UU church shooting

July 30, 2008

I’ve been on the other side of the country than usual, so I’m slow to blog. But I just wanted to make a note about the latest church shooting, this time in a Unitarian Universalist church. The Wild Hunt has some of the details there.

Some commentary, like that at Confederate Yankee, has focused more on the fact that the shooter was anti-Christian rather than anti-gay or anti-liberal. Says the CY:

While many in the political blogosphere will no doubt focus on the fact that Adkisson said he hated liberals and gays, the fact of the matter is that the didn’t target a gay club or local progressive political groups, he specifically targeted a church. He did so after expressing beliefs to neighbors in the past that he had an abiding anger against Christianity, an anger that appears rooted in his childhood. The church appears to have been targeted because it embodied at least three things this pathetic human being hated, not just the one or two things I know certain critics will single out as they view the world through their own warped prisms. [ Small Miracles ]

But if Adkisson’s primary target was a Christianity, then he had to pass by a lot more obvious choices. UUs are made up of atheists, agnostics, Christians, Buddhists, pagans of all stripes. People bound together by common ethics and spiritual inclinations rather than cosmology and symbol. And the UU emblem is not cross-like at all. So I doubt that Adkisson was planning on shooting up a church first, and then deciding to select one that was liberal just because it added that much more.

UUs are not often considered to be part of the “religions community,” much less Christian, by fundamentalists. But now it is convenient to do so in order to cast Adkisson as part of an anti-religion movement rather than a product of anti-liberal eliminationist rhetoric.

Posted in Religion