The biblical warning that “surely your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23) carries particular weight when I think about America’s contemporary struggle with violence, especially the epidemic of school shootings, murder and recent political violence, including the shooting of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk. Violence is a defining characteristic of modern American life.
In 2024, there were 330 school shooting incidents recorded in K-12 schools in the United States. This represents not merely a statistical tragedy but the culmination of violent tendencies woven into the very fabric of American identity from its inception.
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in War and the American Difference, makes the provocative claim that “war (let’s call it violence) defines American political identity.” He writes, “America depends on war (violence) for its identity.”
This dependence on violence as a foundational element extends far beyond military conflicts to permeate domestic society. It shows up in the normalization of firearms and the glorification of armed conflict. Most tragically, it appears in the regularity with which American children endure gun violence in their schools and political figures confront violence anywhere they are accessible.
The roots of this violence can be traced back to the nation’s founding.
America’s birth was predicated upon three foundational violences: the systematic displacement and genocide of Native American populations, the revolutionary war that severed colonial ties through armed rebellion, and the institutionalization of slavery that reduced human beings to property through the threat and reality of brutal force.
Each of these founding violences established patterns of problem-solving through force that continue to echo through American culture today.
Native Americans
The displacement of Native Americans represented perhaps the most comprehensive violence in American history. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny provided moral cover for what amounted to continental ethnic cleansing, establishing the precedent that American expansion and prosperity could legitimately come at the expense of others’ lives and livelihoods.
This violence was not incidental to American development but essential to it. It created a national mythology that celebrated the conquest of the “frontier” while systematically erasing the humanity of those who stood in the way.
The Heritage of Revolution
The American Revolution (for which my dog, Revolution, is named), while celebrated as a noble fight for freedom, nonetheless established violence as the ultimate arbiter of political disputes. The revolutionaries’ resort to arms against the British crown created a cultural template that viewed armed resistance as both legitimate and heroic when directed against perceived tyranny.
This revolutionary heritage contributes to contemporary American gun culture’s insistence that an armed citizenry serves as the final check against governmental overreach, even as this same armament facilitates domestic violence on an unprecedented scale.
Chattel Slavery
Slavery represented perhaps the most intimate and sustained violence in American history. It reached into every aspect of enslaved persons’ lives while undergirding the economic prosperity of both Southern plantations and Northern industry.
The violence of slavery was not merely physical but psychological, social and cultural. It was designed to break human spirits and reduce persons to property.
This systematic dehumanization required an extensive apparatus of control, surveillance and punishment that established patterns of racialized violence that persist long after slavery’s formal abolition.
Unsafe at School
2022 was one of the deadliest years for school shootings, with 47 fatalities, including the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two educators were killed. These contemporary tragedies cannot be understood apart from America’s violent heritage.
The same cultural DNA that sanctified violence against Native Americans, celebrated armed rebellion and normalized the brutalization of enslaved persons now manifests in a society where 221 school shooting injuries (not counting the shooters) occurred in 2024 alone.
Hauerwas argues that Americans have developed what might be called a “liturgy of war”—ritual practices and cultural narratives that make violence not merely acceptable but sacred. This liturgy sanctifies violence when directed toward approved ends, creating a moral framework that simultaneously condemns individual violence while celebrating collective violence.
The same society that mourns school shooting victims also maintains military expenditures that dwarf those of other nations and celebrates a gun culture that treats firearms ownership as both a constitutional right and a cultural identity.
The statistical reality of American school violence stands as stark testimony to this violent heritage. The largest number of K-12 school shootings was recorded in 2023, at 349 incidents, representing an average of nearly one school shooting per day. These numbers reflect not merely individual pathology but systematic cultural dysfunction rooted in America’s foundational embrace of violence as a problem-solving mechanism.
Generational Reaping
The biblical warning that sins will find us out suggests divine justice operating through historical consequences. America’s founding violence against Native Americans, through revolutionary war, and via slavery established cultural patterns that continue to bear bitter fruit.
The children who die in school shootings are, in a tragic sense, paying the price for sins committed generations before their birth—sins that American society has never fully acknowledged, repented from or sought to remedy.
Contemporary American society remains deeply invested in the mythologies that justify its founding violences. Native American displacement is remembered as “westward expansion,” the brutalities of slavery are minimized or relegated to distant history, and revolutionary violence is celebrated as the birth of freedom.
These sanitized narratives prevent the honest reckoning that might interrupt the cycle of violence.
Hauerwas challenges both religious and secular readers to “rethink the ground of their own commitment to a politics built on violent sacrifice,” suggesting that American political identity itself depends upon the willingness to sacrifice lives—whether of enemies abroad or children at home—to maintain existing power structures.
Until Americans confront the violent foundations of their national identity and develop alternative ways of resolving conflicts and organizing society, the sins of the fathers will continue to visit the children in increasingly tragic ways.
The epidemic of school shootings and political violence represents not an aberration in American society, but its logical culmination. A nation built upon violence, sustained by violence, and committed to violence as the ultimate problem-solving mechanism should not be surprised when that violence turns inward upon its most vulnerable members.
Surely, our sins have found us out, and they bear the faces of children who will never come home from school.
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Speaker, Enneagram theorist, author and coach. Sean is the Teaching Pastor at Ecclesia Houston.
