By Jeff Brumley
Wednesday’s shooting massacre in California was more than tragic news for Julie Pennington-Russell. It was personal.
The former pastor of First Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga., Pennington-Russell shared with Facebook friends on Thursday that a relative was in the building where a husband-and-wife team of shooters killed 14 people at a holiday party.
“Our niece … works on the second floor of the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino and was successfully evacuated yesterday during the horrific mass shootings,” said Pennington-Russell, who is set to preach in view of a call this Sunday at First Baptist in Washington, D.C.
She concluded her status update in a way that echoed much of the response from American faith communities: that the nation has reached an unacceptable “new normal” with daily mass shootings. She also issued a call for action.
A number of religious leaders followed suit on Thursday by urging people of faith and anyone else frustrated and frightened by the year’s onslaught of mass killings to connect with ongoing campaigns against gun violence.
Death won’t win
It won’t be a waste of time to do so, said the Right Rev. Ian Douglas, bishop of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and co-convener of Bishops United Against Gun Violence.
Christians especially ought to put their hope in the resurrection as an indication that death will not win out — whatever the apparent trends appear to be, he said.
“As the amount of gun violence in the U.S. continues to occur, I believe it needs to be addressed by Americans of many perspectives and persuasions,” he said.
A 2013 Qunnipiac University poll supports Douglas’ optimism that a groundswell of support is possible for sensible firearm legislation.
It found 92 percent of Americans, for example, support background checks for all gun buyers. That support was 91 percent among those in households with guns.
On other issues, researchers found that most Americans support stricter nationwide gun control laws and a ban on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
The frustrating part is that those who express such views publically are marginalized by pro-gun legislators and lobbyists, including the NRA, Douglas said.
“But maybe the good news is that Americans of a variety of backgrounds and commitments will find their voice and represent the broad middle and seek safe gun legislation,” he said.
‘We have to push harder’
An interfaith effort along those lines is the December Gun Violence Sabbath spearheaded by Faiths United Against Gun Violence and the Washington National Cathedral.
It offers Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other traditions prayers, sermons and other resources for use Dec. 10-14.
“People need to speak up, they need to get involved,” said Carol Blythe, past president of the Alliance of Baptists and its representative to Faiths United Against Gun Violence.
“And we need a new Congress that cares about these issues and not just money and the top 1 percent,” she added.
Attention also must be paid to research that shows stricter controls on firearms are effective, she said.
A study by Johns Hopkins and the University of California at Berkeley, published this summer in the American Journal of Public Health, found that Connecticut’s law requiring permits to purchase guns reduced firearm homicide rates by 40 percent in the decade since its passage.
Blythe said the findings may offer opponents of gun violence an approach where there has been none in Washington.
“Just because Congress is so stuck on doing nothing,” she said, “it’s possible to accomplish something on the state level.”
But that means convincing more Christians and other Americans to get involved.
“The support is there in the populace and somehow we have to push harder,” Blythe said.
‘A much deeper problem’
So what will it take to get people involved?
Michael Bledsoe says more tragedy won’t do it.
“Another mass killing will not move Christians to finally support meaningful gun control,” said Bledsoe, pastor at Riverside Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.
“Were that the case then we would have risen up after the atrocity of Sandy Hook Elementary when children were gunned down with their teachers.”
The answer is spiritual, he said.
“What should lead us to action is the truth that Christ was himself a victim of murderous men,” Bledsoe said in an email to Baptist News Global. “We need to be converted so we will stand with families and children who fall prey to gun homicides.”
And there is evidence such shifts in attitude can be achieved.
“Christians eventually embraced as Christ-like the abolition of slavery though many had in fact supported it and practiced it,” he said. “We need a conversion that leads to the control of guns.”
Another minister said guns aren’t really the problem.
“There is a much deeper problem,” said Russ Dean, a blogger on social issues and co-pastor of Park Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C.
“There is a problem in the soul of this country and there is too much anger and angst — and it’s working its way out” in part through daily mass shootings, he said.
Limits on firearms will not fix that problem, but they could provide some relief to the nation’s love of guns and violence.
“We ought to do something,” he said. “We ought to limit who can buy and who can’t buy. It would save some lives.”
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