Don't Pray for Me, Politicize Me

Does God help those who help themselves? Or does He only help white Republican politicians?

May 10, 2023

Welcome to Hollering with the Armadillo, the section of Home with the Armadillo wherein I (Andrea Grimes, a Texan writer/activist, if you’ve forgotten which newsletter you signed up for! It happens to me a lot!) publish essays, fiction, and various, well, hollerings. In this edition: I expound upon my Twitter thread unpacking the Dallas Morning News’ belated call for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to address gun violence when the paper has three times endorsed his candidacy for governor.

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In the wake of another mass shooting, this time at an affluent North Dallas suburban shopping mall, the Dallas Morning News editorial board made an impassioned call to Gov. Greg Abbott to address gun violence in Texas: “You must speak to the terrible imbalance that you and Republican leaders have created between the individual liberty of nearly unrestricted ownership of the most powerful rifles and guns versus the increasing decline in society’s ability to function without constant fear of violent death.”

These are righteous and correct words. They are also the words of an editorial board that has endorsed Greg Abbott for governor not once, not twice, but three times: in 2014, in 2018, and in October 2022. The October ‘22 Dallas Morning News editorial board’s endorsement of Greg Abbott came almost exactly five months to the day after nineteen children and two teachers were murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in a massacre that also wounded seventeen survivors. The attack was brutal in bare fact and made more terrifying by the “abject failure” of Texas Department of Public Safety officers to urgently respond to the scene.

What incentive, then, does Greg Abbott have to heed the Dallas Morning News editorial board’s call for him to address gun violence when he has thrice over enjoyed that same board’s endorsement despite doing nothing, year after year, to address gun violence? What incentive does Greg Abbott have to address gun violence when he has not just done nothing — indefensible in and of itself — but has instead led Texas Republicans in their efforts to make guns more accessible and available across the state?

To me, the incentives of limiting, rather than expanding, the availability of guns seems obvious. Gun control, a thing this state has never attempted and in fact rejected on even the barest level, has the potential to:

It feels positively and disgustingly mercenary to describe it this way, but might one gun control incentive be the possibility of preventing the murders of active participants in the thriving Texas economy from which Abbott has derived the substance of his endorsements from the Dallas Morning News editorial board? I speak, of course, of the 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart, and the shooting days ago at the Allen Premium Outlets.

If I were skeptical of or perhaps even offended by the mere suggestion that the widespread availability of guns — and especially of assault-style firearms — could conceivably in any way be related to incidences of mass gun violence, I might after some length of time — say, after three terms as the governor of a state wherein mass shootings were many times a year resulting in the deaths of dozens of Texans — start to wonder if it might not be worth just testing out the idea that guns and gun deaths are related. I might start to wonder if it might not seem like an interesting experiment to see what happens if, instead of more guns, fewer guns? Like just as a weird lark? If it seemed like whatever I was doing wasn’t saving children’s lives, I might be sort of open to wild-ass ideas like making the guns men use to mass-murder Texans less available to the men who mass-murder Texans?

But this is just how I think about this stuff. I’m a nobody weirdo. I’m just a person who has access to all of the same information that Greg Abbott has, but none of his access to political power. That’s the difference between me and Greg Abbott. I think: If it were me, I would try literally anything to keep Texas children from being massacred at school or at the mall over and over again on my watch, but I’m just looking at the statistics and the facts. If I were looking at letting Texas kids get massacred at school and at the mall over and over again on my watch, but it might mean I lose my cushy political job if I conduct some sort of bizarre, evidence-based experiment in stopping them from being massacred at school or the mall over and over again on my watch? I think I might sacrifice my cushy political job for other people’s actual lives.

Well, shit. That thought experiment sure doesn’t hold up.

The incentive of saving the lives of Texas children and their families is not now and has never been enough for Greg Abbott to support gun control. It wasn’t enough in 2014, in 2018, or in 2022. Gun violence is not new. It is only worsening. It is both laudable and laughable for the Dallas Morning News editorial board to have finally taken notice of this. Especially when the board is notably lagging behind other editorial boards at legacy newspapers across the state, which have repeatedly endorsed Abbott’s Democratic opponents — often on the grounds that those opponents have expressed a willingness to explore the mere idea of limiting access to firearms in the service of saving Texan lives.

What, then, is at the root of Greg Abbott’s rebuke of even the most meager gun control measures in lieu of the unchecked expansion of firearm ownership and “constitutional carry” in Texas, neither of which have resulted in “good guys” with guns saving lives? It cannot be a mere rebuke of widespread, peer-reviewed evidence that shows reducing access to guns reduces gun deaths. I loathe the man, but I do not think Greg Abbott is unable to put the statistical pieces together.

Instead, Greg Abbott has recognized something more valuable to him than the lives of massacred Texas children. He has mobilized something more meaningful to him than the lives of massacred churchgoers. He has weaponized something even more politically meaningful to him than the lives of Texas retail consumers.

Greg Abbott has rightly identified how to capture and capitalize on the lazy, self-interested goodwill of comfortable white people.

I don’t want to give Abbott too much credit for this. The idea that gun ownership (especially vis a vis a willful misreading of the Second Amendment, and especially with regard to assault-style weapons) is necessary for the protection of (implied, and sometimes explicitly white) middle-class American values and (usually explicitly white) “real” American families is much older than Abbott’s political career. He’s seizing the political narratives available to him, narratives developed by people smarter and wilier than he is or ever will be. Nevertheless, it has clearly paid dividends: the man wins, again and again and again.

What incentive, then, if not saving Texan lives? If the bodies of slaughtered Texans on the sidewalk outside the GAP or in the aisles of an El Paso Walmart are not enough? Why would a legacy newspaper editorial board, whose own news reporters are worn down and burnt out from covering mass shootings, repeatedly endorse a governor who has never lifted a single finger to address gun violence? Why would white people — who are the majority of Republican voters — whose own children and grandchildren and friends and family are as much at risk of being gunned down at the mall or church as anyone else’s, repeatedly elect politicians who issue naught but thoughts and prayers when Texans are preventably massacred in gun violence?

The answer is whiteness, and the perceived access to class mobility and political power that proximity to whiteness offers — especially the promise of unrestricted white gun ownership and the social control and political power that comes with it. I didn’t make this up because I’m a crazy liberal pundit, it’s historical fact. Decades ago, the flagging National Rifle Association recognized that it could rebuild itself as a political force by mobilizing against the threat of American multiculturalism and the prospect of equal rights for Black Americans in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement; it is now the top lobbying body behind America’s refusal to address gun violence. The NRA has very successfully obfuscated and diffused its goals; after all, doesn’t it seem like some tinfoil hat shit to blame one shadowy organization for widespread policy failure? But the receipts are plentiful.

Pro-gun politics are a proxy for white supremacist politics, and for all the promise encapsulated therein: legitimacy, prosperity, security, dominance. And any politics that are not an explicit rebuke of pro-gun politics are, by default or omission or ignorance, pro-gun politics. When people are dying by the dozens to gun violence in America and nowhere else, we must describe the enthusiastic support for unrestricted gun ownership and the casual or incidental support for policies and politicians who do not limit gun ownership in the same way: as pro-gun politics.

What is the incentive, then, for Republican voters to put their children in harm’s way? When I follow the question backward through the lens of white supremacy, I land on this: they must believe it is better for their children to die in a school shooting (statistically unlikely, if terrifying) than for their children to live in a world where white supremacist, pro-gun politics are challenged. Better, I guess, for white children to die than to live without the privileges of whiteness.

This odious prospect repulses me, and it is also why it’s important to name the whiteness and white supremacy at the heart of pro-gun politics, and for those of us who want to save lives to name our rebuke of same. Otherwise, those of us who are trying to do right — well-meaning people who feel helpless to do anything else, because voting and marching and dying en masse has not yet been enough — risk getting bogged down in debates about a particular politician’s motivations, or the specific evidence that does or does not support one or another kind of gun being available or restricted, or the benefits or not of making guns available to one group of people or another. Much like with abortion or trans rights, we concede a great deal of ground when we work to prove or disprove the particulars of policy rather than asserting the fundamental primacy of our values around bodily autonomy, public safety, and public health. (Witness: the diversion of gun violence conversations into mealy-mouthed nonsense about “mental health,” about which none of these fuckos are doing a single thing, either.)

It is equally important but perhaps harder, I think, to acknowledge the tandem role that both mainstream and evangelical American Christianity (to the extent they are different, which is debatable) plays in the construction of white, pro-gun politics. I was prepared, when I first conceptualized this essay the day after the Allen shooting, to make this connection through Republican politicians’ predictable deployment of “thoughts and prayers” language, but in fact Greg Abbott did me one better by going to church himself. The church he chose? Cottonwood Creek in Allen, where the pastor is a former (as of January) Republican Texas House representative, and who, in the wake of the Allen shooting, called on the congregation to applaud the governor and other Republican politicians in attendance for how hard this whole thing must be for them.

Later in the service, according to a report from the Texas Observer, the Cottonwood Creek church ejected a couple of congregants who asked “What about gun laws?”

If the question of who is responsible for gun laws has no place in a church that worships an all-knowing and merciful God who sometimes allows children to be murdered en masse for unpreventable and mysterious reasons, where does it belong? Not, one assumes, with the politicians at the church whose congregants are being encouraged to applaud those politicians for their service supporting gun ownership?

This feigned, Christ-fueled helplessness in the face of actionable solutions is enraging. I don’t care if it’s not a “fair” representation of American Christianity, it is a popular and mainstream and Fox News-perpetuated representation of Christianity, and as much as the onus is on Republican voters to clean their act up if they don’t want to be perceived as bigoted assholes, it is on those same people to clean up their churches’ passivity around gun violence and a host of other attacks visited on marginalized people in God’s name.

I skimmed the Twitter responses to the Dallas Morning News tweet of their editorial board’s call for Greg Abbott to address gun violence, and a theme emerged among pro-gun folks: sometimes bad things just happen, because evil people (immigrants) do evil things, and probably they are crazy, and laws won’t ever stop them. Believe in Allen Republican Congressman Keith Self’s God or not, neither he nor his Almighty give a fuck! As he told the New York Post: “Those are people that don’t believe in an almighty God who is absolutely in control of our lives. I’m a Christian. I believe that he is. … Today we should be focused on the families. Prayers are important. Prayer is powerful in the lives of those people who are devastated right now.”

I don’t dispute that prayer is powerful for those who find it a comfort; I count my agnostic self among them. But I absolutely dispute the premise that humans are helpless to resist the capricious will of a God who is “absolutely in control” of whether entire families get shot fucking dead at the mall by a white supremacist who faced no barriers to obtaining the weapons he needed to commit his crime.

Does God help those who help themselves? Or does He only help white Republican politicians? Where is the line between personal responsibility — which the American right wing loves to crow about — and the wholesale rebuke of responsibility for every individual who has voted for the Greg Abbotts and Dan Patricks and Ted Cruzes and John Cornyns and Keith Selfs of the world to pull their heads out of their asses and save their own goddamned lives? Or for a Dallas Morning News editorial board that champions economic success over the lives of Texans, in the service of obfuscating the motivations behind pro-gun politics?

Who is responsible when the most powerful people and institutions can never be held responsible, because they said so?

Whiteness is like that, though, isn’t it? Who can say why bad things happen, when the bad things mostly enrich affluent folks, or empower white folks, and folks who aspire to whiteness? Isn’t it interesting that the problems with no solutions are problems whose solutions might benefit poor folks, or folks of color, or women, queer folks, or trans folks? Isn’t it interesting that an Almighty American Christian God has nothing to offer us besides appreciation for our prayers? Isn’t it strange that the God who listens to the prayers of the Cottonwood Creek church is omniscient and all-loving when Republican politicians gather to applaud themselves, but has to rely on church security to prevent Him from hearing the cries of people desperate for justice?

I know to whom I cry out when I am desperate for justice: the people who are in a position to do something about injustice. That’s why I try to vote in every election, no matter how politically piddly. It’s why I donate to grassroots organizations and volunteer my time for candidates and causes I believe could make change. It’s why I am tired of hearing that the most powerful people in the world, people who claim to have the ear of the literal Creator of the world, can’t do anything besides pray for change.

If I die by gun violence, don’t pray for me. Politicize me.