On Friday, Jerry Falwell Jr, the President of Liberty University (our nation’s largest and influential such institution), spoke the following words during the school’s convocation, to wild cheers and applause:
If some of those people in that community center had what I have in my back pocket right now …Is it illegal to pull it out? I don’t know…
I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them.

Now, let’s put aside for a moment that Falwell’s remarks are the kind of lazy, incendiary, irresponsible language that perpetuate uninformed stereotypes, incite unnecessary fear, and make violence against Muslims seem noble and justified—hate speech of the most grievous kind.

And let’s not talk about the fact that if he truly wanted to somehow lift up gun ownership as a means of protecting innocent Americans from violence by bad people, he should have name dropped white Christians, as they account for far more religiously motivated mass murders in our country than anyone, and it ain’t even close. (In most cases of bloody domestic terrorism using firearms, Falwell’s kind are the bad guy, not Islamic extremists.)

Yet even if these things were not part of the equation, Falwell’s vile comments, their warm reception in the crowd, and the subsequent social media defense from other believers, illustrate just how far American Christianity has drifted from the namesake of our faith.