School Shootings Underscore Our Religious Race Against Time| National Catholic Register

COMMENTARY: A Church that often seems to move at a deliberate pace needs to have a much greater sense of urgency, purpose, creativity and conviction as we see the signs of the times.

Sometimes the immediate terrors can distract us. This is always a danger when horrible events occur, like the shooting and murders at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.

All too often, the instant narratives of the secular world in such situations are sickeningly predictable — a lot of noise and jockeying for political advantage, blaming this single element or the other. The superficiality can be almost overwhelming.

As Catholics, our initial reactions have been the right ones: prayer and weeping, and care for the families and children and the wounded people of God. In my view, those others that focus on church security or gun control or mental health are not necessarily wrong, not wrong at all, but they’re deeply incomplete.

As I watched the documentation and lengthy video produced by the killer, Robert “Robin” Westman, I had a strong feeling of déjà vu. When I worked in counterterrorism in the State Department, I would watch both the highly polished propaganda videos of terrorist groups like the Islamic State and also review the more personal, rawer content produced by individual extremists. I was always interested in the “whys” — the small, individual details of lives gone so deeply wrong.

All too often, casual observers would think that jihadists were made as a result of deep religious conviction, but that was not always true. It would sometimes be because of passions, or fervent but shallow stances — what one scholar has called “the cultural-emotional dimension” of jihadism.

Those who found Westman’s ravings as possibly demon-possessed or as proof of mental illness were likely not wrong. There is also plenty of content that was antisemitic, anti-Christian, anti-Trump, anti-everything else, a broad swath of other disturbing content in a variety of shades and hues — a laundry list of slogans, memes, hermetic symbols and sick jokes.

Westman had also identified as transgender (as had the killer of Christian children at the Covenant School in Nashville in March 2023), saying he was “tired of being trans” and that “I wish I never brainwashed myself.”

What this all brought to mind was the insight of “internet ethnographer” Katherine Dee writing after the mass shootings of children in an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school back in 2022.

For Dee, our late liberal civilization suffers from a built-in “nihilism problem” where, for many, neither civilization nor society nor family nor even life itself — their own or anyone else’s — has very much meaning. There is a deadly intent and malevolence, but also a shallow emptiness, a void. Dee says, “Yes, America has a mass shooting problem. But why? It is the why. The impenetrable darkness beneath all the bloodshed.”

A toxic mixture of leisure, boredom and narcissism — Dee’s “towering emptiness of the right now” — leads to ceaseless, exhausting quests for some sort of identity or purchase in what seems like a dissolving, adrift world. In Westman’s case, it may have been about sexual identity or an anti-Christian bias, but in other cases, it is something else. Right-wing or left-wing, religious or atheistic, straight or not, these young killers are not that different. They are more alike than not.

Westman reminded me of Corey Johnson of Jupiter, Florida, who as a 17-year-old in 2018 stabbed a 13-year-old to death and wounded two others. Johnson (now serving a life sentence) had been “radicalized online,” by himself — through watching Islamic State videos — and converted to Islam without seemingly ever interacting with a real-life Muslim.

Before his conversion, he had been infatuated with Hitler and Stalin, with white supremacists. He supported the Oklahoma City bombing (which took place five years before he was even born). At his murder trial in 2021, his lawyer described Corey as an “empty vessel looking to belong.” The empty vessel found some things to be filled with.

Like Westman, Corey was supposedly both depressed and driven, rife with beliefs that seemed both fervently held and shallow. They both embraced different versions of what they perceived to be the New Thing to be.

Generation Z adults like Westman and Johnson are the most medicated, anxious and (so far) least religious generation in history. And all of this darkness has been occurring now before we see the full parameters of a supposed brave new world emerging, where we will be even more connected to technology, where artificial intelligence promises to replace more jobs and disrupt more lives. We are already sick and adrift with the purposelessness of life, and we are told that the possibility of even more leisure, boredom and narcissism beckons.

A proper respect for — at least — the safety of one’s family and community should convict the Christian believer with the urgency and deep need for conversion in this fallen generation. We hear of an unexpected boomlet in Christian conversions recently, a so-called “quiet revival” among some young people, especially young men. It is, in a way, a very old story — “an evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.”

Minneapolis and Nashville and Uvalde and so many other places seem to call to us that we are in a race against time, and that a Church that often seems to move at a deliberate pace needs to have a much greater sense of urgency, purpose, creativity and conviction as we see the signs of the times.