Diana Butler Bass writes at Progressive Revival about yesterday’s shooting at the Holocaust museum, and how we understand the context of the shooter’s action:
Yesterday, all of the news commentators agreed that James W. Von Brunn’s action was morally wrong. And, whenever a criminal breaks violates the communal moral conscience, everybody asks, “Why?” What was the source of his evil? Where did he go wrong? What triggered this episode?
As pundits discuss these questions on the airwaves, their answers will fall into two predictable camps. Conservatives will emphasize that Von Brunn was a “lone wolf,” a deeply troubled man, who, acted on a bad belief (hatred of Jews) and made a bad choice (to pick up a gun and shoot people). Liberals will analyze anti-Semitism, placing Von Brunn’s actions within a larger framework of structural sin involving racism. Some may also comment on institutional sins—gun control laws, the current economic crisis, and the “climate” created by talk radio for example—as sources of Von Brunn’s actions.
This is, of course, an old argument. For almost a century, conservatives and liberals have been arguing the same point about sin. Conservative theologians believed that sin is a personal matter, a choice made to break a moral code, usually based in some flawed belief system; liberal theologians believed that sin resulted from structural evils, whereby people act out of subservience to some form of institutionalized sin. Hence, conservative sought to reform individuals while liberals sought to reform systems. What made someone sin? The soul or structure? The individual or institution? And this theological division made its way into political life—and it has shaped the way we argue about moral events in our public discourse.
[…]To say that Von Brunn was a lone gunman in a lone incident misses the point. However, to say that D.C. has weak control laws (which were recently weakened by the NRA) also misses the point. Von Brunn lived—as all of us do—in a complex, connected web of unredeemed powers that act as a cancer in the world.
Read the full post here.