School Shootings, Tennis & a Lack of Christian Faith

The way I see it, school shootings, tennis and a lack of traditional Christian faith are all related.  Let me explain.

This week I watched a TV show about the legendary Australian tennis player Margaret Court.  Forty years ago she was diagnosed with a heart condition and doctors believed she would have a very short life.  After much prayer she claims she was miraculously healed.  Court entered the ministry.  Many people who’ve encountered her make the same arguments for healing.  Court is also a believer in scripture and traditional roles for men and women.

This angers some of her former rivals.  Some of whom are lesbians.  They’re demanding Court’s name be taken down from a tennis arena in Australia.  If not, the two retired players are demanding the arena be boycotted.  Court believes God can heal homosexual attraction.  Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova argue there’s nothing in need of healing.

The thing is, Court isn’t wrestling down lesbians and dragging them into church for forced conversions.  The player turned preacher doesn’t mind people of same-sex attraction coming to her services.  If homosexuals leave without a change in behavior nobody denounces them and there’s no effort to ostracize them or call them names or to shout they’re going to hell.

A reporter interviewing Court suggested her views were out-of-touch, archaic and out-of-bounds.  The former tennis star replied the Word was 2-thousand-years-old and would remain long after we’re all dead.  In a voice over segment of the program the narrator explains she demanded to see some of the sexually converted but none were made available.  This is made to sound sinister but is there a possibility members of the flock don’t want the public grief visited upon their pastor?

Court is apparently supposed to renounce the Bible, proclaim homosexuality a public good and climb into bed with Billie Jean to prove a newfound enlightenment.  All because Reverend Court has a different set of beliefs, harms no one and is willing to be spat upon by media, her former peers and any corporate entities offering endorsement deals.  And she’s the bad guy?

O.K., how is this related to school shootings?  This morning I was reading a column written by a traditional Roman Catholic.  Pat Buchanan explains mass shootings were rare in the America of his youth 60-years-ago.  The 1950s are considered racist, stifling and backward by all the “right people”.  Buchanan is considered a cultural dinosaur or worse, evil, by the new conformity and, yet.  The really evil people, the ones killing innocents by the dozens are often the products of broken childhoods. They grew up without religious formation.  The so-called oppression of a judgmental deity is nowhere to be found in the detritus of their lives.

The genie isn’t going back into the bottle.  Court, Buchanan and their kind truly are a dying species.  Tell me how the world will be a better place when they’re gone?