What if, saving our bodies, we destroy our souls?

To our bodies, we know well what violence does. The blood, the stench, the sound: We feel it before we understand it. The tremors, the nerves frayed in pain or flight, are animal reflexes buried deep in our brains, emotional viscera exposed once the shooting starts.

Brought forward from evolutionary dormancy with news of each violent act, it’s a primal fear we’ve begun again to receive like a screened sacrament of human retrogression. All this violence is reviving that hunted feeling in our primitive selves, rendering us animals, conjuring instincts to kill or be killed or run.

It’s animality, of course, which as a society we’re trying to keep at bay. Such is the purpose of every act of heroism and healing, the bravery of bystanders and the selfless work of first responders, to restore humanity to the rational charity to which we tell ourselves we’ve evolved. All of it good, light in darkness, it is also, insofar as we still help each other and struggle for our better selves, evidence that hope remains and that we should keep struggling.

But precisely here we must be careful, and spiritually so. Here we could lose our souls, all while trying to be humane and responsible. Because we’re not asking the questions we should, but rather ignoring them, due likely to the fact that they are, after all, only spiritual questions and therefore, we think, unimportant, or at least not relevant to the urgent concerns of body.

We’re not asking what violence is doing to us interiorly, how all this violence is transforming our souls. Even if you don’t believe in the soul, still it’s reasonable to suggest that constant violence may do more than merely disorder us, that it might, in fact, be changing us, mutating our nature, our psyches or subjectivity. Whatever you want to call it.

In an age of random mass shootings, anti-Semitic attacks, racist violence, attacks on LGBTQ people, must violence necessarily make us violent? That is, can we still choose what sort of humans we will be? Can we remain peaceful, unarmed even, or must we accept violence as necessary to human existence?

It’s a difficult question, one long riddling our religions. For non-believers, perhaps they read Michel Foucault or Georg Simmel and achieve some peace or acceptable despair. For Christians, however, it has meant wrestling with the fact that Jesus refused violence, even security. He was explicitly passive and willingly suffered rather than defended himself. For Jews, it’s been the choice between martyrdom or the sword, between Eleazar, for instance, embracing death, or the revolutionary Maccabees. For Muslims, it has meant arguing over the true meaning of jihad, whether it’s something peaceful or bellicose. Is it better to die for the honor of God, refusing to shed blood oneself, preferring faithfulness and fearlessness, believing in life after death? Or, is it better to fight, to defend oneself, and to become violent for the sake of safety?

These questions we at least must ask. Are we doomed to be violent, or free to be peaceful? Dismissed by many and even, some say, by common sense, still, for those who accept some notion of the soul, of a good transcending the body, these questions can’t be unimportant.

Now, certainly, security is essential. To defend oneself, the innocent too, is not to be faithless. In fact, it’s almost always a moral duty. One thinks of Albert Camus’ tale of the pacifist, “the pure heart who rejected distrust,” opening his doors without care to all. “Who do you think answered that noble invitation?” he asked. “The militia, who made themselves at home and disemboweled him.” This is not, obviously, a stupidity we’re called to embrace. However, we must accept that these matters involve the soul and not merely the body. As we rush to arm ourselves to the teeth, turning our places of faith into fortresses, if we do not ask what sort of effect it will have on our souls, and if we do not ask how it will fundamentally change our purported religions of peace, then we betray a spiritual disorientation of the first order. Because it suggests the death of faith and the resurrection of fear.

And it might also betray, as people of faith, our calling. In a world ruled by fear and violence, it might just be our task to show others what living vulnerably in peace looks like. Maybe we are called to bear witness to this increase in violence, with gentle faith fearless of death and peace beyond understanding. Because we believe in God and in love stronger than death, prizing our immortal souls more than our bodies.

Or so we say.

This column originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News.