Senseless

Details are starting to emerge about our latest mass murder, this time at a Sikh place of worship rather than in a movie theatre.  The shooter: former military, connections with white supremacist groups.  The victims: people of South Asian heritage (Punjabi, presumably) gathered for worship and a meal.

This is an act of violence every bit as pointless, stunning, and horrific as what happened in Colorado just a few weeks ago.  The body count is lower, but so much is the same - a gunman entered what is supposed to a perfectly safe space and killed innocent people.  In this case, we have a presumed motive - these were people of color murdered in cold blood by a man who seems to have believed that only white people authentically count as people, and that everyone else is inferior.  I don't know much else yet - if the gunman thought that Sikhs were "terrorists" simply because "all them A-rabs look the same," or what.  

I do know some things.  First, Sikhism is the 5th-largest religion in the world, and the average U.S. American had probably never heard of a Sikh prior to yesterday.  Almost nobody knows that their religion is monotheistic, that they were a popular reaction against the excesses and snobbery of the clerical classes of both the Hindu brahmins and the Muslim moguls which began to coalesce roughly concurrent with the Protestant Reformation in the West, that the center of their faith is a sacred book of poems about God which has been mostly set to music.  Their traditionally distinct appearance - beards, well-maintained long hair typically beneath a blue turban, silver bracelet - usually get them labeled in this nation as "Indian," "A-rab," or worse.  They are our neighbors, and we know nothing.  Of course, Islam is the 2nd-largest religion in the world, with Buddhism and Hinduism rounding out the top five (Christianity is on top in the numbers game)...and how much does the average person know about any of those, for that matter?  Other than that, of course, they're not white people religions.

I also know that the outpouring of grief and rage I've seen over this one in the world of social media has involved a conspicuous lack of grief and rage from conservative Christians.  For that matter, the number of people posting about this latest shooting has been almost nothing compared to the Colorado massacre.  Part of it is that the average person can more closely relate to going to the movies than going to worship at a non-Christian house of worship.  To a certain extent, the violation of the the movie theatre's safety is more immediately jarring, as at least houses of worship of all kinds have been targets in the past.  I get that.

But, I think there's more to it than just body count and the novelty of a mass murder at the movies.  I quite frankly think that most white Christians in this country are more disturbed when people who look like them are killed in a movie theatre than when non-Christian people of color are killed at worship.  I think subtle (or perhaps overt, for a minority of people) racism and religious exclusivism are at play here.  Again, I say - I think most of us in the church care a whole lot more about what happens to white, middle class, "God-fearing" people than to non-Christian people of color.  It doesn't matter that they were gathering for worship, much like how a Christian church would be gathering on a Sunday; they're not right enough with Jesus, and don't look like us, so they probably had it coming.  The shooting was  a senseless act of violence...but so is the sheer silence of white people of faith.  Every bit as senseless, and in its own way, every bit as violent.