Hate

I wrote this post Sunday night, then had misgivings about posting it. I should have done so. For what it's worth, here it is.

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The church shootings yesterday had a particular resonance for me. I've passed that church many times, as it was, for over six years, on the route between my home and work. It's part of a "religion row"--that stretch of Kingston Pike has quite a few houses of worship, including mainstream Protestant denominations, at least one synagogue, and of course Southern Baptists (it's the south, after all). The possibility that the Unitarian Universalist church was chosen at random from among that group is close to zero. In coming days we will learn more, but after living in Knoxville for so long I am willing to venture a guess as to the reason people were murdered in a church. If I am wrong, then I will apologize in this same venue.

The likeliest explanation is that the shooter is a Christian fundamentalist who thought he was doing God's work, by killing people who were doing the work of Satan. The UUC is among the most openly liberal of churches: their tradition of principled opposition to oppression goes back to the days of abolition, before the Civil War, and in the sixties they were for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Today they support gay rights, among other issues.

Knoxville is in an area where Christian fundamentalism has always been strong, and over the last thirty years has gotten even stronger. It's the sort of place where openly supporting reproductive rights can get someone fired, and where teachers of intro biology classes at the University of Tennessee don't even bother to talk about evolution, since it would bog the class down in endless arguments between the instructor and many, perhaps most, of the students. The area where Eric Robert Rudolph, who murdered three people and injured 150 others with the bombs he planted at abortion clinics and the Atlanta Olympics, hid is less than a hundred miles away. The people who clandestinely fed, clothed, and sheltered him, because they thought he was a hero, have a lot of ideological kin in East Tennessee.

One concomitant of openly expressed hatred of "the other" is murder. Always. Whether in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, in the Balkans in the nineties, in Cambodia in the seventies, in Armenia during World War I, famously in Germany during World War II--and of course there are many other examples--once a group of your fellow human beings become defined as evil, and your group believes that part of being a good person is to hate them, then at some point there will be murders.

In this country there is now such open hatred by some people on the Christian right for those who are different from them, that they feel that plain murder is acceptable. It is for them a rational act, and in fact the kind of thing a "good" person may even have a duty to do. But these people are, as the old saw has it, the tip of the iceberg. They are buoyed up by the much larger majority--those who will not in the short term pick up a shotgun and start shooting at strangers in a church, but who will make excuses for the ones who do, and then go back to their churches and listen again to words telling them that they are doing the work of the Almighty Lord; and that those who believe that abortion should be legal, those who believe that men and women who prefer sex with their own kind should be able to live openly, and those who believe that tolerance is God's law, are in fact the agents of Satan, and deserve whatever they get. And that it is a sign of being a good person to say such things openly.

The man who murdered the churchgoers in Knoxville was, it will be said, a lunatic. But a true madman comes out of nowhere. If it turns out that this man had some other motive for his actions then, as I said, I will apologize here. But if I'm right, and his motive was to do God's work, then he definitely did not come from nowhere. He came from the heart of the USA in 2008.