Divinely Ordained Murder

When God speaks, do children have to die? Abraham thought so, and Isaac almost paid the price. Jesus thought so, and did pay the price. Andrea Yates and Deanna Laney apparently thought so, too, but their peers, unlike those of Abraham and Jesus, simply wrote them off as nuts.

In the long run, the mental health experts who messed with both of these terribly disturbed mothers' trials may do the rest of us more harm than good. First, they focused (as they should) on the accused parties'craziness, and on what medication can do for it. But they appear to have shied away from saying much about the religious culture which shaped both mothers' actions --- a culture for which there is only a theological remedy, not a pharmacological one. Second, they influenced two juries to draw cruelly different conclusions about the same aberrant behavior: while Ms.Yates' insanity warranted imprisonment, Ms. Laney's did not.

I would have hated to be on either of their juries, and I feel grateful, even if also a little guilty, that other citizens had to do what I was not called upon to do. The disparate punishments the two juries meted out, however, leave us with a daunting moral and spiritual dilemma: when someone is so out of touch with what God asks everyone to do, as to do exactly what God never asks anyone to do, what sort of punishment is appropriate?

There is, of course, a part answer to this question that is easy to determine. Whatever else punishment in cases like these should be, it has to ensure that people who do harm in God's name cannot remain in a position that allows them to keep on doing it. But the "whatever else" part of this answer still has to be dealt with.

If you think God is telling you to do something terrible to someone innocent, are you simply off your rocker? Are you merely hearing a voice in your own head rather than one from on high? Your therapist would say so, and every therapist to whom I have ever referred people with religious delusions also says so. Before you can get to a shrink, though, as the surviving members of Ms. Laney's family have discovered, there are a lot of people who get to you first with trust your inner voice messages, coming at you through the sponsorship of truly weird groups of self-proclaimed true believers. If there is psychosis to be ferreted out in the killing of theYates and Laney children, it is to be found in their parents' religious associations as much as it is in their mixed-up inner psyches.

It is surely psychotic to hate, maim, and murder any human being as a test and an expression of personal and communal faith. Unlike Abraham, we are supposed to know that there was a lamb in the bush on Moriah's slope, and that God desires all our sons and daughters to live. In fact, we know this so well that we have no excuse for acting as if it were not true. And no excuse for telling anyone else, in the name of God, to trust the inner voice and get on with suddenly sacred executions, whether of one's own children or an "infidel" peoples'. The only sacrifice of offspring that the one true God ever asked of anyone, he asked only of himself and of his own, and he intended that sacrifice to be enough for everyone. Let's say it all together: everyone.

And while we are on the subject, it is just as surely psychotic to take gleeful comfort in the notion that when Christ comes again, everybody who hasn't yet pledged fealty to him will be cast away to the outermost regions of hell. With the release of the last book in the "Left Behind" series (we should be so blessed), a lot of bookstores are going to be crawling with spiritual gloaters for some days to come. Frankly, this psychotic series left me behind a long time ago, and not in the way that its authors will think. Care to join me?

I hope and pray that Deanna Laney will finally get the help she needs and deserves in the hospital settings that await her. Hopefully, the staffs in charge will also keep at bay the people in her world who have assisted her so effectively to lose her mind. For the life of me, though, I cannot see how Andrea Yates is going to get the help she needs and deserves spending the rest of her life in prison. Some of the people who sent her there pretty obviously need the same kind of spiritual help that so many in Ms.Yates' world need even more.