Who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle

Back in 2019 progressives, centrists, and traditionalist of the United Methodist Church met with a professional negotiator to come up with a proposal for splitting the denomination. The main reason for splitting was how LGBTQ people, including LGBTQ pastors, were to be treated. The negotiating team did a pretty good job of creating a plan they all agreed to. Towards the end February 2020 I attended a program put on by the Reconciling Ministries Network, the main group pushing for LGBTQ inclusion, that explained the plan and talked about how it would be presented in May of that year to General Conference, the denomination’s worldwide legislative session that happens every four years. Yeah, GC didn’t happen in 2020. It was postponed to 2022 – and won’t happen. It has been postponed again, essentially combining with the regularly scheduled 2024 GC. Of course, life doesn’t stand still, even in a pandemic. The plan was to allow the progressive side to keep the United Methodist name and the traditional side to create a Global Methodist Church. Individual congregations could decide whether to stay with the UMC or go with the GMC through a defined process. I got word today that RMN said they are withdrawing their support for the separation plan. Their reason is the plan offered a way for the GMC to get started and a particular path for congregations to leave. However, the GMC has already started and congregations are already leaving. That prompted me to review recent articles from the blog Hacking Christianity, hosted and mostly written by Rev. Jeremy Smith. That blog had been quiet for a while, though several articles were written as the starting date of the GMC came close and has now passed. Here is one written by Smith discussing the history of how what became the GMC got started. One bit of this history caught my attention. Back in the 1939 various branches of Methodism reunited. They had split by the Civil War and the question of whether the church should or should not approve of owning slaves. In 1940 the segregationists split to from the Southern Methodist Church. That new denomination didn’t fare so well. So in the 1960s Rev. Charles Keysor started pushing to make the Methodist Church, which became the United Methodist Church in 1968, more conservative. Smith wrote:

Keysor found that rather than separate like the Southern Methodist Church, claiming “minority status” and staying inside the larger organization was a much stronger organizing principle for white people feeling vulnerable after the racial justice efforts of the 1960s. This call for minority empowerment of white men, however, required constant criticism of actual minorities: those of other races and genders.

Keysor decried minority mania in which various minorities understood and proclaimed their faith from the perspective of their minority identity. Smith described the traditionalists creating parallel denominational resources, such as its own publishing house, which siphoned the evangelical spirit from the UMC. Even with their parallel network, the traditionalists pushed the denomination to the right. As in the traditional wing of the UMC, which is becoming the GMC, those on the political right have claimed persecuted minority status. They see white people will commit themselves and their money to any organization that allows them to scapegoat other minorities. An anonymous commenter added that the conservative African congregations will quite likely jump to the GMC. And the GMC, created to draw racist white people, will be dominated by Africans. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported something Republicans don’t want mentioned, that urban areas aren’t the hellholes of gun violence they’re made out to be, that they’re safer than rural areas. When talking about regulating guns, someone will say, “What about Chicago?” This is a claim made because Illinois has gun regulations yet Chicago has this reputation for being awash in guns. A lot of the guns in Chicago come from Indiana – just across the border. Even so, Chicago has a firearm mortality of 13 per 100K. Yeah, that’s higher than the Illinois average of 10.8, but it is lower than St. Clair County, IL which is near 20. And the rates for Louisiana and Mississippi are over 25. New York state just enacted more gun regulations and its mortality rate is 5.3.

Why would that be? Because the rate of gun ownership in New York is 20%, while in both Louisiana and Mississippi, the number is greater than 50%. Illinois is in the middle with 28%. More guns, more deaths by gun.

So why are big cities, like Chicago, thought of as deadly? Cop shows. When talking about Chicago there is usually a reference to “black on black” crime. But gun deaths are more of a white on white crime – a resident of Caspar, Wyoming is more likely to die by gun than a resident of Chicago. The gun violence in cities tends to be more homicides, but in rural areas more die from suicide. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos also looked at the stats for rates of death by guns. He noted the six states most affected by gun violence – Mississippi, Louisiana, Wyoming, Missouri, Alabama, and Alaska are also high in the percentage of adults who live in a household with at least one gun. At the other end of the list: Hawaii with 3.4 gun deaths per 100K and with 8% of adults living in a house with at least one gun. Also, Hawaii has strict gun control laws. Hawaii has a big advantage that Chicago doesn’t have – it’s out by itself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And a long way from Indiana. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that, surprising no one except maybe Senate Democrats, Republicans are making sure the negotiations on stricter gun laws are going nowhere. It seems Republicans aren’t even talking about guns anymore, they’re talking about mental health. Thomas Lecaque, a historian who studies the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence, tweeted a gun company has made a gun named the Crusader and has Psalm 144:1 stamped on it. In case you don’t remember your 12th and 13th century history, a crusade is a call to a holy war, and thus a call to murder. And I looked up Psalm 144:1, which says “Blessed be the LORD, my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” I would think it is really strange for a gun company to do that, but they must know their customers. There is a 12-18 month waiting period for this gun. Lecaque added:

But sure the problem isn't the guns it's the lack of Christianity in society... wait. Anyway we should be really worried about how weird people are getting about AR-15 like weapons in this country and the creepy religious language used with them. ... It's the little things too. A company deciding to choose the name "Templar Rifle Company." A black powder manufacturer whose website says everything they do is for God's glory. It's the bullet rosaries sold on Etsy and the comments on them. This stuff is everywhere. ... Once you have decided that guns are the appropriate solution for Christian Nationalism's views on the nation's problems... This is radicalization. And for every "lone wolf" narrative that gets word vomited out every time there is a politically and religiously motivated mass shooting by a white far right Christian in this country, we know better. There is an entire apparatus pushing hate and violence.

He wonders why aren’t we treating this as a call for religious terrorism? Steve Inskeep of NPR discussed the view that Texans need their guns to protect against the drugs and guns being smuggled in from Mexico and carried by refugees. Inskeep talked to Ioan Grillo, a journalist based in Mexico City. Yes, drugs are coming into the US from Mexico. But not guns. The guns are being smuggled from the US into Mexico. And the numbers on both sides are huge. The number of guns may be 200,000 a year or two million in ten years. This quantity of guns fuels the violence in Mexico. A flood of guns into Latin America means the weaker governments can’t handle the violence. That increases the number of refugees. So while guns may not defend against refugees, the guns are causing the refugees. The US has all these guns counterbalanced by a too aggressive law enforcement system. Lalo Alcaraz of the Kos community created a cartoon of a police officer in full gear with several guns in a backpack talking to a frightened teacher gingerly holding a gun. The police officer says “Active shooter is over there. Good luck, teacher!” Sumner has been reporting on COVID ever since it appeared and long before it hit America. In that first deadly wave of the pandemic black communities were hit hardest. That’s because of the usual reasons of health care being less available and of lower quality. Also hit hard were native and immigrant communities for the same reasons. Then the vaccine came out. Black communities struggled to get their members protected. Native communities did too. And it was a struggle. And many white communities rejected the vaccine. Now a New York Times article reports that over the last year the death rate for white Americans has been 14% higher than the black rate and 72% higher than the Latino rate. Sumner concluded:

White Republicans have been worrying about some kind of conspiracy to replace them with Black people or immigrants. It turns out there is such a conspiracy. And white Republicans are running it.