Dear America:
I feel like I should still love you. I’m struggling to love you. But you’ve got a problem, an addiction, that is making that so hard.
Europeans tell many mean jokes at your expense, convinced of their cultural superiority. I have never believed that. “They don’t have passports!” smug friends point out. This always seemed an absurd judgment to me. If I lived in a nation as vast, diverse and beautiful, I might never feel the need to leave either.
“Their culture is so tabloid!” seems even worse. Whether Europe is that far behind in the dumbing down of discourse is debatable. (I’m looking at you, Fleet Street.)
I was a teenager at the time of the Columbine shooting. No one could mistake suburban Dublin for anyone’s utopia, but my friends and I could recognize that we might as well live in a different galaxy.
My favorite movie is “Jurassic Park” and my favorite novelist is Marilynne Robinson and my favorite songwriter is Paul Simon and if that renders me hopelessly middlebrow, then so be it. I had always been ready to take your side, America.
The primary reason I regret falling out with you is the role so many Americans have played in my life. It was a dear friend from Oregon who introduced me to the young woman who became my wife. In my 20s, when I had rediscovered Christianity after years of atheism, it was an almost impossibly gracious woman from Alabama who played a key role in helping me grow in faith. My best friend is from Little Rock. Well, North Little Rock, because I know that in America, just as in Ireland, such local distinctions matter.
I also think that there is no better sporting experience in all the world than a summer’s evening spent watching baseball with friends. I have an abiding love of your county fairs, with their charming combination of competitive agriculture, saturated fat and intergenerational community spirit. And for all the pleasures (and pretenses) of French or Italian dining, the best meals out I have ever enjoyed have been in the kind of small, well-run but low-key establishments that seem to be everywhere in America.
But America, I find it harder and harder to love you these days. It is your peculiar relationship with guns that is draining that love away.
America, I find it harder and harder to love you these days. It is your peculiar relationship with guns that is draining that love away.
I was a teenager at the time of the Columbine High School shooting. No one could mistake suburban Dublin for anyone’s utopia, but even then my friends and I could recognize that we might as well live in a different galaxy.
The most pressing issue we faced in the spring of 1999 was our “orals,” when we had just 15 minutes to prove we had achieved the minimum capacity with the Irish language. We could not conceive of a situation where teenagers would be expected to learn while also living under the threat of such violence. The randomness of it was especially striking.
Had you told me that more than a generation later, the problem would still be unaddressed—in fact had gotten much worse—I would have been astonished. I might not have known the word for it, but I would conclude the society that allowed its young to live under such a shadow was flirting with nihilism. What is the point of a society that cannot even keep children safe?
A few years before, in 1996, a man burst into a small primary school in a town in Scotland—much closer to home—and killed 16 children. By the end of the next year, the United Kingdom had successfully drafted, debated and passed laws to make gun ownership vastly more restricted.
Of course, laws alone cannot change human hearts, but these laws definitely contributed to a changed, saner and safer society. There has been only one mass shooting incident since those laws were passed, and the annual rate of death at the hands of guns in the United Kingdom is now 0.03 per 100,000. That is 120 times lower than the rate in the United States, which is 3.6 per 100,000 people.
All the money in the world could not compensate us for bringing him into a culture where he would have to endure training drills so he knows how to respond if a stranger shows up outside his classroom with a gun.
There have been at least 160 mass shootings in the United States in 2023, a year that is 110 days old. Mass shootings have become so commonplace that they often go unreported outside of local media.
They are so commonplace that two friends of mine have been personally touched by this rampaging violence in the last year. My officemate from my Ph.D. days was on a playground with his daughter when he got a text message warning him of an active shooter down the block. It was the Covenant school shooting in Nashville. Just months before another friend’s child survived a different school shooting but had to step over the body of her murdered classmate when finally evacuated by police.
Dear America, these are not normal experiences. No people should countenance such carnage becoming normal.
In Ireland, we are not unacquainted with violence. This month we are marking the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, a peace deal negotiated with considerable help from the United States, which brought an end to the generation-long civil war in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.
When, in the early days of the conflict, the violence was directed toward some coherent political aim, the Irish Republican Army won widespread passive support from people in the south, the Irish Republic. But after years of what appeared to be increasingly ruthless targeting of innocent people, there was widespread disgust toward the paramilitaries. The defeat of the terrorists can be attributed to many factors, but popular revulsion at the barbarous pointlessness of their violence must be included as part of that.
I should love you, America. It should be the case that I would welcome a chance to move to the United States for a spell and relish the joys of baseball and folk music and shrimp-and-grits at a more relaxed pace than that of a tourist or a visitor. My wife and I have discussed it. But unless we felt it was a vocation—literally going to you as missionaries—we would not even consider it.
Our son starts school in the fall. In Ireland his major classroom concern will be sitting still at his desk for prolonged periods of time. All the money in the world could not compensate us for bringing him into a culture where he would have to endure training drills so he knows how to respond if a stranger shows up outside his classroom with a gun.
The figure of Moloch haunts the Hebrew Scriptures—a god who demands the sacrifice of children. In the year of the Belfast Agreement, one of its key architects, the Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume, gave a speech that implored the need to decommission the weapons of war. But before we decommission the guns, he said, we must decommission our minds. Ireland had to commit to living as a society without recourse to lethal violence because its people could flourish in peace.
The biblical text is clear: No society can prosper while Moloch is allowed any space to reign. My wife and I admire how American Christians so often boldly declare their pro-life stance. We wish it was a position held consistently.
As pro-life people, too, we wish you cared more about life, America. We wish you would honor the victims of Columbine and the thousands of victims since Columbine by committing to the decommissioning of the weapons of war that are used so commonly, so randomly, to such devastating effect.
Perhaps this is the vocation of Christians in America today: to be a people dedicated to decommissioning their minds of the hollow promises of liberty offered up by these tools of death.
