With Robb Elementary added to Buffalo Tops in a week’s time, we have a furious pair of examples of untreated lawlessness and violence in America.

Where is the Church in all of this?

The Church has long preached on the importance of a higher law for its own members, but seems less interested in working to enforce even minimum standards for lawful order in the broader community.

The Christian Church is justifiably focused on easing the burdens of its own members, given its early and continuing history of mistreatment. But what good is peace and salvation for one’s own tribe in the chapel, if one’s neighbors and their children suffer in unmitigated violence in other local sacred spaces like schools?

Staying out of pressing community matters like gun violence is taking separation of church and state too far.

That hallowed concept refers to preventing the state from running the church, and the church from running the state. That is not the problem here. It is clearly possible for good church members to be a force for lawful standards in the community as well.

Why is this not happening?