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The End of the Gun

Even this wasn't lost on my students in my Ethics class. We had finished watching The End of the Spear and were discussing the issue of violence and its different cultural expressions. The film retells the true story of a group of Christian missionaries in 1950s Ecuador who set out to bring the Gospel to the Waodani tribe (a hunter-gatherer tribe known widely for its violent revenge killing by "spearing"). When five men from this group are speared to death by the tribe's warriors, the wives and children of those men move into the Waodani tribe to teach them about Jesus. As a consequence of their encounter with true Christian love and forgiveness, the Waodani renounce their violent lifestyle and thus bring about the "end of the spear."

So my students and I ended up with this question: What would it take to bring about the "end of the gun" in the Americas? Of course, the answer should be the Gospel, but this has already been squandered by the bastard child created through the adulterous love embrace between civilization's paladins and Christianity's bottom feeders. So now we have an entrenched culture of violence that is approved by the leaders of the Church. We saw this in the outspoken zeal of ministers, pastors, and chaplains as they all took turns stirring the cauldron of emotions that collected together American's unfamiliar feelings toward the emboldened enemies of their lifestyle in this "Christian nation." Instead of a Christian response, we respond with the gun—in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in the sinister posturing of the Cheney-Bush presidency as it looks for a pretense to respond with the gun in Iran.

We have lost the leadership of men who can act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.¹ Instead of being transformed by the love of Christ, we have instead conformed ourselves perfectly to the pattern of this world; instead of striving to overcome evil with good, we ourselves have been overcome by evil.²

How do we bring about the end of the gun in these circumstances? Michael Moore's award-winning 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine, asked a different question, of course, but in doing so he brought into focus how deeply entrenched in contemporary American culture are the tools of violence, whether they be the handgun, the rifle, or the nuclear warhead. Our republic was created by war, our union was preserved by an incestuous war, and our future as a nation will therefore be determined by our ability to remain victors even in our foolish wars of choice. I do not mean that we have to be defeated through war. Perhaps that will never happen. We may be brought down by disease, or by the lack of petroleum—or even by the lack of water.³ But our standing in the world, in the history of civilization, will never be so high again so long as we, as citizens, find ourselves unable to appreciate the balance of good over the evil that we can do. Unfortunately, the long illicit love affair with debauchery has finally spread among our clergy a venereal disease more virulent, more hideous than syphilis or gonorrhea. Our mainline Christian leaders prefer now to skulk like trolls in the dark, singing hoary songs of praise to war mongers, as the blisters of infection distort their eyes, their ears, their tongues.

The end of the gun, like the end of the spear, will follow upon a new revolutionary war, but not a war with guns or spears or weapons of mass destruction. This is a revolutionary war that must come from the heart, a renewing of the mind, from a new Christian witnessing.

1.  See Micah 6:8.
2.  See Paul's remarks in Romans 12.
3.  This isn't farfetched. The issue of water is going to loom larger in our future if recent efforts by the Security and Prosperity Partnership (a collective often referred to as "NAFTA-plus") to control Canada's water resources is any guide. On this, see "TRADE-CANADA: Losing Water Through NAFTA," Inter Press Service, September 22, 2007.