Guns N' Idols

I like guns. When the carnival came to Sibley, IA, for the Osceola County fair or for Dog Days, my favorite booths were the shooting galleries.

Three shots for a quarter: shoot the heart out of an ace of hearts, and win a prize. After two shots with the .22, 3/4 of the ace was gone. One more shot and I'd win that prize (whatever it was). But the excitement was too much for this 12-year-old. I wavered and missed by a good half inch.

One hundred shots with an air-powered Tommy gun was a dollar. Could I afford that? I hung around and watched the grown-ups try while my brother went off to see and do other things. I realized that those who fired a just few shots at a time didn't do so well. Finally, I gave the man a dollar. I pulled the trigger and didn't let go. When I was done, a few edges of the picture I was supposed to eliminate from the target were still there. The hawker let out his breath and said, "If you had only taken a little more time, I think you would have had it." Darn, I should try again with my alternative strategy of cutting the whole target off at the bottom. But I was broke.

I got my first gun while working on a farm in Montana's Gallatin Valley after high school. Gary Bolhuis said I could have his .22 Remington single-shot for $10. I'd shoot sparrows that swarmed the grain bins and Richardson's ground squirrels, which dug holes in pastures and ate barley and wheat in the fields. The single-shot saved me a lot of shells. I sometimes hunted with friends who had semi-automatics, and they never could resist the urge to continue firing as the gopher ran away if they missed on the first shot.

A while ago I read an article that started, "Frank Antenori shot the head off a rattlesnake at his back door last summer." Frank thinks this is a useful skill, which he learned in the U.S. Army. He thinks what most people learn in college is not useful. I don't think shooting the head off a rattlesnake is very useful, just like shooting an ace of hearts is not all that useful. It may be fun, but not useful.

I wasn't a bad shot. I took out a lot of gophers. The U.S. Army didn't pay for my training.

A year or so after my stint on a Montana farm, I went to college.

I got some financial aid for coming from a large, low-income family, and some of that aid may have come from the government. In college, I studied what Frank considers useless topics. I read Plato's Republic and Homer's The Iliad. I studied some philosophy, some religion, some history, and languages, along with math and physics and art and other required courses. I took an engineering class, and liked it. It was useful, but I can't say it was more useful than the humanities. Translating Greek and Latin may be "useless,"  but learning to interpret difficult material was helpful. I now translate the language of engineers into English that most people can understand. My gopher marksmanship is not useful.

Except, maybe, I understand better the obsession with guns that some of my co-workers have.

There are two types of obsession about guns. One is an inordinate fear of guns. I was listening to a radio program the other day. It featured logic-driven economists discussing parenting. One economist mentioned that some people wouldn't let their children play at a home if there was a gun in the home. The parents did not seem to have the same fear of letting their children play at a home with a pool, even though the chances of their children drowning were greater than those of their being shot. (Note: I checked statistics, and it seems more children in the U.S. die by shooting than by drowning annually. So I'm not sure which statistics the economist-parent was referencing.)

The other obsession is an ideology that guns are essential to our protection. I suppose shooting the head off a rattlesnake is an illustration of protection, though the story did not mention any imminent danger from the rattlesnake. In Montana, I believed I was protecting grain and preventing cattle from breaking their legs in gopher holes.

We give guns to policemen, whose job it is to protect us, and we believe that the guns help them do their job. Our considerable defense budget pays for a lot of guns, and bigger weapons, and for training people to use them. Protection, at least in America, is almost defined by guns.

I can point out that statistically possession of a gun does not make you safer from crime, but many gun advocates will provide alternate statistics. Guns are protection. End of story. Just as someone who fears guns will not feel comfortable letting their child play at a house that houses a gun, some gun advocates won't feel safe without a firearm. Some of the same people who offer statistics about how essential guns are to safety defend not funding the CDC to study gun violence. I suppose that if, like Frank Antenori, you think that the people gathering the statistics have useless knowledge, then you only trust your own statistics. But resisting research suggests you are afraid of the results.

Many cultures have an obsession with protection. In West Africa, people would carry fetishes or talismans as protection. I visited Tibet once, and nearly all the window frames were painted black. It was for protection. There were swastikas on the roofs of some houses—for protection. I'm sure each person with a talisman could give you stories of how they provide protection. I'm equally sure the evidence to back this up would be less than conclusive.

The Romans had penates, household deities, for protection. In the Old Testament, Laban had household idols for protection. Apparently, Rachel thought so highly of their protective power that she stole them from her dad when she and Jacob and her sister left town.

It is a human condition to want protection. As children we need protection and as parents we protect. This is natural and good.

But it also seems natural to depend for protection on things that are not proven effective. I wonder if guns aren't being promoted and trusted in America as household gods, talismans of protection.

Graven Images

Martin Luther taught that anything we trust, other than God, can become an idol. Anything.

In that case, we are all guilty.

I've been asking myself this question: Is it possible to be guilty of idolatry in the very act of believing in God? I suppose this seems ridiculous, so bear with me. God is beyond understanding, yet we tend to think we understand. That's a problem. We don't trust God nearly so much as we do our own perception of God.

We have a long history of doing terrible things, because we believe God agrees with our beliefs: if you disagree with me, you disagree with God and deserve his wrath. And I am all too willing to execute the judgment you obviously deserve. This has been the MO of too many religious leaders and their followers.

We are more tame (I hope) than some of our ancestors, who marched on crusades, burned witches, and tortured heretics. But there seems to be a growing intolerance of others in general, and of religious others in particular.

The title of a book by Peter Enns sounds right to me: The Sin of Certainty. Maybe I don't even need to read the book. Maybe the title is enough. The subtitle is: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct Beliefs."

If we are guilty of idolatry when we trust our own perspective of God, what else have we got? Perhaps worse is trusting someone else's view of God.

It's not that we shouldn't trust God. It's that whatever our perspective of God is, it's inadequate, a small bit of the truth at best. Trusting God includes a lot of wonder and, frankly, a lot of not knowing.

Listening to prominent Christians fawn over a man who makes no bones about idolizing himself has forced me to ask whether beliefs can be idols. Not only do these people defend the man, they are certain that he is to be admired. God is on his side and theirs. God sent him—and them—to judge evildoers.

I believe I should remain open to the possibility (however slim) that they are right. But I won't trust their judgment on the matter. They are too certain of themselves. They are too quick to condemn. If only they had the grace of Job's friends, who demonstrated their concern for their friend by sitting with him in silence for an entire week.

When Job's three friends did start talking, they warned Job with the best of intentions and the best theology of the day. Job argued with them, and they impressed upon him just how God does things. After all of their sermons and arguments, God finally weighs in. We are hoping for a clear answer, but there is none. Instead, Job is chided for expecting to understand God, and his friends earn God's wrath for claiming to.

While the term idolatry has been expanded on (for example, in the book Playing God, by Andy Crouch) it didn't occur to me to think of graven images as anything other than carved piece of wood or chiseled stone or molded metal—fulfilling quaint and old-fashioned notions of divine protection. We, of course, have moved beyond such silly superstitions.

Maybe not. If we don't understand that our images of God are necessarily inaccurate, we risk trusting little more than graven images.