Church, state, and guns

New York Mayor Eric Adams made some headlines this week when he announced at one of those utterly extraneous interfaith breakfasts  politicians like to use as vote-getters, that he does not accept the Constitution’s admonition in the First Amendment that while church and state are in the same country, they do not belong in the same building.  Introduced by his chief aide, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, as “definitely one of the chosen,” Adams greeted applause from the breakfast crowd and told them, “Ingrid was so right.  Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body. Church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.”

Adams assured the city’s religious and political leaders that when he implements policies in New York City, he does so with a “godlike approach.”  He continued, “I strongly believe in all of my heart, God said, ‘I’m going to take the most broken person and I’m going to elevate him to the place of being the mayor of the most powerful city on the globe.  He could have made me the mayor of Topeka, Kansas.” 

It was unclear if Adams’ remark about the capital of Kansas was a joke or an appreciation of the infinite wisdom of the God he worships.

It is bad enough that Adams’ misunderstanding of, indifference to, or utter defiance of the First Amendment puts him in the company of not only right-wing evangelical Christians and the Republican Party, but he went further when he seemed to blame today’s incredible tsunami of gun violence on the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Engle v. Vitale which banned prayer in public schools as an establishment of religion. “When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools,” Adams told the crowd.

Given that Adams was born 1960, perhaps I can enlighten him about what was going on in the public schools at that time and for many years previously.  I was in school before morning prayers became a thing in public schools, and then one day around the time Eisenhower signed a bill in 1954 adding the words “under God” to the pledge of allegiance, they started making us either recite the Lord’s Prayer or listen to it being read by a teacher or by a principal over the school’s public address system.  Later in life, I would learn that the whole God in schools thing was a political reaction to the Red Scare being led by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.  Politicians and prominent people were being run out of public life and people, including school teachers, were losing their jobs because they were perceived to be insufficiently loyal to American values, or something akin to that, including currently being members or having been members in the past of the Communist Party – which by the way did not violate any law whatsoever. 

A panic swept the land, and part of the reaction to it was to come up with ways to assert your Americanness, and what better way to do that but to pledge your allegiance “under God” rather than without His blessing or assent, and to pray in school and before every kind of public assembly that could be conceived, including political gatherings, sporting events, and meetings of Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops.  Every time you turned around in the 1950’s you were praying or pledging or bowing your heads, and you didn’t even have to be in a church.

Of course, every single prayer I ever heard in school or anywhere else was a Christian one, and the pictures that started showing up on the walls of school rooms were not of the Prophet Muhammed or Buddha or Vishnu, but of Jesus, depicted as a beneficent-looking white man.

I never saw a gun in a school throughout my time in the public schools, which began in 1951 and ended in 1965.  I saw plenty of guns in the Boy Scouts and on hunting expeditions with my father and brother and on Saturday mornings when I participated in NRA shooting competitions with a .22 rifle.  I saw many, many guns of every description imaginable on the Army posts where I grew up – everything from my dad’s .45 caliber pistol to the M-1 Garand rifle, to the M-48 tank, and while in Germany in the late 1950’s, the so-called “Atomic cannon,” which was capable of firing a nuclear warhead.

But no guns in the secular post-Engle schools I attended, no guns in schools I visited as a cadet making public relations appearances for the Army, no guns in schools I visited as a reporter and then as the author of several best-selling novels, no guns in public schools attended by my children.  No prayers and no guns.

There is of course no connection between whether children are forced to pray in school and the use of guns by children or adults to murder schoolchildren, which has very much become a thing over the years.  There is a connection, however, between the easy availability of guns, which are sold over the counter to anyone with the money to pay for them and are omnipresent in the homes of Americans with and without children present. 

The two schoolboys, aged 13 and 11, who shot up a middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 1998, took guns from one of their grandfather’s home, where the guns were lying around the house not locked up, along with 2,000 rounds of ammunition they found atop his refrigerator.  Here are the guns they loaded into the back of one of their mother’s Dodge Caravan:  a .44 magnum rifle; two .38 Special revolvers; a .357 revolver; a .38 caliber two-shot Derringer pistol; a replica M-1 .30 caliber Carbine rifle; and a .30-06 rifle; and two .380 pistols.  They used the guns to kill four students and a teacher and wound 10 others. 

They weren’t forced to pray in schools, but here is what their parents did make them do:  they took both boys, then aged 12 and 10, to so-called “practical shooting courses” and taught them to shoot at full-size human silhouette targets.

You can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think it says anywhere in the Christian Bible or in any of the volumes of religious teachings of the Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or any other religion I can think of that children of school age should be taught by their parents to shoot at human beings.

Mayor Adams should be ashamed of associating himself with the intolerant Christian evangelical movement and with the political party that has promoted through its association with the National Rifle Association the spread of firearms into 35 to 45 percent of homes of Americans who report that they own guns.  I have yet to read or hear the prayer to any God that can stop a bullet.