God was there for the Texas shootings. But they’re on us.
God was with those 19 children as bullets were destroying their bodies. They had to be identified through DNA matches and descriptions of the clothes their parents had chosen before dropping them off that morning at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. God was with the two adults killed as well. God was with the teenager who committed the massacre, the heavily-armed law enforcement officials who waited in the hallway and outside the school, and the parents desperate to get inside whom police officers decided to handcuff and taser.
God was with Trey Ganem of Texas as he built customized caskets for those mangled-unrecognizable bodies. He painted one like Superman, another pink and white, another with happy baby dinosaurs. God will be on hand during every funeral as the anguished cry out “Why God?”
God is all-knowing and ever-present, or he isn’t God. That’s true no matter how relentlessly those of faith – I include myself among that number – scramble to explain it away by shouting “thoughts and prayers” or claiming God had been kicked out of schools. An all-powerful God can’t be kicked out of anywhere.
God was in the slave castles where stolen Africans were being held – and select women raped – as they awaited an ungodly trip across the Atlantic to be delivered into a different kind of hell. But calling the Middle Passage ungodly is misleading. God was on those ships, too. God was there when colonists committed a genocide of native peoples as many of those colonists praised God for their bounty and the blood-soaked land they were claiming. God was there when the Civil War erupted, claimed by fighters on both sides. God was there in World War II when Adolf Hitler massacred millions of Jews and other “undesirables”, when white U.S. soldiers decided to treat black U.S. soldiers worse than captured Nazis.
God was there during a century of lynchings that began in the shadows of Reconstruction, was present in Wilmington, N.C. in 1898 and Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 and on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. God was there when politicians made it legal for husbands to rape their wives, for gays and lesbians to be treated like yesterday’s trash. God is sleeping next to the homeless in Myrtle Beach, S.C., was there when priests were molesting little boys and Southern Baptist preachers were raping those under their charge.
God was there when prayers were mandatory in public school and since they’ve become individualized. There has never been a time God wasn’t there. In the United States, the Christian God has been the most recognized, most cited, most called upon no matter the movement of the stock market or how high or low gas and oil prices fall. And yet for many Christians who worship guns more than they worship Jesus, the call is for more Christianity, more churchgoing, more God, as though those things have ever not been in abundance.
In many areas of this country, you can’t spit without hitting a Christian church.
That’s why the “thoughts and prayers” chants ring hollower after every mass shooting. Because it’s a transparent attempt to deflect, to deny that there is work to be done by human beings who call themselves Christian American, who say they value the sanctity of life, who’ve proclaimed themselves more moral than most. It’s an escape hatch from personal responsibility, a refusal to play an active role in attempts to curb an annual gun violence carnage that claims more child victims than police officers and U.S. soldiers combined.
Time to stop pretending. This isn’t about God. This is about us.
This story was originally published June 4, 2022 at 11:02 AM with the headline "God was there for the Texas shootings. But they’re on us.."