To end the public warfare, stop the war within.

Photo credit: Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

The tragic loss of life in Uvalde Texas should be an occasion for coming together. As one, our hearts break at seeing the photographs of 19 tiny victims, two female teachers, and a husband who died of a broken heart. We needed time to process, time to grieve. We did not need the immediate exploitation of the crime for political ends.

Only two days before the horrific shooting, the WTE editorial board published a call for civility. Its tone was sincere, but pessimistic. “It almost seems like a waste of words to ask for and expect anything else. Yet we can’t help but try.” I think they articulated the hopelessness felt by an overwhelming swath of readers.

We know that we want to be left alone to live in peace the lives that God has given us. We want to raise our children in an environment where all our neighbors and teachers help us to protect them both from those who would murder their bodies with bullets and those who would murder their souls with lies.

Uvalde victims

I believe that nobody in this entire state would disagree with that simply stated desire. And yet, I can already feel the tug at the leash as the dogs of war ready themselves. Two sides of an incessant cultural war long to sink their teeth into that red meat and pull it in two vastly different directions, tearing its unity right down the middle.

Before the words of unity even leave our mouths, the noise of the mob turns them into words of war. One mob accuses the proponents of gun control of killing children by leaving them defenseless. The other mob accuses the opponents of gun control of killing children by arming irresponsible and troubled people. Both consider the lies that kill children to be in the mouths of the others.

Our pessimism arises from the repeated experience that neither side can possibly concede an inch to the other. It’s not that they don’t want to do so, but that they cannot. It is not merely about willfulness and hard-headedness. We are—all of us—chained into a way of thinking that prevents thought. We have been drawn into a liberty that enslaves us.

Alasdair MacIntyre, the Scottish philosopher, began to uncover this impossible situation in his 1981 book, “After Virtue.” There he wrote about how the emerging redefinition of “liberty” threatened to enslave us all in the hopeless world we are now experiencing. When freedom is reduced to the unfettered ability to do whatever the bleep I want, we simply lose the ability to have civil discourse. When truth ceases to exist, the only value that matters in the public square is “what I want.”

In a particularly lucid paragraph, MacIntyre writes, “Contemporary moral experience has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also …[practices] manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we …[direct] towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case.”

Once we define “freedom” as the ability to live completely and absolutely by our own inner desires, we have no alternative but to stop up our ears to any and every external authority. Other people’s opinions become threats to our very existence. Not only people, but also facts, logic, Bible, and even God Himself become mortal enemies. That is the prison that encloses us.

This lie about freedom isolates us in silos of individuality that are oppressively lonely. It prevents us from having civil discourse. It poisons the world that we want to be safe for our children. It is precisely this false view of freedom that unleashed the demons in Buffalo, Uvalde, and across our own state.

But I am not pessimistic. The chains that enslave us in this hopeless thought-world may be impossibly strong, but they are also brittle. Built on a lie about human freedom, they can be broken by a single word of truth. For truth exists not in each private will, but as a public gift from God. This truth frees us from the slavery of pretending to be gods.

Thus, we are freed from the slavery of obligating others while, we ourselves, avoid every obligation. We are freed, instead, to submit to the obligations that God lovingly gives us. These are gifts, not debts. Under God, we neither manipulate others, nor are we manipulated. 

Civility returns because we have stopped the endless war within ourselves.