The Covenant School Shooter and the Religion of Openness
How the Nashville Shooting was a religious exercise almost 100 years in the making
It took a little over seven months, but we finally have some answers regarding Audrey Hale’s motives for murdering six people, including three kids, at The Covenant School in Nashville back in March. They included what many people suspected; a bunch of anti-white rhetoric, relishing in the thought that she was going to kill “yellow-mopped” little rich kids with their “White privilege.”
The fact that she chose to target a Christian School as well, especially considering her identity as a transgender, speaks volumes. But this hatred didn’t just spontaneously foment inside her, this was clearly a learned hatred, the result of years of indoctrination.
I am reminded of a tweet I saw recently from some sort of “intellectual,” who made the argument that the kids aren’t being brainwashed by universities, they are just learning new things from other points of view for the first time now that they are outside their parent’s “sheltered bubble.”
My initial response was that he was wrong; that I could prove they were being brainwashed because they were going into school believing one thing, and coming out believing things never before believed in human history, and preaching them with the fervor of an apostle! This is not because a bunch of people from various backgrounds got together and somehow discovered the patchwork truth; it’s because they created an “anti-reality-reality” out of whole cloth. How is that not brainwashing?
But as it turns out, I was the wrong one.
See, students aren’t entering universities and coming out believing things no one has ever believed, rather, they are coming out believing ancient pagan teachings that were defeated by Christendom and the West centuries ago, just updated with modern language. So yes, people like Audrey Hale and other radicals are being brainwashed, and they are being seduced by the false religions of old; LGBTQIA+, “My Body, My Choice,” Critical Race Theory, and a host of other antiquated pagan beliefs repackaged to be the new hotness. We’ve all known that schools were a mess for the last fifteen to twenty years, but how did we go down the slippery slope so fast?
We didn’t.
Prof. Allan Bloom in his remarkable book The Closing of the American Mind, opens with a vital observation; if you are a professor in higher education, you can be sure that students will come in already having had their foundation for absolute truth completely eroded, so that the very idea of its existence is seen as an absurdity:
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every
student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is
relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students'
reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the
proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling
into question 2 + 2=4 . These are things you don't think about. The
students' backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are
religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right…They are
unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the
two are related in a moral intention…(pp. 25)
So according to Prof. Bloom, it doesn’t matter what a student’s background or upbringing is. Almost counterintuitively, they pretty much all seem to enter university thinking absolute truth is just about as crazy as believing the earth is flat. But there is a word there we need to pay attention to, “entering;” meaning this point of view isn’t learned IN higher education, no, the indoctrination begins long before. Bloom continues:
They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the
modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the
traditional American grounds for a free society…The danger they have been
taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is
necessary to openness and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary
education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. (pp. 25)
Fifty. Years. This has been going on in all education, at every level, for fifty years. Except for one thing. Bloom’s book was written in 1987, three years before I was born, meaning that we can take those fifty years and add another thirty-six to them. You want to know how we got here, “so fast?” It’s because it’s the culmination of (at least) eighty-six years’ worth of societal undermining; the destruction of all that is good, true, and beautiful at an educational level.
Now, maybe this is an overreaction; perhaps I’m seeing similarities and drawing wild conclusions. Prof. Bloom answers this objection only a few lines later:
The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture
teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were
right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and
chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right;
rather it is not to think you are right at all. The students, of course, cannot
defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been
indoctrinated. The best they can do is point out all the opinions and cultures
there are and have been.
What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the
others? If I pose the routine questions designed to confute them and make
them think, such as, "If you had been a British administrator in India, would
you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral
of a man who had died?," they either remain silent or reply that the British
should never have been there in the first place. It is not that they know very
much about other nations, or about their own. The purpose of their education
is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue—
openness. (pp. 26)
Doesn’t this sound like it could have been written in 2023? Yet, it was written over three decades ago.
The religion of openness - and it is a religion - has dispensed with the “old way” of doing things in America and the West, and even what it means to be an American or Westerner. Bloom points out that we used to recognize and accept every man’s natural rights, and it was this that brought us unity and a sense of similarity. Yes, there were differences in race, sex, religion, class, etc., but all those things could still be recognized without destroying the common interests and brotherhood of what it meant to be an American.
The recent education of openness has rejected all that. It pays no
attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which
are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive…There is no
enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. But when there are
no shared goals or vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer
possible? (pp. 27)
Remember back in 2020, when during the summer of lockdown, exceptions were made for those who - in the name of racial justice - were destroying historical statues of anything they deemed to be “racist” or in any way problematic? Not only were statues of confederates torn down, but so were statues and monuments to the Founders, even ones who were anti-slavery. Christopher Columbus, discoverer of our nation? He wasn’t safe either. It seems every October we keep reliving the same arguments over history. Why? Openness.
But openness, nevertheless, eventually won out over natural rights,
partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion
against nature's last constraints. Civic education turned away from con-
centrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history
and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the
Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a
greater openness to the new. (pp. 29)
Of course, much of this degradation of the principles that made America great, and what made it America to begin with, was helped along during the reign of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when the religion of openness seized on actual problems and twisted them to fit the advancement of their deconstructive tendencies:
Franklin Roosevelt declared that we want "a society which leaves
no one out." Although the natural rights inherent in our regime are
perfectly adequate to the solution of this problem, provided these outsid-
ers adhere to them (i.e., they become insiders by adhering to them), this
did not satisfy the thinkers who influenced our educators, for the right to
vote and the other political rights did not automatically produce social
acceptance.
The equal protection of the laws did not protect a man from contempt and
hatred as a Jew, an Italian, or a Black. The reaction to this problem was, in the
first place, resistance to the notion that outsiders had to give up their
"cultural" individuality and make themselves into that universal, abstract
being who participates in natural rights or else be doomed to an existence on
the fringe…Openness was designed to provide a respectable place for these
"groups" or "minorities"— to wrest respect from those who were not disposed
to give it… (pp. 30-31)
If this sounds all too familiar, it should. While we still have vehement political battles over the Black experience in America, and anti-Semitism has been on the rise around the world, as well as here at home, it would be fair to say that in the minds of many “an Italian” has been replaced by “a member of the LGBTQIA+ community” as the minority in need of more than just laws of equal protection; they need respect and acceptance as well. But of course, simple acceptance was never the goal, and from acceptance sprouted the demand for affirmation of their sexual identities and predilections, especially if it meant destroying the societal principles and foundations that anchor us to reality, by holding their natures in check. Again, Prof. Bloom:
Sexual adventurers like Margaret Mead and others who found America too
narrow told us that not only must we know other cultures and learn
to respect them, but we could also profit from them. We could follow
their lead and loosen up, liberating ourselves from the opinion that our
taboos are anything other than social constraints. We could go to the
bazaar of cultures and find reinforcement for inclinations that are repressed
by puritanical guilt feelings. All such teachers of openness had either no
interest in or were actively hostile to the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution. (pp. 33)
By its very nature, the religion of openness requires sacrifice, perhaps even its own twisted version of penal substitutionary atonement, like a dark side bastardization of Christianity; but instead of Christ dying as a substitute for the sins of others, history, tradition, and truth must die to atone for the sins - real or perceived - of the past. Once accomplished, however, the atonement doesn’t last. No longer, as Bloom writes, are American heroes like “Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lincoln and so on—all of whom contributed to equality” honored for their achievements, albeit imperfect. Instead, they are castigated as part of the reason there can be no peace in our day. What’s worse, is the religion of openness knows its true enemy is the only other religion that can provide an alternative answer; Christianity and the biblical principles this nation was founded on were something that held us as a people together, and so, go they must.
Thus, openness has driven out the local deities, leaving only the
speechless, meaningless country…Students now arrive at the university
ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to
be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it. The other element of
fundamental primary learning that has disappeared is religion. As the respect
for the Sacred—the latest fad—has soared, real religion and knowledge of the
Bible have diminished to the vanishing point… (pp. 56)
…The Lord's Prayer we mumbled in grade school when I was
a child affected us less than the Pledge of Allegiance we also recited…Moses
and the Tables of the Law, Jesus and his preaching of brotherly love, had an
imaginative existence. Passages from the Psalms and the Gospels echoed in
children's heads. Attending church or synagogue, praying at the table, were a
way of life…There was no abstract doctrine. The things one was supposed to
do, the sense that the world supported them and punished disobedience, were
all incarnated in the Biblical stories. (pp. 57)
But it was more than just religion disappearing in schools that contributed to our problems, oh sure we no longer taught the positive virtues of the Christian faith in the classroom, nor allowed prayer in schools - which I assure you was all part of the plan - but you would think that this would be counteracted by such instruction in church and by the family. But what many who were blissfully unaware as to what the old gods were doing under the guise of openness failed to realize, was that this contagion had infected those spheres as well. It makes sense as it is not within the nature of people to be constantly vigilant in their duties, especially in a fallen world and when experiencing “easy times” of growth, prosperity, and leisure. When a society becomes too comfortable, it loses its grip on the rope very easily.
The loss of the gripping inner life vouchsafed those who were nurtured by the
Bible must be primarily attributed not to our schools or political life, but to the
family, which, with all its rights to privacy, has proved unable to maintain
any content of its own. The dreariness of the family's spiritual landscape
passes belief. The delicate fabric of the civilization into which the successive
generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated. (pp. 57)
That last line from Allan Bloom really hits home for me, “children are raised, not educated.” It implies that simply raising a child is not enough and that education begins in the home. How does Proverbs 22:6 go again? “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” To train is to build up and become strong in whatever it is you are training for, and when you fail to do that spiritually in the home, then send your children to be taught the antithesis of it in school for over a decade of their formative years, we shouldn’t be surprised when the results are catastrophic and contribute to societal implosion.
Bloom elaborates that this was happening in families that were happy and whole, where “husband and wife like each other and care about their children, very often unselfishly devoting the best parts of their lives to them.” The problem is that even in these seemingly idyllic families, the true meaning of what God designed family to be, died. The family, Bloom says, “requires a certain authority and wisdom about the ways of the heavens and of men” and that “ritual and ceremony are now often said to be necessary for the family, and they are now lacking.”
Remember, this was being said of families in 1987, and if it was true then, how much more weight do those words carry for us today? Even anecdotally, my own family suffered similarly; my father initially tried to get us to do Bible studies as a family, but grew increasingly frustrated and dropped it because I as a young child was less than cooperative or enthusiastic. I do not bring this up to shame my late dad but rather to use it as an illustration because in many ways I still feel the effects of this lapse in judgment to this day. Back to Bloom:
When that belief disappears, as it has, the family has, at best, a transitory
togetherness. People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do
not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever,
let alone one that informs the vital interests of life…The cause of this decay of
the family's traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that
of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even
could, contain the truth. So books have become, at best, "culture," i.e., boring.
As Tocqueville put it, in a democracy tradition is nothing more than
information. With the "information explosion," tradition has become
superfluous. As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is
dead, something to which lip service is paid in the vain hope of edifying the
kids. (pp. 57-58)
The greatest of these old books is, of course, the Bible; and we have seen here in 2023 even more so than Allan Bloom would have in 1987 the absolute rejection of it as authoritative, even by many professed Christians. Gallup noted last year that a record low of only 20% of Americans view the Bible as the literal word of God, to whittle that number down even more, 16% of supposed Christians say the Bible is just an ancient book of fables. Now you can judge the reliability of Gallup as a pollster however you wish, but these numbers are not hard to believe when you consider just how many denominations have gone apostate or are leaning woke (read: lean towards openness); and before my Catholic friends jeer about these denominations, have you seen what Pope Francis is doing?
In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common
culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and
old, and—as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of
things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art, the greatest works
of which were in one way or another responsive to the Bible—provided
access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disap-
pearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and
necessity of world-explanation is disappearing. (pp. 58)
This is painfully true. As the Bible has disappeared from both public and, often, private life, we’ve seen nothing but the breakdown of what unified us as a nation. The social compact is dead, and the rule of law is set aside. The poor hate the rich, the young lack respect for the old, and we can’t even agree on basic biology anymore. The religion of openness has taken the concept of real, absolute, and unchangeable truth and thrown it upon the altar to be replaced with “your truth” and “my truth.” It’s as if some cosmic Oprah is shouting, “You’re getting a truth, and you’re getting a truth! Everybody’s getting a truth!” When everything is true, nothing is, and it’s the exact opposite of what we need if we want to survive as a people. Once again, Professor Bloom sums it up perfectly:
My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards, and my
grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich
because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual,
found their origin in the Bible's commandments, and their explanation
in the Bible's stories and the commentaries on them…
My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the
fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their
special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past. Their simple
faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt
with the same material, not from outside or from an alien perspective, but
believing as they did, while simply going deeper and providing guidance.
There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with
their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common
experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief.
I do not believe that my generation…have any comparable learning. When
they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women,
parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but cliches,
superficialities, the material of satire. I am not saying anything so trite as that
life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based
on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper
research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great
revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is
nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the
only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with
the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.
I can promise you that the Covenant Shooter, Audrey Hale, had none of that; rather, she hated it. It was not a mistake that out of all the people she supposedly hated, she ended up targeting Christians, and not just Christians, but their children. Because this was no normal act of violence, no typical mass shooting. This was a religious rite of the religion of openness, taken against the one true enemy that can defeat it, a religious exercise a century in the making; and while Audrey has now met her maker, it is undeniable that we have been living under a system longer than most of us have been alive that will continue to breed more religious fanatics like her, unless we finally wipe the proverbial sleep from our eyes, and shake the complacency from our bones and do something about it.
It’s not enough to pass policies like school choice or banish CRT and gender ideology from the classrooms, though that is a great start; until we truly realize that the enemy is a long-established false faith - the old gods made new again - the religion of openness, we will never be able to bring down this demonic house of cards once and for all, and we and our children will continue to suffer for it.