Bible means by love. Simply put, is God's definition of love the same as ours? I would argue that for most people the answer to this question is no. Therefore, when Robinson and Stewart pile on the Christians who use Leviticus to argue for the stoning of homosexuals (who are these people, anyway; seriously, who in the last 30 years has used Leviticus to argue the Bible's case on homosexuality?), arguing that they need to contextualize the words of Scripture, I would tell them that they need to do the same thing. Do a word study on love and see if "doing whatever I feel, as long as I really feel it, is right" seems to be the scriptural definition.

The worst part of the video for me is the implication that because Jesus hung out with a bunch of dudes--the Bible even says he loved one!--then he must be gay. Of course, Robinson does the whole throw-up-my-hands, I'm-not-saying-this-but-if-I-were-this-is-what-I-would-say thing, but he is none too subtle here. And nothing to me shows how culturally derived Robinson's view of sexuality and masculinity is. 

One of the most revelatory moments of my life was when I was thinking about friendship, particularly with my best friend. And I thought about how much like romantic love it was. I love talking to him, miss him when we're apart for long periods of time as we invariably are, spend all my time with him just talking over our whiskey, call him on the phone (a rarity for me), I even tell him that I love him. If someone were writing a book about me, it would not be outlandish to call Casey the one I love. Of course I love other people, lots and lots of other people, but there is something particular about my love for him. The only difference, of course, and it's a big one, is that I don't want to have sex with him. He's a good looking guy, but it's just not there. 

Our culture doesn't really make room for relationships like this. If a person with a certain disposition read the preceding paragraph, they would attribute my reluctance to have sex with my friend as evidence of my repressed desire for him. Repression, while certainly real, becomes a convenient club to swing for people inclined to do so. These are the people for whom everyone opposed to gay marriage is actually a closeted homosexual.

Male friendship is not valued in our culture and where it exists it is so completely watered down that it barely qualifies as friendship. I remember once, walking with my arm around a friend, praying together before he left for the Army, and a couple of guys drove by and called us faggots. This reduction of physical affection flowing from friendship to sexual desire is part of what fragmented our culture so heavily against gays in the 1940s and 1950s. Which makes it odd that a gay man is now utilizing this gross reduction to argue that Jesus just might have been gay. Robinson, having imbibed this cultural construction of male friendship, sees no way for an alternative to be possible. Every close male relationship is therefore suspect. And that, apart from being blasphemous (ah, that old word), is also very sad.

James Wood and Biblical Fiction

I am reading a bookof essays right now by James Wood, the literary critic for the New Yorker. Wood's writing is downright beautiful and he is humane and generous while remaining knife-edge in his criticism. Too much criticism takes this sort of mathematical form: introduce the author and the book while making it quite clear that you are familiar with a larger body of the author's work, name one or two points of agreement with a quick quote, and then deconstruct all the reasons why you think the work ultimately fails. Criticism designed to praise a work inverts the last two steps. Then you end with some reasoned thought about how, were the author only as insightful as you, the work under consideration certainly would have been better. Not that there is anything wrong with this format, this very post will probably hew somewhere close to this model, but it gets that formulaic feeling. Wood avoids that in most of his writing. He is surprising, thoughtful, genuinely well read. The book of essays I hold in my hand ranges from Sir Thomas More to Flaubert to Gogol to Mann to Pynchon. I first read Wood when hewas reviewing Marilynne Robinson's work and it made my soul hurt. 

Wood is a writer who had faith and lost it. Yet he seems, at times, to deeply regret this fact. He participated in a forum a few years ago with fellow New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell and The Nation's Christine Smallwood, all of whom are onetime evangelicals who lost their faith or never really had it to begin with. For Gladwell and Wood, in particular, this loss wasn't an exuberant moment of freedom where they finally gained the wherewithal to live happy and fulfilled lives, but a moment of deep regret and longing. Gladwell, as I recall, it having been a number of years since I've watched the video, was the most pessimistic of the group, seeming to imagine himself some special article of Providence: the man who would believe if he only could. In other words, he longed to believe, wishing it were true, but couldn't find the faith. I remember listening and longing to comfort him with the words of another doubter: "Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief."

As sad as it can be to watch the growth of the sentimental and nostaglic atheist in our culture, the development is not entirely surprising. The Christian faith shaped more than doctrinal belief in the European West since our culture's dawn. Christianity also shaped our rituals and communal practices. As we have stripped away doctrine, ritual and community have gone with it. This absence leaves a yawning gap and one which culture free from religion has no way to bridge. And the rising emphasis on the individual (one of the aftereffects of the Reformation) will simply not do the trick. 

For Wood, this nostalgia for the lost cultural language of Christianity causes him to wish for the form of Christianity (community, shared practice, etc.) without the content. You can see this in his recent New Yorker article on the anniversary of The Book of Common Prayer. He treasures the beauty of Cranmer's collection, but dismisses the belief that fathered such beauty. But if you dismiss a house built on stone, as the wise Gospel Storyteller told it, you are left with nothing but sand to build on.

Which brings me to the book of essays I am reading now. The collection is called The Broken Estate and in the introduction Wood takes some time to explain the title. The old estate was the Christian understanding of truth, mediated through Scripture, and this estate was broken, as Wood explains, by the novel. He ends the introduction, thus: "For it was not just the ascent of science but perhaps the ascent of the novel that helped to kill off Jesus' divinity, when the novel gave us a new sense of the real, a new sense of how the real disposes itself in a narrative--and then in turn a new skepticism toward the real as we encounter it in narrative." I don't take Wood to be gloating in this passage, merely denoting what he sees to be a historical truth: Flaubert did as much to undo Christianity as Darwin.

According to Wood, it was in the nineteenth century when the "Gospel's began to be read, by both writers and theologians, as a set of fictional tales" that the authority of Scripture and the gospel narratives were undermined. The novel, which reached its Western apex in the nineteenth century, helped blur the lines between truth and reality. When the same principles of fiction reading were applied to the stories of Scripture that were applied to the stories of Jane Austen, the supernatural power of Scripture was replaced with a novelistic reading of Jesus of Nazareth and his zany Galilean adventures (sorry, I couldn't resist). 

In one sense, Wood's reading is indisputable, in that the rise of fiction did coincide with a downplaying of the inerrancy of Scripture and a reconsideration of the divinity of Christ in the popular consciousness. But was the relationship between the two causal? Religious belief has declined in our era corresponding to the rise of the internet. Are these two things related? Maybe. But there is no necessary causal relation between the two. And my feeling is that there is no necessary relationship between the rise of fiction and the decline of belief in inerrancy. Coleridge, whom Wood quotes, might have been interested in reading Scripture using the tools provided by other literary forms, but this does not mean that you necessarily deny the truth claims of those stories. Thinking that it does requires an almost willful blindness to the fact that for centuries before the estate-breaking nineteenth century people already knew to read the Bible largely as a story. Pedantic theologians aside, and there were many of those in the nineteenth century as well (see George Eliot's wonderfully awful Dr. Casaubon in Middlemarch), it would come as no surprise to a reader of the Bible that the book is comprised largely of stories. I would even go so far as to say that the Bible writers themselves were largely aware that they were writing stories. The epistles of the first Christ followers at the back of the book aside, pretty much everything in the Bible consists of stories. Jesus himself seems to have preferred to tell stories in his teaching, and it is not anachronistic to point out that people understood that these stories were fictional. No one was out trying to track down the prodigal son or find the guy who found the pearl of great price. It is our modern ignorance of the Bible that reduces it to a theological handbook. It is not for nothing that the reformers spoke of the arc of redemptive history. They understood the Christian faith was a part of the past, the present, and the future, and not only a set of received doctrine. The implication that the use of stories, true stories as the Bible claims to be, became discredited by an accumulation of fake stories is silly and frankly demeaning to the intelligence of the people who read the Bible for centuries before Austen and the Brontes and Dickens came onto the scene. 

Stories, whether fake or true, follow largely the same pattern. The goal, generally speaking, is twofold: to engage readers so that they continue to read, and to recount something memorable. A bullet point version of history would be intolerable, and a bullet point version of Sherlock Holmes impossible. We demand to be engaged. And the Bible writers knew this. So they wrote with poetry and grace and elegance as they told impossible truths of God and his dealings with mankind. And they wrote four histories of the man who was God; four histories wildly different in style, but brimming with life even at this distant remove as they worked to sharpen the curve on that arc of redemptive history.

In making this critique, I am not entirely sure if I am merely critiquing the way the period of the nineteenth century allowed questions of fiction to simplistically subvert the notion of Biblical truth or the way Wood seems to view this critique as valid on its face. In any event, neither Wood nor the nineteenth century show much historical charity, historical knowledge, or--and this might be the most egregious condemnation for when speaking of fiction--imagination.