Mass Murder, Mental Illness and Spiritual Vacuousness

Laura Ingraham

I listened to a guest (sorry, I do not recall her name) on The Ingraham Angle (Fox News) explain how a mass murderer "might not necessarily be mentally ill" (paraphrased). Possibly because her guest was highly credentialed, Laura Ingraham did not challenge her guest's assertion that only about 25% of all mass murderers suffer from mental illness. And therein, folks, lies but one of the many reasons why we cannot get our act together to combat mass murders: Those who would define mental illness are themselves gripped by a kind of mental illness. They seek to normalize mass murderers because they cannot bring themselves to classify anyone as other than normal.

Connor Betts and sister he murdered.

Raise your hand if you agree with the following statement: "All murderers, by definition, are mentally ill." I hope you raised your hand, because by definition, that is a true statement.

What the mental health experts almost universally fail to address in the guns-mental health argument is the connection between mental illness and spiritual vacuousness. People who are sick in the head almost always are sick in the heart first. They lead empty and purposeless lives. They have a low, or no, spiritual IQ. They don't understand the significance of their own lives, much less that of human life in general. Why that might be deserves our attention. 

Most mass murderers are at least twenty years in the making. To become a society that experiences mass murders as frequently as the United States, however, takes longer. Arguably, we have been in a headlong rush to become such a society at least since the mid-1850's, and realistically from the moment our nation was born.

I don't know that we are capable of an open and honest self-assessment of how we got here and how long it took, and I suspect that it might take a long time to turn it around (though it need not), but I do know that things won't get better until the pendulum swings back toward our once again becoming, for the most part, a God-fearing country. If that is something that the majority of us simply will not tolerate, then we must be willing to accept ever-increasing violence and social disintegration in America.
One task of the Church, hand-in-glove with the command to share the Gospel, is to set the ethical and moral tenor of society. The role of the government is to get out of the Church's way. Right now, neither Church or Government is fulfilling its proper role.

And did you notice? Not once did I mention guns, or any symptom of our national mental and spiritual illness. Symptoms are not the illness, and methods are not the madness. Only by addressing the spiritual illness that leads to the mental illness that leads to mass murder will we make real progress.