Monday, September 9, 2024

Part I

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Unspeakable Moral Evil in Georgia School: Massive Questions Raised in Aftermath of Mass Shooting

Once again, America’s heart is torn by a school shooting. In this case, the shooting took place in Barrow County, Georgia. The shooter was a 14-year-old, and the dead in this case include two other 14-year-old children and two school teachers. Now, every one of these cases is unique. And on The Briefing, we do not discuss every one of these cases because we do not want to give publicity to this kind of shooter. And in many cases, that’s exactly what they are looking for. So with that in mind, I am not going to mention the boy’s name. I’m not even going to mention the name of the boy’s father. I’m going to talk about the meaning and the significance, the Christian worldview implications of this story as it is unfolding.

First of all, it is an unmitigated tragedy. And it’s a tragedy if we were talking about the shooting of a human being by another human being in the first place. But it’s not just that it is the shooting of multiple human beings. In this case, we’re talking about students and teachers at a school. There were nine who were injured, but there were the four who were killed. Now, almost immediately, we try to find some kind of sense in the middle of this kind of horrifying crime. So a part of trying to seek the sense is understanding motivation, how the motivation was then somehow in an intersection with the opportunity. And we want to know what kind of grievance this shooter had. But when you look at it, you recognize that even though he undoubtedly had grievances, more on that in just a moment, he did not even when it comes to those who were shot and even to those who were killed, he really did not know them at all.

He had just begun in this new school. He’s lived a traumatic life in his short 14 years. His parents had recently divorced, they had been evicted from their home. And as we come to understand, this becomes very, very key to the entire situation, there had been very serious alarms raised about the boy and his potential for violence, specifically for gun violence at school. So as we’re trying to make some kind of sense of this, some kind of moral sense, what’s taken away from us in the beginning, is the understanding that there is any kind of grievance on the part of this boy against this school or against people at this school. Even as you had federal and local law enforcement that had become involved a year earlier when the boy was 13, living in Jackson County, Georgia. The reality is that there he at least knew the people, but in this case, he really didn’t know the people he shot. He really didn’t know the people he killed. 

But here’s something moral realism underlines. They’re just as dead as if he had known them for years. And those who were shot, all those in the schools, are just as traumatized as they would’ve been had they known him and grown up with him in the very same community. Life and death are non-negotiable categories. And in this case, we’re talking about the death of four people, two 14-year-olds, and two teachers at the school, who lost their lives in the very beginning of the school year on what was otherwise a very calm school day morning. Now, from a Christian biblical perspective, we just need to remind ourselves that there’s only so much we can understand. In one sense, there’s only so much we want to understand.

But we do understand this: When we’re looking at a very clear motivation, it does make even a horrific crime, not less horrific, but at least more understandable. The further you get from some kind of rational explanation, the further you get from the ability of human beings to say, “Well, this is an understandable situation.” But the reason we’re talking about this today is not just because of the scale of the death in this case and the shocking nature of something coming so early in the school year with such murderous effect, but we’re also talking about this because it raises a host of other issues that have been raised in part in previous mass shootings like this, but never quite so clearly. So here’s what we would like to think. We would like to think that 14-year-old boys would not undertake this kind of crime. But now we know this is something that actually does happen. And it’s happened with other teenage boys, in particular, far more boys than girls to say the least, who have been involving themselves in school shootings and in violence at schools.

And even as we hear those reports over and over again, they don’t become less shocking. They do become more difficult to explain because as we’re looking at this now, we recognize in every single one of these cases, the picture is a lot more complicated than may appear at the first. That’s underlined by something very unique to this case thus far. And that is the fact that almost as soon as the news broke about this shooting in Barrow County, Georgia, that’s the town of Winder, Apalachee High School there in that school system. Almost as quickly as the news spread and as law enforcement began sharing information, including the information of the boy suspected as the shooter, that’s the way you have to put it in some legal context, the reality is that what’s shocking in this case was a response from the FBI. The FBI reported that back in May of 2023, they had alerted local law enforcement authorities there in Georgia, that they believed a social media account tied to this boy was threatening this kind of mass shooting in a school.

Okay, from a worldview perspective, from a theological and biblical analysis, this is where things get really vexing. Because we would like to think that we would know when someone is contemplating this kind of crime. When most of these shootings take place, the immediate response is “Nobody saw this coming.” But as in Columbine High School and that mass shooting and in so many others, you begin to connect dots afterwards and you recognize Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida is another one, where you begin to understand, “No, there were clear warning signs that were missed.” But these warning signs were not what had come previously to law enforcement attention. But in this case, that’s exactly what happened. In this case back in May of 2023, no less than the Federal Bureau of Investigation understood that this young man might be a threat. And local law enforcement had reached out to the family, had talked in this case to the boy’s father and to the boy.

And even as it was determined there were guns in the house, even as it was acknowledged that the boy had some access to the guns in the house, the argument from the father was that he did not have access by himself to the guns. And so you look at the news story as it began to break just days ago, the horror of the shooting, the harsh, horrifying reality of the deaths, and then the very troubling news that you had law enforcement that not only had a warning in this situation, multiple reports sent in to anonymous tip lines, but you also had contact between local law enforcement on behalf of the FBI in this situation. And so you’d like to think, well, we would at least know how to handle such a thing, but clearly we don’t know how to handle such a thing.

And so even as law enforcement talked to the father and the father gave them assurances, and even as local law enforcement talked to the son and the son said this was not his social media account, he would never say such a thing, he would never contemplate such a thing, it’s also interesting to note that law enforcement said they could take no further action, but they also had a very clear indication that there was trouble in this home. And that trouble was also communicated to the officials there in Barrow County, Georgia, where the boy and his father had moved. So as of where the story was Friday of last week, it was just one moral concern piled upon another moral concern. And in worldview dimensions we’re looking at it thinking, “Well, look how many things were missed.” But in this case, it’s not just like there were dots that weren’t connected. The law enforcement actually received some connection of dots, but they still couldn’t do anything.

And then you ask a hard question, what do you do with a then 13-year-old boy when this kind of accusation is made? And the law enforcement said at the time they did not have definitive proof that the social media account was his. But it’s also clear that they were very concerned. And then you come to the new situation at the high school there in Barrow County, Georgia, and you recognize they were in a situation in which at least given prevailing policy, they had to accept the boy into the school. But then developments that happened over the weekend made the situation even far more difficult to understand. And this was when the boy’s mother, estranged, and now we are told, divorced on the father, reports that she had called not only law enforcement officials, she had called the school before the shooting began, to warn them that the boy had been talking about something like a mass school shooting when he had left for school in the morning.

And so then the story begins to unfold that they actually did pull a boy out of class, but they pulled out the wrong boy, because they were confused about the name. And then you have another dimension of this that becomes very clear. And that is that in a fallen world with so much sin and so much tragedy, and very sadly, with headlines like this happening, you do have new policies, new procedures put in place by so many schools. And that’s why national and even international media are saying, “Another part of this story is how many people in that school in Winder, Georgia, did the right thing.” Beginning with a student who looked out the window of a classroom door and saw the boy with a gun, and didn’t open the door.

An immediate question, which was raised in almost every media report, was not only were the procedures followed in many cases, it turns out they were, even to heroic extent, you also have the question, how could a 14-year-old boy, a new student there in that school system, how could he get that far in the school with an automatic or a semi-automatic modified rifle? How could that happen? And in this case, it was a modified AR-15, we are told. And then the story just gets darker because it turns out that the boy was given the gun by his father. You had a father who had been alerted to the fact that law enforcement was concerned about potential violence from this boy. And it was the father who after that, gave the boy not only access to, but actual possession of to some degree, he was able to possess the weapon. By the time he got to the school, it was called his weapon, a modified AR-15, an extremely deadly weapon. How do you make sense of this?

One of the most interesting developments, and this was headline news, again globally, not just here in the United States, was that within hours, and by the way, this had never happened before, the father was arrested on very serious charges. And so when you had a court appearance, there was the unprecedented reality of a 14-year-old boy appearing just about the same time as did his father on related charges.

The charges against the father are not the same as the charges against the son. The father’s charged with two counts of second degree murder, plus several other very serious felony counts of child endangerment. But as we’re looking at this, we recognize our legal system is always behind. It’s always behind in terms of catching up with this kind of criminality. It’s always behind, or at least in so many cases, is behind, in being able to read the human mind and the human heart. Even when you had an FBI report with the boy’s name, with credible concern, even when school authorities were shared at least some of those concerns, and even when parents and other family members knew of those concerns, still, this was a 14-year-old boy. We’re not talking about a highly trained and experienced world-class criminal here. We’re talking about a 14-year-old boy was, both given the gun, given access to the gun under these circumstances, and then we have to say, under what circumstances could that appear to be a normal act?

And then you have the situation in which he shows up at school with the gun. How in the world does all this happen? What breaks in a boy’s heart to this extent? Even with the injury that had come to him with the eviction from home and the drama that evidently was playing out in his home, the separation and eventual divorce of his parents. I mean, tragically enough, there are so many young people, children and teenagers in the United States who live lives with similar kinds of experiences. How does all of this snap, and how does all of this become activated in the heart of a 14-year-old boy? And then how are the rest of us, the rest of the entire society in some sense, complicit in making this happen because of the structure of our laws? And then we ask a harder question. What law could be changed?

Well, the immediate answer to that has at least something to do with pointing to the arrest of the father so quickly in this case, that’s unprecedented as I said. Because when you are looking at a parent who gives a child this kind of gun and allows access to this kind of weapon, especially when there’s been the kind of warning we know that was already raised with the father and with the family, then you are talking about what the Christian worldview would say is agency and complicity. Two very important moral categories. It’s not just the boy who had agency in this case, it is the father who had agency. And given this crime, to some extent, he certainly had complicity. What’s also very unusual in this case, by the way, just from a media perspective, is how quickly law enforcement and other officials have confirmed reports.

Normally in a situation like this, you go back to previous mass shootings, it has taken days, weeks, even months for many of these details to spill out. In this case, they spilled out very, very quickly. And of course, undoubtedly there are more to come. Why? Well, tragically, it’s because the experience of this kind of crime leads to a compression of the amount of time that is necessary for people to understand at least something of the questions that ought to be asked, of the dots that need to be connected. But so sobering for human beings is the realization that we cannot read the human heart. Even when you have the kind of detailed concerns raised about this boy. Even then there was an inability to read the heart. And then when there were danger signals picked up and reported even by the boy’s relatives, even by his mother, the fact is, looking at it in retrospect, those dots should have been connected more quickly.

But you asked the question, how? And I think most of us would have to respond, given these circumstances, we’re not sure how. Another worldview dimension of this in conclusion, is the fact that we’re not sure exactly how to talk about these things even with each other, even as families, even as communities and congregations. Because even as we discuss what was present and what was absent in terms of our understanding of this kind of horrifying crime, one of the sad things is that out in the secular world, there is just no real category of sin. But how in the world do you deal with something this evil? How do you deal with something this premeditated and this intentional, this deadly? How do you deal with this without the category of sin? For Christians that leads to no arrogance that we have an answer others do not have. It should lead to the humility of understanding. Even armed with much of the information we have, and even armed with the Christian doctrine of sin, it’s not clear we would’ve understood what was going on that morning, in the heart of that boy. If that’s not sobering, I don’t know what is.

Part II

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Yet Another Orchestrated Political Game: A Republican Dynasty, the Cheneys, Announce Support for Harris/Walz Campaign

But next, we have to shift to political developments here in the United States, because they’re coming at us fast and they’re coming at us furiously. Now remember, tomorrow night, 9:00 Eastern Time is the first, and we expect the only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in the course of the 2024 presidential election campaign. And we’re going to be talking tomorrow on The Briefing about how we should be watching that debate and how Christians should be thinking about how we look at the debate and understanding what it means. But today, I want to point to the fact that in the buildup to the debate, both campaigns have been working at doing the best they can to influence expectations for the debate. Because the way the political game is played, if you control the expectations, you have a lot of advantage in controlling the outcome.

Now, one of the interesting things that was said, by the way, in terms of the analysis of the 2016 race, and the first debate between then candidate Donald Trump, and then former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. One of the interesting things is that both campaigns apparently thought the candidate on their ticket had won the debate. Now, that’s impossible in a larger sense, but it’s also possible in the sense of the way political expectations are played out. Because you have one candidate who does better than he or she was expected, and you have another who does worse than was expected in some sense. And then you have different analysis about what it means. And so you can have someone who turns in an outstanding performance but is understood to have lost the expectation game. If this is complicated, this is the way politics spills out. But all of that’s going to be for tomorrow.

Now, I want to talk about how when the buildup to the election, there are orchestrated events. And there was no more important orchestrated event, and I think there’s some who want to say an orchestrated non-event, than the announcement that came over the weekend of the Cheney endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket. Now, the way the mainstream media are spinning that is that you have a former member of Congress, who was a very prominent member of the Republican leadership at one point, Liz Cheney, who made the announcement first that she would be voting against Donald Trump. She’d be voting Kamala Harris for the office of President of the United States. Just a matter of hours later, it was announced that her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, will be doing the same. Now, I’m not going to read their statements. They basically are saying two things though, and they’re clearly saying both things.

Number one, they are voting against Donald Trump. Number two, they’re voting for Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. And so they’re making very clear, and the media is just trumpeting this as a huge political story, because you have such a strong and historic Republican family, the Cheney family, voting for the Democratic ticket. And you know those who were announcing this had a great deal to gain they believe, by it. And the mainstream media fell right for the story, telling us that you have the very conservative, ultra conservative Cheney family, abandoning President Trump, repudiating the Republican ticket, and announcing they were voting for the most liberal democratic ticket in memory. And yet you look at it, you recognize, okay, there’s both more and less here than meets the eye. The more than meets the eye has to do with the fact that you really are talking about a Republican dynasty here.

And it’s not just Dick Cheney who had served in the Ford White House and even served as chief of staff to former President Gerald Ford. He then went into Congress in the statewide seat for the state of Wyoming. He had been born in Nebraska, but his family had moved to Wyoming. He considered Wyoming his home. This is where he basically grew up. He went back to Wyoming, and there he was elected to Congress. He served in Congress in 1975 to 1989. And during that time, he rose to the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. And then when the Republican, George H.W. Bush, who had been Vice President of the United States under Ronald Reagan, was elected in the 1988 election, he asked Cheney to become his secretary of defense. He served in that role, was Secretary of Defense from 1989 to 1993. Now, just remember that includes the first Gulf War, that turns out to be absolutely crucial.

And then when George W. Bush, the son, was looking for a vice presidential nominee, he asked Dick Cheney to head the process to find the vice presidential nominee. And that turned out to be none other than Dick Cheney. He served as Vice President to George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009. And of course, as you look at the Democratic Party, they hated Dick Cheney, particularly for his eight years as Vice President to George W. Bush. As a matter of fact, they have poured all kinds of criticism upon Dick Cheney for his role in the big Gulf War, the war in Iraq, and the expanding war that has led to so many complications around the world. And it’s not just Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, it’s also Lynne Cheney. She had served by Republican appointment as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and of course she was the Vice President’s wife from 2001 to 2009.

She served as the National Endowment for the Humanities chair from 1987 to 1993. And she was pretty prominent in conservative intellectual circles at the time for her defense of Western Civilization and American society. And so you do have a big name in the Republican party. It’s hard to come up with a bigger name, I’m saying this as carefully as I can, I’m going to say it’s hard to come up with a bigger name than the Cheney name in the Republican Party. But what I think is false is where you have so many people in the media saying this is a prominent conservative family. Because I just want to point to the distinction between conservative and Republican. I also want to point to the fact that in so many ways, the Cheney family did function in a conservative way. Dick Cheney undoubtedly voted for many conservative priorities including pro-life positions during the time he was in Congress.

And the same thing was true in terms of Liz Cheney and her defense of say, the natural family, or at least apparently the endorsement of the importance of the family and so many other conservative concerns. And even when you get to their daughter, Liz Cheney, she was conservative in many ways. But here’s the thing. Even over a decade ago, Dick Cheney came out absolutely in favor of same-sex marriage, legalizing same-sex marriage. And this was before the Obergefell decision of 2015 by the Supreme Court. He was out ahead on this. For one reason, Dick and Lynne Cheney have another daughter who’s married to another woman. And well, you can just do the math on this. And even Liz Cheney at some point, was against same-sex marriage until she was for it. And so my point is that the word conservative is often misused, because I’m going to argue that if you are an enthusiast for same-sex marriage, you’re not conservative in the sense in which I think conservative makes sense.

You’re not seeking to conserve creation order in this case, you’re actually becoming an agent for overturning it. And this is where many people don’t understand what’s going on in the Republican Party. And frankly, right now, the Republican Party is a giant open question. But one thing is clear, and that is that many of the people who said they were conservative a generation ago, say during the two Bush administrations, the reality is that under pressure and the pressure of the sexual and moral revolution, they turned out not to be nearly as conservative as they indicated. Now, there are people who are going to say, “Well, if you’re going to criticize the Cheney family, well, Donald Trump is held to some of the very same positions.” And the reality is he has, which is another reason why I say the future of the Republican Party is one of the great question marks of American political history in our current moment.

But the reality is, that when you have the announcement that you had this very conservative family and these two conservative politicians who have now gone so far as to say they’re going to vote for the presidential nominee of the opposing party, I just want to say that by the time you get to this point, who in the world finds that to be surprising? This is a manufactured story, manufactured for political effect. And at least if you gauge it from the mainstream media, it’s getting a lot of political effect.

Part III

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Love of Neighbor Does Not Mean Support for ‘Queer Joy’: Politics and the Confusion of Creation Order

Meanwhile on the Democratic side, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Minnesota governor Tim Walz appeared Saturday night at the big annual dinner and event for the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation’s most prominent pro-LGBTQ+ groups. The head of that organization, HRC president Kelley Robinson, according to the press release, quote, “Gave an inspiring speech on the power of queer joy.”Indicating again, the intentional use of the word joy connected to the Walz and Harris campaign.

I want to draw our attention to one statement made by the Minnesota governor as he spoke to the event. He said, “What this election boils down to in a lot of ways is fundamentally about freedom. Donald Trump and JD Vance,” he said, “Their idea of freedom is that the government should be free to invade every corner of our lives, our bedrooms, our kids’ schools, even our doctor’s office. When it comes to personal things, bodily autonomy, your gender identity, when to start a family, marrying who you love, I think we just need to be really good neighbors. Everyone just deserves to be treated with respect, freedom, to make that choice.” 

All right now, you Christians know where we have to go with this. We’re being here, we are told, reminded of love of neighbor, love for neighbor. But even as Tim Walz picked up on that language, we need to remember love of neighbor means loving them in a way that is honoring to God. And it is not honoring to God that we love our neighbor by lying to them about matters that their own soul. Matters that lead to the unraveling by human intention, of creation order. And we look at this and say, “Well, what are we seeing?” Well, we’re seeing a political campaign approach. We’re seeing some very carefully crafted language. But I want us to see we’re also seeing an attempt to grab a loose thread in the fraying order of creation by human sin, and pulling on it, seeking to unravel the entire creation order, in a speech ended by a call for love of neighbor.

I’ll just say, it certainly does not represent love of neighbor if you tell them a lie and you live a lie, and you allow them or become even complicit in unraveling, at least by human attempt, the entire order of God’s creation. 

Just think about that.