CREEDE HINSHAW: The Orlando massacre and a nation’s anguish

The Orlando massacre was depressing and tragic on many levels. The worst gun massacre in U.S. history involved a young Muslim adherent of the most fundamental interpretation of Islam who used an assault weapon to execute 49 mostly gay and lesbian Hispanic young adults. One hardly knows how to assess this heinous act of a deranged, perhaps bi-polar person.

Americans are at odds with each other over how to approach Muslims, with some Americans even denying that Islam is a religion. Americans are divided over gay and lesbian persons. Americans continue to disagree about the meaning of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and how to responsibly protect people from guns.

Any one of these issues is enough to make the sparks fly; here we have a confluence of disastrously controversial issues overlaying the needless, senseless, violent deaths of over four dozen young persons who were simply enjoying a dance club until their lives were brutally ended.

I try to listen to and read various viewpoints on current events, a practice that I highly commend. It keeps one from hearing and thinking about only the things you already believe. But this discipline has really been tough these last few days. Whatever view we citizens (conservative or liberal, Christian or Muslim, Republican or Democrat, etc.) already held on guns, gays or Muslims, we are remarkably clever at fitting the events of Orlando into our pre-conceived notions of each issue.

Every person tries to use the Orlando massacre to score points with the other side, whoever they are. Whatever you believed about Muslims, gays, the judgment of God, whether guns need to be more available or more regulated, which world religion is about love and which is about hate, whether a lone shooter represents all of Islam or just himself, whether it is important to recite the words “radical Islamic terrorism”… whatever a person already thought about any of these issues, Orlando has become the latest illustration of what they already believed.

Mass murder is the exclusive project of no particular religion. Last year’s massacre in a Charleston church and this year’s massacre in a Denver Planned Parenthood Clinic were not carried out by angry Muslims, although many other such brutalities have been. Some of the murderers are Muslim; others are Christian. All of them are lost souls dealing with heavy mental burdens and tortured backgrounds. All of them have killed innocents. Massacres in schools, theaters, shopping centers, recruiting centers, Army bases and marathons have not brought this nation together; they have simply laid bare our differences.

Would Jesus carry an automatic weapon or teach and preach nonviolence? Would he welcome or shun immigrants? Would he receive and affirm the GLBTQ community or call them sinners? Would he sit at table with Muslims or condemn them? I have my answers, but many Christians, equally ardent and faithful, have different answers. The church is, sadly, every bit as divided as our nation.

Email Creede Hinshaw, a retired Methodist minister, at [email protected].