In another frustrating and agonizing version of Here we F*&ing Go Again; another sick-and-twisted déjà vu, “We the People” are reeling from yet another mass shooting. This time in Texas, and only weeks after the slaughter in Las Vegas. And this one happened in a church… where the victims were “already praying.”
In the wake of this shooting, as with every shooting, comes the clarion call from America’s so-called leaders to offer “thoughts and prayers.” Lately, however, based on responses on social media, many Americans have become sick-to-death of this trite and worn-out response. Recently, Paul Ryan found himself defending just that sentiment in an interview on Fox “news” with Laura Ingraham. Personally, I’d love to see Ryan visit an actual news organization and defend those comments, but he wouldn’t want to answer the questions a real news anchor might ask him. While he insists that “prayer works,” he then points the finger at the “secular left” for asking that he do something about the issue in the first place. As Ryan told Ingraham:
It’s disappointing. It’s sad, and this is what you’ll get from the far secular left. People who do not have faith, don’t understand faith, I guess I’d have to say.
While it makes him feel superior, what he refuses to acknowledge is that there are just as many people of faith on the left as there are on the right. However, these people are less ideologically motivated, meaning that they’re less fear-based, and more likely to insist that, along with thoughts and prayers, we actually do something about the problem. A position made clear by Jesus’ little brother, James:
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
James 2:14-17
The other frustrating point about Paul Ryan’s screed is that he ignores a very important reality. As citizens, the only thing that most of us can do is offer thoughts and prayers. But Ryan is in a real position to fix the problem… to prevent it from happening again. You know, save actual lives. So we pray, but Ryan must DO something—which he has so far refused to do.
Absurdly, the one thing that Paul Ryan isn’t going to address, is the instrument used to create the carnage in the first place. Nor will any of his fellow Conservatives and Evangelicals. Why? Because… Freedom? Because… Jesus? So logically, it stands to reason that guns are not the issue. Evangelicals and Conservatives are the issue: particularly their ideology of fear which they wrap up in the word “faith.” Which means that it’s their “faith” that is the problem—or more specifically, their ‘lack of faith’defined as faith.
One of Jesus’ most common teachings centered on faith. “If you have the faith of a mustard seed…”“Ye of little faith, why are you so afraid…”“He was amazed at their lack of faith…” His teaching on faith could probably be distilled to this one statement:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
Matthew 6:25-27
There are pages and pages of ideas we could extrapolate from this statement, tens of thousands of words we could write, but it acts as a staunch rebuttal to the way Ryan uses his faith to defend the instrument used in mass murders rather than to actually do something about the problem. One has to wonder, would Jesus be comfortable with Ryan’s lack of faith and his misplaced confidence in a weapon?
The irony of Ryan’s “people of faith” is that they lack faith. They live in fear that if they budge even slightly on the issue of guns, someone will take their guns away altogether and force them into FEMA camps. They live in fear that immigrants are taking their jobs, that gay people are ruining their marriages, and that the “secular left” is taking God away from them. This is not faith, this is fear. If it’s true that “Perfect love casts out all fear,” these people are a long way from love (and we know that based on their hostility toward those with whom they disagree).
And he said unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?
Practicality was a major player in Jesus’ teachings. But his methods were extreme: trust in God and love your enemy. For Jesus, like his brother James, faith was tied to action. When he commended anyone on their faith it was because of what they “did” in the name of that faith—and it wasn’t because of their “thoughts and prayers.”