Reaction to July 13, 2024

I am a history teacher by training and experience.  Over my years teaching the important dates of history, I would tell my students there are certain dates that should be part of our common memory – 1066, 1215, July 4, 1776, December 7, 1941, etc.

One of my history professors called dates such as these as ‘watershed’ dates.  He explained these were dates in which the course of events was changed so dramatically as to never be the same.

Let us look at a couple of those.  After the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, world history was changed dramatically with the ushering in of the American experiment and the birth of our United States.  This event, however, was not simply about the creation of a new country – that has happened many times throughout history.  Rather, this was about a unique and fundamentally different view of how a country should operate and be governed.

Early in my teaching career, I was compelled to add to that list of culturally relevant dates my students had to memorize with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  Again, after those events, life was unalterably changed not only here but throughout the world.  Students of today do not know a world without tighter airport security and many spent their entire formative years with their country at war.  For me, I joined the US Navy Reserve and found a second career and a renewed determination to serve my country that lasted for twenty-one years and two overseas deployments, including to Afghanistan.

I was still young when President Reagan was shot in 1981.  I remember the shootings of both Representative Giffords in Arizona and Representative Scalise outside of Washington, D.C. over the past few years.

That brings me to this past weekend and the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. 

Perhaps it is because our political rhetoric is so divisive or that we lived through the violence of the summer of 2020, but I remain unconvinced the rhetoric will subside for long.

So, what is our response to the near assassination of a former president who is also the leading candidate of a major political party?  We certainly can, should, and will ask questions about security, the shooter, responses, etc.  I have watched and read a great deal of these over the past few days and will continue to do so.  Both our current president and the former president have spoken about unity.  While that is good and noble, we will always have our disagreements about policy, philosophy of governing, and direction of the country, but my hope remains we can do so with civility and a common love for this country.

I will leave much of that to the political pundits.  My role is as a teacher.  I am faced with the question of what will I say and how will I and my colleagues teach our students when they return to school?  What do we tell them about our age of such vitriol?  How do we let them know that the importance of our founding documents and their beauty is not limited simply to the ancient past, but should be what we continue to strive for daily as a nation?  How do we “form a more perfect Union” in such times?

For those of us in the classical Christian education movement, we have a myriad of answers.  We look back to the ancients and to the great thinkers of Christianity.  We look to the words of Jesus Himself who promises us a kingdom that is not of this world.

We hope to show our students that faith and reason can not only coexist (not in the way of those bad bumper stickers mind you), but that the best of Athens and Jerusalem lead us to a greater understanding of our role as Christians in a world that rejects in so many ways what we hold most dear.

Cicero, the great Roman statesman, once noted:

“What greater or better gift can we bring the republic, than to teach and refine the young?”

Our charge is to point our students to Jesus Christ, “the author and perfector of our faith” and to remind them our time here is but momentary.  While we are here, though, we have responsibilities as citizens of our country and to take up our mantle as well-informed and active citizens.  We are to stand firm in our convictions, to share our beliefs, and to disagree in a civil fashion.  This does not imply we ‘give in’ or simply roll over – not at all.  We are called to higher things and we reflect our Lord in all we do, say, etc.

How then do we react to this heinous assassination attempt?  While I don’t wish to raise Donald Trump to a height any other than as a political leader, his determination in the immediate aftermath (note the now famous picture) should be our stance.  We stand firm and we realize what he realized – we are only given so much time here on earth and we are called to make a difference and to show Christ’s love while defending our faith in the midst of oppression.

July 13, 2024.  Another date to the list of those culturally relevant.  I pray it is one that will shape not only the life of this one man, but of our nation to return back to who we really are supposed to be.