I am a son of the Black church, so I am well versed in such delaying tactics. We have not had the luxury of time to mourn. When domestic terrorists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, murdering four of our little girls, Martin Luther King Jr. used the eulogy he delivered in the presence of the children’s caskets to challenge the church and the government to change.
He said: “These children — unoffending, innocent, and beautiful — were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician.”
The deaths of the children spoke to the state of anti-Blackness in America. In death, their blood cried out for justice and transformation. Similarly, every single young body riddled with bullets from guns that we could control preaches a sermon. They issue a word of condemnation, a Jeremiad.
Do not misunderstand: I believe in the power of prayer. But the Christian response can’t be limited to it. That assumes that all activity on behalf of the innocent lies in the hands of the almighty when the Christian Scriptures themselves suggest that God will judge us according to how we treat the most vulnerable. We should not be accountable for only the fervency of our intercession but also for the relentlessness of our actions.
Taylor Schumann is a shooting survivor, wife, mom, Christian and advocate for gun reform. The author of the book “When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Journey Into the Realities of Gun Violence,” she says that some people who resist gun reform do so out of fear, but they are looking at it the wrong way. “The desire for gun control does not come from a place of wanting to take away something, but rather to save something else: fellow human beings,” she told me. “We’ve tried so many things to reduce gun violence, everything except widespread gun reform. If there were another way to do it, I believe we would’ve found it by now.” Ms. Schumann is right. We have not found another answer and so we are left with a question, which is: Whom do we love more, our guns or our children?
My wife and I had occasion to visit Edinburgh, Scotland, last summer. Strolling along its cobbled roads, we wandered into one of the many old churches. Carved into the cool stone walls were names of those long dead.
All that we could know about them was the year of their birth and the day of their passing. The life that took place in the middle was lost to history. We noticed that a few lived very brief lives, dying as children. My wife and I wondered what had befallen them — illness, accident or some other tragedy? The disquiet around the death of the young echoes through the centuries.
Years from now, when those of us alive today have gone the way of all flesh, others will wander through our graveyards. They will see the waves of tombstones commemorating children with not enough years between the first number and the last. But unlike those children in Scotland, the cause of those tragedies will not be a mystery. The undeniable testimony of our actions will be that our children kept dying because some of us did not love them enough.
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