The most sacred way to use our faith today is to imagine a world where nonviolence is the standard. Certainly, it can feel foolish to envision such a reality, as steeped in violence as our culture is. It would take every inch of our spiritual discipline to hold that line, but what better use of those disciplines is there?

There are tangible ways to start, and even more importantly, there are real people to look to in our communities today for faithful intervention: our nation’s children–and particularly Black children. But to do that, we have to collectively stop treating each incidence of violence, the violence we’ve so normalized living in the United States, as one-off occurrences. We have to examine the culture that enables the violence as a whole.

That is exactly what our latest white paper, Community Violence: Violence and Depreciating Resources in Communities, does. It contextualizes our climate of normalized violence, including our preoccupation with guns and incarceration.

“… To survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.”

James Baldwin

We cannot tolerate a reality where Black children are 17x more likely to die from gun violence than white children. We must protect children, defend and treasure children, as our faiths demand, by disavowing the cultures of violence that our world is accustomed to.

At The Expectations Project, we are confronting the stripping of our faithful imaginations by the culture of violence our nation’s government has projected onto us and the world. There’s no easy way to start conceptualizing better. We all just have to decide together that we are done tolerating the harm. 

What better place to start than with our children?