Mass Killings and the American "Culture of Death"

                America has been deeply shaken by senseless and wicked mass shootings carried out 18 days ago at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and yesterday at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.  Undoubtedly the trial of the Colorado shooter and the press inquiries into the Wisconsin murderer will bring to light some of the killers’ personal motivations for these heinous crimes.  The Bible calls on Christians to mourn with those who have lost loved ones in these calamities (Romans 12:15) and to pray that they will seek and find comfort in the one true God of the Bible, who alone is “the Father of mercies and God of all comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3).  However, horrific crimes like these also call for Christians to reflect on the reasons why mass killings that would have been unthinkable just 50 years ago now seem to occur with frightening regularity.

                No one should deny at all the personal responsibility to be borne by the evil men who carried out the murders in Colorado and Wisconsin.  The Wisconsin killer died in a fire fight with police, and the Colorado killer must bear the full penalty for his crimes under Colorado law.  However, as Christians we must also wonder if our changing culture has not played at least a background role in these killings.  The late Pope John Paul II famously described western civilization, including American society, as a “culture of death.”  What John Paul II meant is that we do not respect life in the womb, for on average, more than a million abortions take place in the United States every year.  We also on see evidence in America of less and less respect for the lives of the elderly and disabled and the terminally ill.

                The Bible declares that all human life is valuable from the time of conception to natural death, because all human life bears the imprint of the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27).  Even the most disabled little baby is more like his or her Creator than any other beings in the universe.  However, as the United States has turned from biblical teaching and biblical values, and as it has embraced first modernity and then post-modernity, we have left behind this biblical teaching on the value of all human life.  As tragic as mass killings are, perhaps we should not be so shocked by them.  After all, can a society that allows the killing of more than one million of its citizens in the womb each year really profess surprise over mass killings of people outside the womb?  Is one of the byproducts of our devaluation of life the cheapening life to the point that evil men with twisted minds feel permission to commit mass acts of murder?