School Shootings: Mental Health or Spiritual Warfare? By Brandon Showalter, Christian Post Reporter
Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6 of The Christian Post’s series on youth and school violence.
Arguably, no other crime forces Americans to confront the reality of evil than when a gunman murders school children. Yet some of the reasons why horrific incidents happen are seldom discussed.
Whenever mass shootings occur in the United States, the political discourse and public conversation often centers on how lawmakers might further regulate firearms.
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Yet other factors that are not spoken of nearly as much are worth considering, according to a Pentecostal theologian and a mental health counselor of 31 years, both of whom spoke with The Christian Post about some of the factors involved in mass shootings.
To examine the issue from a theological and spiritual perspective, CP talked with Wave Nunnally, a professor of early Judaism and Christian origins at Evangel University, an Assemblies of God school in Springfield, Missouri.
He explained that many Christians have in some ways failed to understand the spiritual dimension of evil, particularly grasping the interplay between the natural world and the spirit realm. And this is more than relevant when thinking about mass shootings, he said.
Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland, Florida, shooter from earlier this year, said “demons” told him how to execute the victims. Seventeen, most of them young students, were killed.
“It’s such an interesting statement that he would make that voluntarily on his own,” Nunnally said, suggesting that it’s also possible those words might have been expressed with the intention of laying the legal groundwork for an insanity plea in court.
But it’s also necessary to investigate whether Cruz had ever been institutionalized in a mental hospital, been on any psychotropic drugs, been in therapy, or had a history of mental illness, in which case any actual demonic voices he said he heard would be an “add-on” to his condition, he said.
