Resentment: The Soul Sickness Behind Mass Shootings

Once again, the people of the United States, especially those of El Paso and Dayton, are caught up in the all too familiar aftermath of two mass shootings. There have been and will continue to be vigils, snapshots of the victims, statements from authority figures, commitments made to increase safety (and hopefully followed through with), gun control debates and then the quiet terror of wondering when and where the next mass shooting will occur. Will I be next? What about my children, my spouse or significant other? It couldn’t happen here, in my state, my school, my community, could it? This sequence of events and thought processes should be painfully obvious to each of us, and I hope that describing it as a sort of rehearsed script does not cause us to despair or be cynical. God can and does bring good out of evil and wants to transform and heal whole cultures, and our job is to cooperate with that and let the Lord’s will be done in us.

                I would like to focus on what I think lies at the heart of mass shootings, specifically in the soul of the shooter himself (I understand that a shooter could be male or female, but since the majority seem to be young men, I will stick to the masculine pronoun for simplicity). I contend that one does not need to be a mass shooter to understand the primary motivation behind his actions, since the same soul sickness that envelopes the heart of the shooter as he pulls the trigger is present in every human person, namely resentment. It seems to me that the difference between the shooter and the non-shooter is not so much the presence of resentment or not but rather the degree of resentment and the decision of what to do with it.

                I think resentment can be understood as an attitude where one sees the Other as the primary cause of one’s life problems or personal distress. Resentment says, “If only so-and-so were not around, my life would be better, and our problems would be solved.” Under the attitude of resentment, the Other becomes a problem to be eliminated rather than a person to be loved. Resentment, then, can be expressed through racism, as seems to be the case in the El Paso shooting, but it goes much deeper than that. In the Dayton shooting, the shooter killed his own sister, and I remember hearing the sound bite from a police officer saying that such an act was “unbelievable.” If the shooter did intend her death, such an act should not be surprising when viewed through the lens of resentment. The first murder in the Bible, born out of deep resentment toward the Other, was fratricide, brother killing brother as Cain slaughtered Abel. Resentment, left unchecked, transcends familial and interpersonal bonds and, in fact, seems to parasitically feed on those very relationships.

                Resentment pervades our society because it stubbornly persists in individuals. Not everyone considers doing physical violence to another, but I think we do ourselves a great disservice not to see resentment operating so openly in each of us. We see siblings refusing to talk to each other, neighbors who passively aggressively (or not so passively) irritate each other, insults hurled over social media and viral videos, speech that demonizes the Other and a general lack of respect. The worst part of this is that, as a culture, I think we have largely come to tolerate this state of affairs or even celebrate it. Now, I am generalizing here, but I think one can say that Democrats and Republicans are remarkably similar for blaming each other as the primary reason for the country’s lack of progress or moral foundation, but from very different perspectives. As much as it pains me to admit it as a Catholic, there is a lot of open resentment in the Church (that could be a whole blog post in itself). Factions are prevalent and pride themselves as not being like those “other Catholics,” who are the REAL reason for problems in the Church. Lord have mercy . . .

                Where do we go from here, if resentment is so ubiquitous in our culture? Well, I have to wrestle with the resentments in my own heart, and I wrestle with them by giving them up and letting God take them away to heal me and those against whom I have borne resentment. It means humbly accepting that even if I have been wronged, that doesn’t necessarily make me totally in the right. Even if I had no role in the wrong done to me (e.g. having my house broken into), that does not give me license to act on my resentment (e.g. finding the person who broke in and murdering him). If we want a culture where open resentment has no place, it has to start with me and my resentments, and I’ll let you infer what that means for you. One person at a time, one event at a time, change is possible with God’s help.

For more on resentment from the psychological or philosophical perspectives, see this video from Dr. Peterson here and this one from Bishop Barron.