By Daniel Webster
My fellow believers in Tennessee were interrupted in their Sunday July 27 service by hatred, gunfire and death.
I call them “fellow believers” because people of faith are united by a bond that cannot be separated by miles or denomination.
Every Sunday you find Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, Mormons and others gathered in prayer and praise of the God we all worship and serve. We who do this are living out the dream of our nation’s founders to freely practice our religion.
Many of the millions of Sunday worshippers are seeking to build what Jesus called the Kingdom of God here on earth. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it the “Beloved Community.” You find it outlined in the Hebrew prophet Isaiah (Chapter 61) and restated by Jesus in several places of the Christian gospels.
The gunman in Knoxville, Jim Adkisson, said he was angry at the “liberal movement” and found a target for his rage in a church that has expressed its witness to God in ways some have labeled liberal.
I don’t know whether the gunman listened to talk radio but the neo-conservatives there constantly fan the flames of hatred. They pour gasoline on the flames of discontent. Now they do so under the same protection the Constitution grants religious groups to worship as they feel called to do.
There used to be a time when the purveyors of hatred could not use our public airwaves with defamatory and inflammatory language. Until the 1980s–when the patron saint of neo-conservative America, Ronald Reagan, removed the “fairness doctrine” from American broadcasters–the John Hagees, Pat Robertsons, Rush Limbaughs, James Dobsons and Michael Savages could not have said on the air what they have been able to say these past two decades.
Our government, our society, had demanded that if you were going to use our publicly owned airwaves you had to be fair. After all fairness is a noble and desirable goal for any society.
But no more. Now Lou Dobbs can keep ranting about the “war on the middle class” and scapegoating undocumented aliens with complete abandon.
Mr. Adkisson also said in his letter he couldn’t get a job. Had he heard that because he was white and nearly 60 that his employment problems were because of liberals, or people of color, or undocumented workers who would work for less?
Nearly 30,000 people a year die from gun violence. Yet recently the U.S.
Supreme Court said the Second Amendment–which clearly states gun ownership is for militias–allows anyone to keep and bear arms. Mr.
Adkisson was easily able to buy his shotgun at a pawn shop.
That Supreme Court decision coupled with the removal of the fairness doctrine, I fear, will create other such acts of violence.
What happened in Knoxville could just as easily have happened in my Episcopal church Sunday. Our church openly welcomes people of difference.
The Episcopal Church has a bishop who happens to be gay and lives in a committed partnership. And that bishop, the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, had to wear a bullet proof vest during the ceremony that made him a bishop because of death threats.
So I feel a great connection to the martyrs of Knoxville and the entire congregation there. I pray for them. And I pray for Mr. Adkisson and those like him who feel violence is the only answer.
And I pray for our country. The right of free speech must be tempered.
You cannot yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. Free speech in the public square should be civil. The right to bear arms must be tempered especially when those who hear the hatemongers on radio and TV can so easily solve their perceived problems with guns rather than words.
This madness of allowing the words of fear and hate to be broadcast unchecked coupled with free access to instruments of death and vindication must be stopped. Otherwise a vortex of violence will envelope our nation like never before.
The Rev. Daniel J. Webster is vicar of St. Andrew’s Chapel, Montgomery and Canon for Congregational Development for the Episcopal Diocese of New York.