A Spurious Explanation

Trey Smith

There is one final point I want to make in reference to one of Wednesday's posts, A Lump of Clay. As I stated previously, there have been some fundamentalist Christians who have advanced the novel notion that the "outlawing of school prayer" and America's supposed turning away from the Christian God is most responsible for our spate of mass spree killings.

For some, this may sound like a reasonable and laudable explanation, but it contains a fatal flaw. Religion, in general, and Christianity, in specific, have decreased significantly in a more secularized Europe and yet deaths from guns are miniscule compared to the rates in the USA. If turning away from the Christian God sets the stage for these sorts of tragedies, then why don't we see them on a regular basis in Europe?

For that matter, why is the rate so low in Japan? Unlike America, the Japanese have never embraced Christianity to a great extent. This is not to say that there are no Christians in Japan, but Christianity is considered a minor religion. One would think -- utilizing the fundamentalist explanation -- that a nation which eschews the Christian God would be bedeviled by these sorts of murderous rampages, but the exact opposite is true. There have been several years in the past decade in which the annual death toll for death by gun in the entirety of Japan is LESS than the number killed in Newtown, CT in one day!

If turning away from the Christian God is THE answer, then why does it work this way in America but nowhere else in the western world?