The Militancy and Idolatry of America

            The United States of America is a nation that was built upon the gun. It began as a uniquely American culture that was built on the foundations of manifest destiny, imperialism, and the American Dream. These notions have only ever held true for a small proportion of Americans, namely wealthy white men. Others have also attained these mercurial holy grails, but only in small drops, as the floodgates have always been open exclusively to wealthy white men. For at the same time these ideals that fed into patriotism and being a “good” American were laid as tracks into American earth, the parallel track of the Trail of Tears, slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws, and systemic racism was also being laid down as a foundation. These twin tracks were both laid down, one of patriotism and the “good” American, and the other of violence and submission, to lead to the almighty gun. Just as various peoples of different faiths worship in a particular direction, the American faith is one that worships in the direction of the gun. This idolatry manifests itself both as an internal culture that has its members in the highest echelons of American power, and as a foreign policy that always aims to use this culture to obtain its interests abroad.

            American culture is one built upon using the almighty gun for all purposes. Most of these purposes do not need nor require even an inkling of the idea of using violence to achieve them. Even if it has been shown that violence does not solve the problem, the American reaction is to continually try to fix it with an ever-increasing amount of violence. There is no maximum amount of violence that leads to a rethinking of problem-solving in the American faith. Every solution to every problem is to add more violence. This is demonstrated in various facets of American life. First and foremost; policing. Various and numerous studies show that in most cases, problems are not solved by armed police officers. In fact, those problems usually become more exacerbated as a result, and sometimes lead to the death of innocents. Policing is used disproportionately against Black and Brown Americans, and for people of color, the police are more of a threat than a symbol of protection. And that is for understandable reasons. There’s a long list of non-white people who have been killed by police officers without any logical or warranted purpose, besides that of the daily re-entrenching of the powers that be through the medium of violence. American gun worship has always been the main way of putting the fear of God in those who are not deemed to be worthy of power. Throughout time, this curtain of exclusivity has had moments where non-whites, or women, have made it to the side of power by either worshiping the gun or getting lucky, but in its totality, the curtain has held throughout time and in most incidents.

            Before the more modern phenomena of this specific form of policing, there was of course, the genocides of Native Americans and slavery. The targeting of non-whites through the gun helped to create this nation. American society and institutions were quite literally built on the backs of those who were forced to do manual labor under threat of the gun. If their value was not appreciated, they were slaughtered en masse. If their value was appreciated, they were worked literally to death. After slavery was abolished, Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan continued to use their worship of the gun to keep those who should not cross the curtain under control. The romanticized images of the cowboy and the Wild West are all about gun worship and the idolatry around it. Such images exemplified different ways of worshiping the gun, and if one did not support it, or was not allowed access to it due to their race or gender, then they were liable to enduring and suffering under the wrath of the gun.

            It is no surprise, then, that the United States has, by far, the most guns per 100 residents out of every country on earth. As of 2017, there were 120.5 guns per 100 U.S. residents. The next most gun-washed country on the planet was Yemen, with 52.8 guns per 100 residents. This gun idolatry also seeps into U.S. foreign policy. The United States accounts for 36% of all global arms sales, well ahead of second-place Russia’s 21% and third-place France’s 7.9%. The U.S. supplies arms to a whopping 96 countries, with Saudi Arabia alone receiving 24% of the total U.S. arms exports.

            The United States is a unique case in which the worship of guns seeps into every facet of American life, both domestically and internationally. To live in the United States is to know that most of its leaders are idolaters. The worship of the gun is used as a tool to keep those who are not wealthy, white men out of power. The recent changes that took place more recently are superficial changes. Remedial touches that only play around with what’s on the surface. Arming the police with military-grade weaponry only serves those who are already in power. As was just seen in Uvalde, Texas, the police there did not enter the school to stop the shooter. They have, however, killed George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and many more. And every single one of them was a Black American who was not a threat.

            The worship of the gun on the international stage means that the United States readily and willingly arms nations in all corners of the earth, and that increasing armaments is the only acceptable foreign policy. The worship of the gun means that the goal of U.S. foreign policy in every nation it goes to is to ensure that the same American wealthy, white men leading the United States also lead the world. It is through the threat and the use of violence that other nations are forced to bend to the United States’ will. One does not need to look back hundreds of years ago, although one can. In truth, one merely needs to look back to Iraq and Vietnam. More recently, the selling of weapons to Ukraine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, among others,  is to try to ensure that those nations receiving American aid beckon to its call by using those weapons to stop other countries like Iran and Russia from interfering with the United States’ goals. The threat of force and violence remains prescient in all corners of the earth.

It is the spilling of blood and the threat of violence that inevitably leads its worshippers down this path. The killing of children both in the United States and abroad is an obvious consequence of the worship of the gun. It is a culture that is deeply embedded in all avenues of American life, and a blight and a cancer that cannot be easily removed. The only way an idolater can escape from the bind of worship is to leave his false god behind completely and fully. America was built on the foundation of gun worship, and so, it will take much more than the slow and awful drumbeat of slaughter for it to find another path. It must consciously and fervently decide that it will stop its idolatry and its worship of the gun. It must cast away all such evils and begin anew.