Shooting after shooting, school after school, community after community traumatized and permanently affected—something is going on—and we should know it is more a spiritual failure than a political one. To think that politics can fix soul-sickness is itself a soul sickness.
Guns have always been around, but mass shootings were rare until today. The states with the strictest gun laws still tally the highest gun violence statistics. Something much deeper has changed—something in the American character—that has born the fruit of these mass killings/suicides.
Guns are merely the means, not the cause, of such murders. If we remove guns, the sickness remains. If the soul-sickness is not addressed, we will only see a change in the tools of destruction. We'll be dealing with mass stabbings, mass poisonings, mass bombings, and desperate politicians pushing to abolish knives, poisons, and explosives. In other words, we will be exactly where we are now—no progress made—just changing the band-aids on an endlessly festering wound.
Christian action is not the same as worldly reactions. While politicians continue their endless search for more expensive band-aids, the Church aims beneath the skin. Unless we attempt to reach the depths where the sickness originates, we will only be making mid-flight adjustments on a plane flying in the wrong direction.
America seems to be sicker than it once was. At times, it looks as though our nation is committing a slow—perhaps unintentional—suicide. Alienated loners, overmedicated and under-loved, come to hate life(including their own). They feel hopeless because they are Godless. It's not complicated: our death ends everything if there is no God to whom we must answer. If there is no God, then when we die, it is as though the universe never existed. For the Godless person, reality all begins and ends with them, and if reality ends with them, it means nothing for them to shoot up a school of innocents on their way down. If they have come to the unholy conclusion that their own life doesn't matter, then why would they value the life of anyone or anything else? It's not complicated at all.
Our problem is neither guns nor government; our problem is moral and spiritual. America has a faith problem and a love problem. Faith and love can—and will—prevent even the most darkened souls from acting on the worst of their worst instincts. Those who believe in God can believe that birth is not the beginning, nor is death the end of the story.
America needs faith, hope, and love if it is to be saved. I believe these virtues have no basis without God, and I believe you and I serve the mission to deliver antidotes for soul sickness.
We can make an enormous difference in the world. Love one person—particularly a lonesome outsider—and you may save lives. Tell one depressed neighbor that God loves her and means for her to flourish and know joy, and she may affect dozens of other lives. Tell the truth that you know in your heart; namely, God is known and knowable through Jesus Christ, who came that we should have life and life in abundance. Tell the hard truths: "You're mistaken," "You seem confused," "You're better than that," "Don't fool yourself"—and the lovely ones: "You matter infinitely to God," "I will be your friend," "Let me help you see how wonderful your life can be!"
America must turn from its current moral decline. The Church of Jesus Christ is its best hope for doing so. We bear full rights to distribute the antidotes freely, and there may be dozens of means to help turn the nation, but every one of them depends upon prayer first.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor executed for complicity in the plot to assassinate Hitler, held prayer as the foremost tool of activism. He says prayer is neither apathy nor passiveness, but prayer is a display of the most robust possible activity.
We need to believe this and believe it deeply. We must trust with our whole hearts that our prayers move mountains, change hearts, and redirect nations. We must pray and pray constantly for national renewal and let no one naysay the value of doing so.
As for other actions, they come to people humbled before God in the form of God's calling. We need not trust our best ideas and self-made schemes of correction; instead, let us go to God, encourage others to do likewise, and set before him (as an early American Presbyterian put it) our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.