One of the greatest disappointments to me within American Christendom these days is the growing intellectual malaise amongst those who, by virtue of their own professed worldview, have greater reason than any group to grow their minds to spiritual maturity.
The country's most notable pastors are rarely serious thinkers; they are far too often intellectual lightweights who gain notoriety for being trendy, overly political, or intentionally provocative.
America's leading Christian universities, likely under mounting financial pressure, have submitted their conservatorship of theological development and biblical scholarship to the flimsy art of pop psychology, lightly glazed in the language of the faithful.
Consequently, when Christian voices emerge on topics of cultural importance, they are rarely if ever significant, profound, or even well-reasoned.
The latest example of this sorry trend came when Christianity Today made the decision to publish an adaptation of Taylor Schumann's upcoming anti-gun book, "Beyond Thoughts and Prayers." Schumann is a survivor of the April 2013 shooting at New River Community College in Christiansburg, Virginia.
The shooter killed two women and injured two others, including Schumann. After surgery and therapy, she now has partial use of her left hand, but has been left scarred both physically and emotionally from the ordeal. No one can blame her, and it is both laudable and commendable that Schumann seeks to turn her tragic experience into something positive for humanity.
The problem with Schumann's piece isn't that she lacks credibility or an obvious impetus for involving herself in the societal debate over guns; it's that she apparently refuses to do the hard work of detaching emotionally from her ordeal in order to make coherent, composed, and reasoned points.
For instance, the first three paragraphs of Schumann's piece are dedicated to a victim-narrative – not "victim of a shooting," but "victim of mean conservatives who oppose her political position on guns." She writes of this mistreatment,
"I was somehow labeled unpatriotic and un-American for wanting to reduce gun violence."
To say this claim strains credulity is an understatement. No one, not even the most ardent Second Amendment advocate, celebrates gun violence. Legitimate progress on the issue will only occur when it is mutually understood that all sides in the culture's gun debate have the same objective – reducing violent crime and death – even if they have starkly differing policy approaches on how to achieve it.
Schumann's refusal to grant her opposition this simple acknowledgement, and instead smear them as fans of human suffering, is as disappointing as it is disingenuous. But the activist author was just warming up.
"I am angry that people are taught to cling to their personal freedoms and their individual comforts above caring for real life human people. I am angry that the God I believe in, the one who teaches us to love our neighbors, to sacrifice our lives for that of our friend, and to consider others more important than ourselves has been turned into a justification for a right he did not bestow and an ideology that looks nothing like him."
It seems impossible that someone who publishes both books and think-pieces on guns at publications like Christianity Today or left-wing blogs like Sojourners can be unaware that it is often armed citizens running into deadly situations to save lives – like David French outlined in detail here –that are "caring for real life human people," loving their neighbors, willing to sacrifice their lives for strangers, and considering the life of another innocent person more important than their own. Don't professing Christian authors like Ms. Schumann have a responsibility to acknowledge them?
The trouble with that irresponsible and likely intentional oversight is only compounded by the almost juvenile logic offered in Schumann's succeeding paragraph:
"[E]ven if guns were banned tomorrow, why should we be so afraid? If you know and love Jesus and are going to spend eternity in Heaven with him, why does the idea of not having guns anymore scare you so much?"
Is this considered Christian scholarship these days? Is this what now passes muster for intelligent discourse at Christianity Today? Ask yourself, would I be making a sound, objectively reasoned point in this debate by posing the reverse of the query back to Schumann?
"Even if guns were in the hands of every citizen, why should we be so afraid? If you know and love Jesus and are going to spend eternity in Heaven with him, why does the idea of everyone having guns scare you so much?"
Of course not. The fact that we Christians anticipate the glory to come does not translate to an ambivalence towards personal and public safety in the here and now. That desire – personal and public safety – is precisely why Schumann wrote her book and this article in the first place, is it not?
Well, that desire – personal and public safety – is also the exact reason her policy opponents advocate for the right to keep and bear arms. Schumann's inability to recognize and address that reality makes her entire appeal little more than standpoint epistemology.
Christians can and must demand of one another better thinking than that in the public square.
