It has happened again, this time at a Christian grade school in Nashville. When I first heard about it, and it was reported a female was the shooter, that didn’t compute. Women are never mass shooters. Then I learned this:
Three adults and three children were killed and the shooter has been identified as a female, which has shocked many people. She was killed on the scene.
However, unfortunately, things turn even darker. The unconfirmed, but widely reported story is that the shooter is a biological female who identifies as a male. Her name is reportedly Audrey Hale.
The three children were nine years old, one the daughter of the pastor of a PCA church I believe was associated with the school. It is heart breaking and distressing. The Revolver piece I linked to above points out that people who suffer from gender dysphoria, or who are culturally bullied into it, are mentally ill. The woke left pushes the transgender mania as the civil rights issue of our time, and lives are destroyed, mentally, emotionally, and physically. But according to woke leftists, guess who the victim is in this tragedy? That’s a rhetorical question. There is reporting the shooter, who attended the school, was driven by resentment against Christianity. Supposedly she penned a manifesto the authorities have in their possession. We’ll see if they have the guts, and integrity, to release it. Resentment, anger, rage, hate, poison is what the left stokes 24/7, and not just against Christianity, but against any traditional value based on it, and anything associated with Christian Western civilization.
As I had finished this post I came across this video of Tucker Carlson on his show talking about how the trans movement is targeting Christians. It’s only nine minutes and I very much encourage you to watch/listen to it. It’s kind of shocking YouTube hasn’t deleted it.
I thought as I prayed for God’s comfort and grace upon that community, and repentance per Jesus himself as the proper response for those who don’t know him, I was angry. This didn’t used to happen in America! Then I thought of our church, which used to be a PCA church, calling for a prayer time last night. I appreciate that, and of course prayer is always necessary, but it’s not enough. I’ve heard our pastor and an elder/teacher disparage the so-called “culture wars,” and that always bothers me. Once in a sermon preaching on the importance of regeneration, the pastor said if we’re focused on the culture wars, we’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Frankly, that infuriated me. It does so even more now as more senseless violence cut short three precious children’s lives, and three adults in the prime of their lives. Christians lost the culture wars, this is what happens. When Christianity’s influence dominated American culture, “school shootings” did not happen.
The regeneration of the human soul and fighting for the health and flourishing of American culture are not mutually exclusive goals, and I would argue, naturally compatible. Culture wars are not a distraction, but modern conservative Evangelical Christians tend to over spiritualize everything. The great Francis Schaeffer’s life and ministry was dedicated to fighting against a two-story Christianity, the upper story or spiritual reality, and the lower story, the mundane stuff of everyday life. In this take, the upper story is the important area of life where we should focus on spiritual, eternal things. The lower story is not spiritual and thus less important. There is a long history to why we are tempted to view reality and culture this way, Schaeffer even goes back to Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Arguably, it was the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century when saving souls became divorced from Christianizing culture. In fact, the saving of souls should lead to a culture becoming more Christian, whatever culture it is, wherever it is.
The great lie of secularism, however, is the myth of neutrality, that there is a space in culture and politics where religious values are irrelevant, unnecessary, and must be only private because they lead to antagonism and violence. In case we haven’t noticed, all secularism seems to give us is antagonism and violence. Not to mention how secularism gave us progressivism which eventually embraced cultural Marxism that we now call wokism. For decades the left accused conservatives and Christians with being obsessed about sex, about what goes on in people’s bedrooms. That’s a lie. It’s the left that has been obsessed with sex for almost sixty years. From the so-called “sexual revolution” to no-fault divorce to gay “rights” to redefining marriage and now the evil insanity of the transgender mania, it’s always about sex for the left
At the 1992 Republican National Convention Pat Buchanan gave what came to be called “the culture war speech.” He had run against President Bush in the primary because Bush came from the moderate wing of the Party, what we used to call Country Club Republicans. Culture War issues embarrassed them, and Buchanan would have none of it:
Friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America.
Even though Buchanan endorsed Bush, that wing of the party mocked and ridiculed Buchanan, along with Democrats and their media allies. Guess which word was used most against Buchanan? Divisive. Because he simply identified what had been a fact for decades, a worldview-religious war in this country, he was the bad guy, a narrow-minded religious bigot.
Less than seven years later we had the first of what has come to be called mass school shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in April, 1999. According to that ABC news piece I linked to,
If a mass shooting is defined as resulting in the death of four or more people, not including the perpetrator, 175 people have died in 15 such events connected to U.S. schools and colleges.
Buchanan was mocked and ridiculed by American elites on the left and right, but he was absolutely correct: the contest in which we are engaged is for the soul of America. As he says, this culture war is about the kind of nation America shall be. It will either be a Christian nation, as we once were, or we will be a nation where we have to fear for the lives of our children every day we send them to school. There is no in between.
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