School Shootings: Is the Bible to Blame?

On August 27, at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, a shooter barred the door to the chapel to prevent escape and then proceeded to shoot students through the windows. Two were killed; another 18 children and adults were injured.

With the return of the school season, we also get the return of what many fear has become a permanent feature of American life: school shootings. It’s not that it doesn’t happen elsewhere; Anders Breivik and Marc Lépine come to mind. But it does appear to happen far more often in the United States. It’s also not a new problem: nearly 100 years ago Andrew Kehoe used dynamite to blow up a school in Bath Township, Michigan, killing more than 30 children and two teachers.

Back then it was an infrequent thing. Not so anymore.

Are Christians to Blame?

The August 27 shooting launched the inevitable debate that almost always follows similar atrocities: does it happen because of access to guns, or does it stem from widespread mental health problems? Is it both? Like millions of others, I spent the day listening to countless individuals defend their positions on talk radio—and that’s when I heard a caller say something outside of the usual opinions.

“It happened because they’re Christians,” a noticeably angry caller said. At first I wondered if he meant the school was targeted for being Christian. He did not. “It’s not because the shooter was trans,” he continued. “It’s because he went to that school, and that’s where he learned to live violently.” He then launched a spiteful tirade against Christianity. “From a young age these kids are taught to read a book that teaches things like slavery and rape,” he said, “so what do you expect? Maybe wait until the kids are adults to show them the Bible, and I promise you, as adults, they’ll reject it.”

It’s not an entirely new sentiment in the atheist community; I’ve heard it many times in the past: Christians are violent. Usually it’s framed in terms of the Spanish Inquisition, where professed Christians did, indeed, behave very badly. Or sometimes it’s couched in the stories of the Crusades, during which marauding knights leading peasant armies sometimes went far beyond their instructions to liberate Jerusalem, ransacking villages en route to the Holy Land.

When I hear critics suggesting that the problem is a product of Christian teaching, I often find myself wishing they could see Christian history the way Seventh-day Adventists see it, because our perspective precludes the notion that the Bible is responsible for this behavior.

Think about it: the violence perpetrated by the church in the medieval period makes sense from our historical perspective. The atrocities were not a product of reading the Bible, but rather a product of ignoring it. John the revelator made it abundantly clear to the earliest believers that the church would apostatize, and he used language reminiscent of Jeremiah’s description of wayward Israel—the woman, he said, would become a prostitute, and she would persecute those who wanted to remain faithful to Scripture (see Rev. 12; 13; 17).

During the Middle Ages, when the state church was committing atrocities in the name of Christ, trying to exterminate so-called heretics, the victims of its violence actually found comfort in the pages of the Bible. They saw the pure woman flee to the wilderness for safety (Rev. 12:17). They understood that Christ would eventually return to end the strife and establish a kingdom in which there would be no more death, sorrow, or pain. (Rev. 21:1-5).

Those Who Read Scriptures

Closer to the present age, it was also (at least in part) the Scriptures that brought an end to slavery in the West. True, there really were American slaveholders who appealed to Scripture to defend the practice, but they were clearly cherry-picking the data, not taking into account the entirety of Scripture the way that opponents to the practice were. One of the most telling developments was the production of a slave Bible, which excised all of the passages that might motivate those in bondage to aspire to freedom. A huge portion of Exodus, of course, is missing—the part that describes the deliverance of Abraham’s descendants from Egypt. In other words, in order to make the Bible accommodate the slave trade, they had to deliberately remove large portions of the sacred writ.

As the American constitution was being crafted at the end of the eighteenth century, a delegation of Pennsylvania Quakers pleaded—from Scripture—with the Founders that their commitment to securing natural human rights would be severely compromised if slavery was not abolished.1 They had met with some success in a handful of states, but the Founders, frightened that slave states would not join the union, tragically placed, for 20 years, a moratorium on the conversation about the slave trade. It was, again, another occasion during which Scripture was ignored.

Ellen White pointed out that America would suffer for not dealing with it—not the least of which would be the unimaginable bloodshed of the Civil War.2

The Bible and Religious Violence

Is the Bible responsible for religious violence? It depends on how you think about it. Are there occasions in which unbalanced people are fueled by religious thoughts to do horrible things? Absolutely. Over the years I’ve seen plenty of kooks waving Bibles as they shout incomprehensible thoughts on street corners. But the important thing to consider is the location of the imbalance. It’s hard to ignore the roughly 2 billion Christians on this planet who contemplated the same faith without killing their neighbors; it’s the individual who is unbalanced, not the Book. With some of them I suspect you could have given them Moby Dick to read, and they’d still find ideas that would prompt their atrocities.

We routinely hear skeptics insist it was the Christian faith that drove those individuals mad. Yet it’s impossible to read the teachings of Christ and come to that conclusion. In Matthew 25, for example, Jesus openly states that God will exclude from heaven those who do not demonstrate compassion to their neighbors. And of course the Ten Commandments continue to exhibit God’s ideal for how we should love both Him and our neighbors.

When a teacher of the law asked Jesus which of the commandments should be considered the greatest, Christ replied: “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37-40).

When I hear critics suggesting that the problem is a product of Christian teaching, I often find myself wishing they could see Christian history the way Seventh-day Adventists see it, because our perspective precludes the notion that the Bible is responsible for this behavior.

What About Catholic Teachings?

The shooter had gone to the same school he attacked, which led the caller to suggest it happened because of Catholic teachings. Admittedly, the Catholic Church’s history when it comes to violence against other faith groups has not been pristine—not even close. Almost any Seventh-day Adventist would be able to provide examples of groups who suffered under the wrath of the Roman Church, including such groups as the Albigensians and Waldensians. But here’s the question we might wish to ask before we accept his premise: where would Catholic teaching include a mandate to kill other Catholics? If we had transcripts of every chapel this shooter had attended inside that same building, would we be able to point to one line delivered by a priest or nun that intimated that personal frustrations should be resolved through violence against fellow church members? It’s absurd.

Again, I’m fully aware that there are doctrinal problems in the Roman system—but I do not blame the teachings of Scripture for that. Not one bit. In fact, it’s the Bible that gives us the ability to understand why it happened: there’s a dragon in the mix.

And of course, we have this prediction from Paul: “But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!” (2 Tim. 3:1-5).

Every problem on this planet, ranging from violence to the reckless plundering of the earth’s resources, can be traced back to our corporate defiance of God’s Word. These things do not happen because God designed us to live this way; they happen because we voluntarily chose to side with the dragon.

The Role of Prayer

You’ll also hear critics jeer the cascade of “thoughts and prayers” comments on social media, because they do not believein prayer. “Go ahead and pray to your imaginary sky god,” I saw one man comment after a previous shooting. “You can waste your time, but I’m going to dosomething about it.”

One popular state governor, in the wake of last week’s shooting, suggested on X (Twitter) that prayer was useless, because the children were actually praying as the bullets started to fly.

It’s another common but misplaced sentiment. Personally, I don’t hear many Christians say that all we need to do is pray. I’m also not convinced that all of these skeptics really believe that God does not exist; after decades of working with the general public and sitting down with hundreds of professed atheists, I’ve come to believe that most of them are angry at God because of their suffering. It’s an understandable emotional response to pain; even righteous Job finally got frustrated enough to demand answers from his Creator by the end of the story. He was not privy to the information you and I have in the written account: God wasn’t doing it; it was Satan.

Perhaps a brief study in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews would help that governor understand the biblical perspective on suffering and faith.

When you’re blinded by pain, it’s natural to lash out at the Creator, assuming that if He really loved you, He’d do something about it right now. I know. I’ve done it. I’m not proud of it, but I’m honest enough to tell you that I have failed the Job test. But I find comfort in the fact that God is willing to forgive my lack of faith, and that He is big enough to hear my complaints and go on loving me as I learn to see the world the way He does. How do I know that? Read the Psalms; the Holy Spirit chose to include frustration and complaints in the inspired record—He knew we’d need to see that.

What We Can Do

In the face of suffering, we face an important choice: we can anchor ourselves more deeply in Scripture, trusting that God really will come through on His promise to end all of this; or we can toss the Bible—and God—to one side and call it a fairy tale. Millions have taken the second route; few of them, I’ve discovered, are entirely convinced they’re right about God’s nonexistence.

Seventh-day Adventists have a unique perspective that the world needs, especially as times get tougher. We are not surprised by the increase in trouble, because we’ve read Matthew 24 as well as Daniel and Revelation. But here in the West, a large swath of Christianity has adopted the relatively recent belief that Christians will soon be evacuated from the planet to escape the very worst trouble. Having read the entireBible carefully, Seventh-day Adventists understand that God’s people are not exempt from the suffering that befell this world when we chose to unlink ourselves from its Creator. We are saved, we have hope, but we do not have an exemption.

I will be praying for those families and praying for peace. I will go on living Matthew 25 as best I can to alleviate the suffering of those around me who might not yet understand that God actually cares—you and I can potentially be their answer to angry, frustrated prayers. And I will go on clinging to God’s promise, knowing that He’s never yet failed to keep one: “They shall neither hunger anymore nor thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any heat; for the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to living fountains of waters. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev. 7:16, 17).

1 https://csac.history.wisc.edu/document-collections/religion-and-the-ratification/quaker-opposition/

2 See Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1948), vol. 1, p. 359.