Against the Stream

The Cross and the Crucified

Over at Tony Jones' blog, he has launched another of his "#progGod Challenges." This one deals with the question of the crucifixion, an appropriately Lenten topic.

I can think of several ways to approach this question, but at heart, I assume the question that Tony wants to raise is "why did Jesus have to die on a cross specifically, rather than -- say -- of old age or by tripping down a flight of stairs?" In other words, what is it about the cross that is of theological significance? What does it tell us about the nature of God-in-Christ?

Christian theology is founded on the idea that the death of Christ is somehow at the heart of the possibility of human salvation. Through is death we are redeemed. The Christian doctrine of atonement is rooted in this idea. But the central question is how it might be that his death redeems us, and the fact of the cross is at center of the answer to that question.

It is deeply theologically significant that, not only did Jesus have to die, but he had to die this death. The cross reveals something of both the problem at the heart of the human condition and what the nature of its solution is.

In his book The Crucified God Jürgen Moltmann addresses the question by noting that the cross was a particular kind of death -- a political death -- imposed by the Roman Empire, not against common criminals, but against political enemies. The fact that Christ died on the cross revealed that the Gospel message is incompatible with, and stands in opposition to, the civil religion of the Roman Empire, which is a form of idoltry.

In his death, Jesus is revealed to be the victim of the structures of political oppression and subjugation. He is subjected not simply to death, but to the horrible, brutal, humiliating, and public death of the subversive and the insurgent. In his death, Jesus Christ is declared by the Empire to be the enemy of Empire. What's more, through his death, Jesus is revealed to stand in solidarity with all of the victims of Empire.

Jesus dies, abandoned and alone, forsaken by all, even God, to die the death of a social outcast and a political pariah. But in his death, Jesus reveals that the Good News of the Gospel is precisely that God stands on the side of all of those who are abandoned, alone, and forsaken, that God is with them in their forsakenness, has shared their suffering in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the resurrection of Christ, has overcome and redeemed it. As Moltmann writes:

“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.” 

What's more, through his redeeming of the suffering of the victims in his death and resurrection, Jesus also opens up a new possibility: That of redemption and forgiveness for the perpetrators as well. They are not left with their crimes, but may be forgiven in repentence, and ultimately reconciled with both their victims and with God. Again Moltmann:

The one will triumph who first died for the victims then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes when is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God. 

This ties in as well to some themes raised by Rene Girard, who is my other "go-to" thinker on this subject. Christ is, in Girard's model, the final scapegoat, who through his unjust death reveals the corruption and evil at the heart of the entire sacrificial system of human religious consciousness, exposes its illegitimacy, and thus breaks the sacrificial cycle once and for all.

Much more, obviously could be said on this topic, but I'll stop there for now. Perhaps for Easter, Tony will present a #ProgGod challenge about the necessity of the Resurrection, which is the other, equally important and indispensible, part of this equation.

Theology and "Zero Dark Thirty"

In Friday's New York Times, Samuel Friedman asks about the theological dimensions of Katherine Bigelow's film Zero Dark Thirty. Writing about the way that the discourse has been framed in sometimes unhelpful ways, he notes that the movie may have opened up a thorny but legitimate avenue of discussion:

So, by the first argument, the film is flawed because it does not follow the historical record. By the second, the film is flawed because torture does not work. What neither argument takes up, but what some theologians have been wrestling with throughout the “global war against terror,” is what a civilized society should think about torture even if it does work.

In that respect, “Zero Dark Thirty” may have done an unintended favor to the national discourse by positing that torture, at least sometimes, succeeds. How do we feel about that? The numerous awards for the film already suggest that we feel tolerant, even approving. Polling by the Pew Research Center has shown a swing between 2004 and 2011, from a majority of Americans rejecting the use of torture against terrorist suspects to a majority favoring it.

I find the increasing support of torture in the United States stomach turning, but Freedman notes that it does raise what are in many respects very morally important questions. Freedman goes on to survey some of the debate:

In 2007, as opinion was shifting, Professor Gushee of Mercer University helped write “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture.” While condemning Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, and while affirming the nation’s right to self-defense, the declaration stated near its end:

“When torture is employed by a state, that act communicates to the world and to one’s own people that human lives are not sacred, that they are not reflections of the Creator, that they are expendable, exploitable, and disposable, and that their intrinsic value can be overridden by utilitarian arguments that trump that value. These are claims that no one who confesses Christ as Lord can accept.”

At least one such person offered a prominent rebuttal. Keith Pavlischek, who was then a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, faulted the declaration for not adequately distinguishing between captured terrorists and prisoners of war, and for not precisely defining torture.

At a theological level, he argued that the document had “explicitly repudiated Christian just war teaching.”

Pavlischek has a strange reading of the Christian just war tradition if he believes that a document that repudiates torture in any all of its forms, regardless of its effectiveness, in some sense "repudiated" it. The just war tradition has always relied in the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, and defined those who are prisoners, helpless, and represent no threat as being noncombantants. Even enemy soldiers in that circumstance can be restrained, but not harmed, shot, killed, or tortured. It is a wonton perversion of the Christian tradition to suggest anything else.

And once more, it is worth noting the bizzare quality of a debate about the morality of torture among Christians, who at the foundation of their faith, follow a man who was tortured to death. That, if nothing else, should create an instant and innate revultion and opposition toward any form of torture among anyone who would call him or herself a Christian.

 

Theological Facial Hair

Reposting this for hilariousness. For my part, I'd happily regrow my guru goatee, but for the time being I'll simply cultivate my post-evangelical stubble.

"And Jesus Had Killed Them All"

Have you seen the Saturday Night Live "Djesus Uncrossed" sketch? If not, you should check it out, it's a brilliant encapsulation of the kind of violent revenge fantasy that motivates a lot of current popular culture, and a great send up of Quentin Tarantino's directorial style.

It's also an ironic indictment of the way in which American Christianity actually does want its Jesus (or perhaps Djesus?) to be an ass-kicking, name-taking bad motherfucker. Those on the Christian right who are taking offence at the skit, would do better to direct their criticisms toward their own stunted, narrow, nationalistic, violent faith, which twists the message of Christianity 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

David R. Henson states the case extraordinarily well:

we’ve been trying to uncross Jesus for decades in this country, long before SNL got their pens into him.

We have tried to arm him with our military-industrial complex, drape him with our xenophobia, outfit him with our weapons, and adorn him with our nationalism. We’ve turned the cross into a flagpole for the Stars and Stripes. We have no need for Tarantino to reimagine the story of Jesus into a fantasy of violent revenge. We’ve done it for him. We’ve already uncrossed him, transforming him from a servant into a triumphalist who holds the causes and interests of our country on his back rather than brutal execution.

The SNL sketch reveals the paucity of American popular theology with its camouflage and flag-draped Bibles that segregate the story of God for American patriots only. It pulls back the curtain and shows us just how twisted our Jesus really is: We want a Savior like the one SNL offers. We want the Son of God to kick some ass and take some names. Specifically, our enemies’ names. And maybe the names of a few godless Democrats. Definitely the Muslims. And the atheists. And the … I could go on.

He goes on to state the ground truth which has been obvious in the United States for a long time, and has been undeniable since September 11th: "In the wake of horror, we like revenge."

Slacktivist adds to this by noting that, compared to the Jesus who shows up in the apocalyptic novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the Djesus of "Djesus Uncrossed" is practically a pacifist. He offers the following example from the books:

Rayford watched through the binocs as men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin.

… Tens of thousands grabbed their heads or their chests, fell to their knees, and writhed as they were invisibly sliced asunder. Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.

… Their flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated.

… And Jesus had killed them all.

There has long been a disconnect between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus who appears in the more explicitly Christian versions of American civil religion. The Jesus of American civil religion is emphatically the Jesus of our national aspirations, and our most cheauvanistic impulses to dominate and subjugate the world. The Jesus of American civil religion is the one who believes that it is right and proper for the United States to have the largest military in the world by orders of magnitude, in order, apparently, to "defend Christianity."

The Jesus of American civil religion is by no means a new figure. He has existed since the Roman Empire. He led the crusades and presided at the Salem witch trials. He bears a much stronger resemblance to the Satan of the Rolling Stone's "Sympathy for the Devil" than to the Christ of the Gospels, showing up througout history to cause mayhem and suffering. 

 

Rolling Stones - Sympathy for the Devil by oggys

This is not the Jesus of redemptive grace, but the Jesus of violent conquest. This is the Jesus of the Left Behind Novels, and of American triumphalism. All the SNL sketch really did was give him a more appropriate name. He is not the Jesus of Christian faith. He is Djesus. And, yes, the D is silent.

The Death of God and Apophatic Theology

Following up on my previous post, I note that Brandon Ambrosino offers an excellent defense of the theological importance of Nietzsche's "Death of God," and of the idea that maybe what we should give up for Lent is God:

Lent, the period of 40 days leading up to Easter, is meant to prepare our hearts to receive God: to receive God as God, as wholly other, as the Other who is coming, who is always coming, always arriving, always surprising us in the face of the dinner guest who shows up unexpectedly asking if we've remembered to prepare him a seat. And to ready ourselves for this meeting, Christians traditionally give something up: coffee, alcohol, the Internet -- one clever, gluten-free friend of mine mused he was giving up wheat. But the purpose of this giving up is to empty our hearts so that when God arrives -- and God is always arriving -- we are ready for the event. Our "idols," those things in our lives undeserving of worship, must be released from our hands, so that we may hold them open to the startling event that is God's Kingdom Come. ...

Indeed, the God of my rigid ideologies, of my complacent Theology; the God who validates my unwillingness to explore heresies, and rewards me for arrogantly dismissing them as sinful; the God who grounds my intellectual arrogance in His omniscience, and my politics in his omnipotence; the God who vanquishes all of His and my inquisitive foes, forever silencing their obnoxious questions with the fires of Hell; whose very Nature demands that humans separate and categorize the world into manageable divisions; the God who has made His Will known to us through Natural Law, and a Holy Book, every word of which we are to follow without hesitation or consideration; whose ethical character remains beyond discussion; whose decisions remain beyond the scope of human analysis; the God who grounds all Thought in his Being - this God, who is Himself nothing more than an idol of Modernism, is dead.

There's really not much I can add to that, though I am hoping to return with another post on Nietzsche in the coming days, if I can find the time.

The Death of God

From Friedrich Nietzsche's "Parable of the Madman":

The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even Gods putrify! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!

How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife - who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event - and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!" Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise.

A passing thought in a conversation on Nietzsche and atheism: There are many Christians (like myself) who hold Nietzsche in exceptionally high regard. I think this is because we recognize that Nietzsche accurately described the moral, social, and metaphysical implications of the death of God. Our chief difference with him is over the question of whether God is in fact dead.

Is it Time for a New Christian Sexual Ethic?

Once more, Tony Jones poses a provocative question that puts me in blogging mode. In this case the question is: "Is it time for Christians to celebrate pre-marital sex?"

This question comes out of a series of blog posts by evangelical and post-evangelical women over the past several weeks lamenting the damaging effects of "purity culture" on women. I highly recommend reading those articles, as they illustrate much of what's wrong with how Christians, at least relatively conservative Christians, approach human sexuality. For example, Sarah Bessey tells her story:

I was nineteen years old and crazy in love with Jesus when that preacher told an auditorium I was “damaged goods” because of my sexual past. He was making every effort to encourage this crowd of young adults to “stay pure for marriage.” He was passionate, yes, well-intentioned, and he was a good speaker, very convincing indeed.

And he stood up there and shamed me, over and over and over again.

Oh, he didn’t call me up to the front and name me. But he stood up there and talked about me with such disgust, like I couldn’t be in that real-life crowd of young people worshipping in that church. I felt spotlighted and singled out amongst the holy, surely my red face announced my guilt to every one.

He passed around a cup of water and asked us all to spit into it. Some boys horked and honked their worst into that cup while everyone laughed. Then he held up that cup of cloudy saliva from the crowd and asked, “Who wants to drink this?!”

And every one in the crowd made barfing noises, no way, gross!

“This is what you are like if you have sex before marriage,” he said seriously, “you are asking your future husband or wife to drink this cup.”

I was making barfing noises of my own reading this story, though what disgusted me was the behavior of the pastor. The message he was sending was clear, at least to Sarah: "If true love waits, I heard, then I have been disqualified from true love."

Others have also chimed in. And Joy Bennett points out the chief problem with the way that the issue of premarital sex has been handled in the evangelical (and otherwise generally conservative) Christian community: Regardless of what your pastor tells you, you probably won't marry a virgin. You can decry this or celebrate it, but you can't avoid it. The cultural tide on this point has turned fairly definitively, and trying to turn back the clock is nothing more than cultural nostalgia. 

What's more, as Joy points out, this is not necessarily a bad thing:

Intimacy in marriage requires courage, vulnerability, and a healthy sense of humor, none of which are mentioned in the current Christian culture. No one talks about what happens after the wedding. No one teaches how to learn to love a spouse, in the biblical sense. No one says out loud that those first sexual encounters (whether on the honeymoon or before) are often awkward, sometimes painful, and occasionally embarrassing. Fireworks? Not unless you count the stars you see when you bump heads trying to kiss.

Here’s the inside scoop: love-making is a skill you have to learn. Even if a person and their spouse remain “pure” (however they define that) before marriage, that purity does not guarantee that they will have any idea how to make love to one another after they exchange vows.

Love-making is not one-size-fits-all. It’s always custom-fit to the couple. Learning to make love to your partner takes practice; mastery requires intense study. That’s why sex can keep getting better the longer you are married.

Sex is risky (and sometimes messy). Baring it all for a lover is about as real as you get – you can’t hide or camouflage  Making love into fireworks requires patience and talking and listening. A couple must talk to each other, ask each other “Do you like this? Does this feel good? Where do you like to be touched? How do you like to be touched?” They must be willing to try something that goes poorly. They must be able to hear their partner say “That hurts” or “That didn’t do it for me” and not take it personally.

To assume that sex will be just awesome for you solely on the condition that you have no experience of it prior to marriage can far too frequently lead to disappointment.

I have to admit, I find the entire conservative evangelical conversation on this to be very alien. It was not the way that these topics were dealt with during my mainline protestant adolescence. We didn't dwell on the evil of premarital sex ... we simply ignored and avoided the topic. In itself, that's not such a great strategy, but it's a hell of a lot better than this culture of shaming (mostly of women, let's note!) that goes on within the evangelical community.

And let's be clear on this: The reasons for the cultural shift are actually quite good for women generally. The ability that effective birth control has given women to detach sex from childbearing has allowed them a degree of independence and self-determination that never existed before. The fact that women are now in control of their own reproduction has allowed women to take part in public life in a way that was mostly unprecedented in prior history. The downside, from the conservative Christian perspective, is that it has also effectively detached sex from marriage. And the question that Christianity has to face going forward is whether it will continue to insist on a sexual ethic in which sex, marriage and reproduction are inreducibly intertwined, or accept that this is simply not the way that sex is handled anymore and try to construct a new sexual ethic. And if we are going to construct a new sexual ethic, what should it be?

It occurs to me that, in the main, Christianity is right to encourage monogamous, committed, lifelong relationships. Whether those relationships take place within the strictures of marriage or not, well, that may be another matter.

I think the harder question is what to do about those who cannot, for whatever reason, stay within the boundaries of those norms. Many Christians have had multiple sexual partners before marriage. They then become happily married and those past relationships are clearly put in the past. Some Christians engage in adultery, and that clearly can damage a marriage, whether or not the infidelity is discovered.

The first case seems to me to be a non-issue: Most of us these days weren’t virgins when we got married (as Joy Bennett recently pointed out on her blog), and chances are very good that most of our children won’t be virgins when they get married, regardless of how much we try to make them think we should be.

The second case calls for healing, and in many cases, may be a sign of a deeper set of issues the best outcome of which may be divorce. Clearly that is itself a sign of a wounded and damaged set of people and relationships. But the question is how should the church relate to the people going through these experiences. If the church cannot be a welcoming home, even for those who have committed adultery, been divorced, or engaged in premarital sex, it will find itself continuing to be marginal to the wider cultural conversation about sex.

But then there are the genuinely marginal cases. Most people, even if they’ve had multiple partners, or even if they’ve strayed, would probably prefer monogamy to polyamory. But what do we say to those for whom one sort or another of polyamory is a successful way of life? One the one hand, I think it’s probably sub-optimal not to have a strong foundational relationship that grounds one’s life. On the other, it won’t do to tell these folks “well, clearly you’re not REALLY happy.” Because they’ll likely respond, “actually dude, I really am.”

I think that those kinds of test cases are the real areas where the church will have difficulties in the future. Ultimately, the church will fully accept gay and lesbian relationships. Ultimately, divorced and remarried or co-habitating couples will find a home in the church. Ultimately, the church will get over its censoriousness with regard to pre-marital sex, while still encouraging teens to delay sex till as close to marriage as possible.

But can we imagine a situation in which the church embraces polyamorous relationships? I suspect not, nor do I think it would be a particularly good idea. But what of various kinds of “monogam-ish” relationships (as Dan Savage would say).

I think a relationship of toleration for sexual outliers is probably the course of action the church needs to pursue in the future. But how far out can we tolerate the outliers to be?

Whatever a future sexual ethic happens to be, it needs to be rooted in a theology of hospitality, grace, generosity, and forgiveness, which are the heart of the Gospel. For too long it has been an ethic based in denial, hostility, gnosticism, and condemnation. That has never done anyone any good, and now it is simply untenable in a world where sex, marriage, and reproduction are effectively separate subjects. Decrying that things are different won't get you very far. The question is how to respond.

The Cult of Guns

 

 

It took a while for all of the threads to begin coming together for me in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings in December. I spent a lot of time watching the news, reading reports, responding to friends online and engaging in at times quite heated debates on the subject of guns, but over the weekend the various pieces began to gel and I realized that yes, there truely is a cult of guns in the United States. The unique confluence in the U.S. of ideology, tradition, and a quasi-religious belief in the absolute character of one's right to wield a weapon the only purpose of which is to kill things has produced a sub-culture for whom the very idea of regulating guns in any way, shape, or form is as anathema as denying a Roman Catholic access to the Body and Blood of Christ.

It really gelled for me on Saturday, as I was reading Gary Wills' article in the New York Review of Books entitled "Our Moloch." Wills writes:

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol’s teeth. The White House spokesman invokes the silence of traditional in religious ceremony. “It is not the time” to question Moloch. No time is right for showing disrespect for Moloch.

When I first read this, I thougt to myself: "Well, that's a clever bit of rhetoric, and I certainly find the demenor of many gun enthusiasts off-putting, but I'm not buying the 'guns-as-gods' angle."

Then I got an email from Sojourners magazine to an article entitled "9mm Golden Calves," by James Atwood. Atwood makes a similar point to Wills:

An idol's followers boldly claim divine status for it. Former NRA executive Warren Cassidy was clear when he boasted, "You would get a far better understanding [of the NRA] if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world." Not to be outdone, Charlton Heston, during a speech as NRA president, intoned, "Sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blued steel—something that gives the most common man [sic] the most uncommon of freedoms, when ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument that symbolizes the full measure of human dignity and liberty."

And again I thought to myself that the rhetoric, while sharp,  was a bit much. But I started to think about it a bit more.

At the very time I was reading these articles, I was engaged in a heated online debate on the subject of gun control with someone who was arguing strenuously with me that, as a matter of fact, requiring registration and background checks on guns was akin to asking individuals to register their religion. Because firearm ownership was a Constitutional right, there was no regulation of any kind that could be justified, just as there was no regulation of any kind regarding religion that was justified.

That's when it struck me: For this guy, it really was a religious principle. He wasn't making a 2nd Amendment argument; he was making a 1st Amendment argument. For him, guns, and the ideology that had built up around them, were as much a religion to him as anything else. True, he may have some other religion as well, but that doesn't change the fact that guns are an object of worship for him. It just means that he's, at heart, a polytheist.

The ideology of guns in the United States is a cult: a set of practices and traditions that have built up around a set of narratives that its adherents tell themselves about who they are, where they've come from and what it is that grounds and gives meaning to their existence. "Guns" in the collective sense, become gods, because they are the source of security and the primary obsession of gun cultists.

To be perfectly clear about this: Not every gun owner is a gun cultist. Not even every ideologically committed gun owner is a gun cultist. But for alarmingly many of those who own and keep firearms in this country, thier commitment to their guns seems to outweigh any other commitment that they may have, even to the larger society itself.

I've been struck with the number of times it's been pointed out in the last few months that there is a "gun culture" in the United States, and the number of times my gun-supporting friends have pointed out to me that I'm not part of that culture, and therefore don't understand the worldview that motivates them. And it's true, I'm not part of that culture. But a culture produces a cultus, as set of practices that give definition to one's life. When that set of practices is threatened, it produces massive resistance, and this is exactly what we have seen in the past month and a half in the debate surrounding guns. No regulations are acceptable, because, at best, they will make things unacceptably inconvient for gun owners. But in its most extreme form, the ideology of gun ownership converges on a form of paranoid apocalypticism, and the end result is the seizure of all guns and the imposition of Tyranny.

Behind this worldview is the unspoken truth that the members of the gun cult far too often want to keep their guns so that one day they can fire them at U.S. soldiers and police.

Eric Bohlert comments on this rhetoric, and demonstrates the damage that this apocalypticism can do:

We already knew from 2009 that far-right voices were fretting about the need for a citizen's militia to stop Obama's destructive ways. Now four years later, with gun control initiatives pending, the frantic rants have escalated and Obama's fiercest critics are rationalizing their insurrectionist chants by comparing the president actions to those of Hitler. The comparison isn't just offensive, it's also inaccurate: the Nazis actually loosened restrictions on private gun ownership (except for Jews and other persecuted groups).

That kind of ugliness not only pollutes our public dialogue, it also gives comfort to gun radicals who embrace the rhetoric. In early 2009, fearing what a friend described as "the Obama gun ban that's on the way," conspiracy nut (and Alex Jones fan) Richard Poplawski lured three Pittsburgh policemen to his apartment, then shot and killed them at his front door.

All the right-wing chatter today about how Obama's following Hitler's lead by allegedly voiding the Second Amendment only adds fuel to an unwanted fire.

Martin Luther once said, said "Show me that which thou lovest most, and I will show you thy god." Paul Tillich, in a similar vein, used to argue that religion was a universal fact of life, since to be religious was simply to be "ultimately concerned." Our object of worship is that which concerns us ultimately. We all surround ourselves with idols of one kind or another, but few of the idols that we worship are as destructive as the idolotry of guns. They are, I am now convinced, truly our Moloch, the devourer of our children, and the seed of violence in our society.