Falwell's damage and our response

I, like many people of faith, am reeling from Jerry Falwell Jr.’s proclamations to his student body. Falwell encouraged the students of Liberty University (there are more than 100,000 of them) to arm themselves against Muslim terrorists.

His rhetoric reminded me of a bumper sticker I see here in Tennessee: “Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.”

I went to a Bible school, where students sometimes imagined that they were the good people and everyone else was a bad person. It was a warped view, for sure. But at least we just passed out tracts and tried to get the "bad people" to repeat the “sinner’s prayer” after us. We didn’t have a college president packing heat in his back pocket, providing free gun training courses, and inciting us to “end those Muslims before they walked in.” Falwell has since clarified that he meant Muslim terrorists, but that’s a very big and telling omission to make as you fire up a hundred thousand young people to arm themselves and kill.

There are the obvious interfaith concerns with this. We work across faithful traditions, because we know that our holy wars have been far from holy. I hope and pray that in the days to come, there will be many voices encouraging love and peace toward our one billion Muslim neighbors.