In my own firearm training, my instructor actually told me it’s better that you not carry if you are not ready to kill in a moment in time. So whenever a Christian takes on their body the capacity and the willingness in their heart to kill another human being, that, to me, is a serious moral and ethical crisis. It’s also a serious theological problem, because we have to ask, “Is is it always the will of God that I survive a violent confrontation?” For example, with the stoning of Stephen as recorded in the book of Acts, was it God’s will for Stephen to survive, and did he fail at that? Or was it God’s will that he die? I would argue it was God’s will. So these are serious theological problems that demand examination for the christian.
When it comes to the subject of guns, I find the mindset of Evangelical Christians to be endlessly fascinating…and more than a little distressing. You’d think that folks so devoted to a Lord and Savior that preached peaceful coexistence would be dispositionally opposed to firearms, being the instruments of death and mayhem they are. You might expect that would be true…but you’d be wrong. WAY wrong.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise that the sort of mindset that lends itself to the belief that God calls us to engage in spiritual warfare with enemies of the faith isn’t far removed from the willingness to engage in ACTUAL warfare. There seems to be an escalating fear within the Evangelical community, a fear that expresses itself in the belief that one needs to protect oneself and those one holds dear against nonbelievers and those who would persecute them. To many, that means accumulating impressive arsenals and preparing as if for war. To these zealots, the phrase “Christian soldiers” isn’t hyperbole- it’s the warp and weft of their self-image. Soldiers prepare for war, hoping to never go into combat but prepared for it nonetheless. Evangelicals who see themselves as soldiers for Christ seem increasingly unable/unwilling to separate spiritual warfare from actual combat. Exactly as Jesus would do, no?
Perhaps it’s time for those who call themselves Christians to have a serious, considered discussion of what it means to follow Jesus Christ…and how guns impact one’s commitment to the Gospel they claim to revere. For example, does rage and righteous anger and a perceived need to arm oneself translate to a love for a Lord and Savior who preached love, tolerance, and peaceful coexistence? If you can with no trace of irony answer that question in the affirmative, I’d submit that you might want to dust off your Bible.
[T]hat’s where the correlation between gun culture and a demographic is the highest—white evangelical conservative Christians. And it’s where I think the disconnect is also largest between language about the sanctity of human life and the embrace of this culture. It’s not just the gun, it’s a language and a set of values around the gun. I call it yippie-ki-yay culture—this sort of looking forward to the conflict, not exhausting all the other possibilities first, and a blitheness and a disregard for the taking of human life….
What we’re increasingly seeing is terrible fear among evangelical conservatives. I think evangelicals have always kind of seen themselves as outside the mainstream and as having less political power. There’s always been a sense among them that [someone was] coming to get them. And then you pour ISIS into that, and then you pour this kind of Fox news always amping up the fear, and then you have the NRA, which is also playing on that fear pretty unscrupulously. So you have people who are convinced that on any given night, someone’s going to break in and shoot them in their home, which is just statistically just as close to impossible as it gets. You’re much more likely to be hit by lightning.
So what does it mean to be an Evangelical Christian and a Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foe ©? What does it mean to believe in the sanctity of life on one hand while simultqaneously professing an unshakable belief in a self-interested definition of the 2nd Amendment on the other? I can’t say, because I don’t believe in God or that 2nd Amendment is a blank check. It astonishes me that this dichotomy exists so openly and without controversy among Christians. The Conservative Evangelical devotion to guns and the willingness to use them on other human beings would seem to run counter to the teachings of a benevolent Jesus Christ. It seems the God of Evangelicals is an angry, vindictive deity who’d just as soon blow a person away as embrace them, which I suppose would make sense if the world we lived in was defined and ruled by the Old Testament…which, thankfully, it’s not.
The act of taking another human life- whether “justly” or not- is a question fraught with conflict for any thinking, rational human being. That would seem even more true for Christians, who by definition believe in a benevolent God to whom all life is precious. That so many Evangelical Christians have chosen to live in a fear-based world where spiritual warfare may at a moment’s notice give way to the need for actual warfare seems inimical to the teachings of the Jesus Christ they claim to follow. What I find so disturbing is that this glaring contradiction, rife with serious theological problems and conflicts as it is, generates so little discussion among Christians.
When so many Evengelicals are also Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes ©, prone to screaming bloody murder (pun fully intentional) whenever the subject of common sense gun control is broached, my question would center on who- more importantly, what- is actually being worshipped.
“Onward Christian Soldiers” is a hymn…not a theological line drawn in the sand. Too bad that so many good, God-fearing Conservative White Christian patriots seem incapable and unwilling to recognize that distinction.
