c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ During a recent Bible study session I asked the members of my inmate congregation for their impressions of the shooting incident at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. As I have come to expect, their answers were both prescient and thought-provoking.

Several men, for example, were impressed by the courage of the students who died for their Christian beliefs. They were challenged by the martyrs’ example of faith under fire, wondering whether, given the violent conditions under which they live, a similar sacrifice might not be required of them.

Others were puzzled by the sense of shock many Littleton residents felt over the fact the shootings occurred there _ in an upper middle-class suburban community.”Where,”one brother asked,”are they supposed to happen?”This led to a discussion of the phenomena of”white flight”and”black flight,”and the social and spiritual implications of these demographic shifts on our culture.

For the men in my Bible study group, the discussion was part of an ongoing debate on what it means to”put legs to our faith.”For them, as for many of us on the outside, religious faith has traditionally been separated and compartmentalized from the rest of life.

As a result, concepts like integrity and morality are rarely, if ever, brought into dialogue with more personal issues like pain and need. Thus, at least theoretically, one can respond to his or her needs without the response being tempered by moral judgment.

Indeed, given the right conditions, even a person’s willingness to commit a crime may have less to do with morality than with opportunity and power. Thus, one may be moral philosophically and still commit heinous crimes. This is particularly true if the motivation to commit the crimes is based on what the person believes is a personal need.

Those of us who work in prisons see this line of thinking all the time. It is at work, for example, in the prison caste system, whereby inmates rationalize their own crimes while marginalizing and even physically attacking others because of their offenses.

For instance, a convicted murderer may dismiss his own transgression as an instance of self-defense while simultaneously repudiating a child molester. The fact that our murderer is a drug dealer who was”defending”himself in a turf war against another dealer is conveniently left out of the analysis.

The point is that all of us have a tendency to blame others for our problems while minimizing and rationalizing our own contribution.

Thus, we come to Littleton, where blame has been assigned to, among other things, Marilyn Manson and the National Rifle Association. Yet, notwithstanding the ungodly lyrics of Manson and the despicable policies of the NRA, they are reflections of our culture _ a culture we created.

If it is true _ and it is _ that our children also are the products of our culture, it is then true we are the makers of that culture. Every decision we make _ from whom we marry to where we work, to the community in which we live and the choices we make about school, religious faith and a hundred other issues, has an incremental but palpable effect on our society.

Thus, it is left for us to choose the kind of society we want to live in and pay the price necessary to realize it. But in order to achieve it, our morals and our actions must agree.

DEA END ATCHISON