Gods, guns, and government
A question that I see bandied about between advocates of gun control and gun rights is whether or not Christians ought to own or carry firearms. This may be a uniquely American subject of contention, since we have an abundance of gun owners, an abundance of active participants in Christianity—many of whom are in the right wing and are thus associated with the side more likely to be in favor of gun rights—and an abundance of people with the spare time to debate such matters on social media. One thing I have learned in observing attempts at interpreting the Bible is that it is a large enough collection of books to be used in support of many positions, and the tennis match between the “love your neighbor” and “sell your cloak and buy a sword” factions can be entertaining. As I do not belong to their club, I prefer to make up my own mind, but I have no objection if Christians—or people of any religion or lack thereof—decide to be armed or unarmed.
What does concern me is the rise of Christian nationalism as the latest authoritarian impulse of the right wing, a group who will proclaim their love of gun rights in one moment, then immediately move on to assert the need in America for a theocracy founded upon whatever flavor of religion they happen to adhere to.
The United States has long dealt with a bloc among us who would like to run things according to how they read scripture, going all the way back to the Puritans who came to New England because Holland was too liberal and the mother country was not yet ready for their grim sort of a commonwealth and weaving its way through embarrassments such as Prohibition and the Butler Act to arrive today with efforts to control the sexuality of anyone who is not a gladly reproducing heterosexual.
And anyone who values gun rights should be against that sort of thing.
I recognize that this may seem to be a difficult assertion to accept for many who tote Bibles and pistols as a regular pairing, but consider: What denomination of Christianity would be in charge?
The easy answer might be any Christians, but I invite advocates of such a system to search history for any example of this religion exercising government power that did not involve Christians gleefully killing each other over doctrinal differences. No particular subset holds anything close to a majority in America—illustrated by a list from one source of the top one hundred denominations here—and a drive through the small town of one’s choosing will show the First, Second, Independent, Full Gospel, and Reformed flavors of denominations, each new church after the initial offering having been founded over disputes about baptism, communion, the proper way to hand out hymnals, or the sexual proclivities of the minister. Can anyone seriously hold on to the notion that all of these together could form a coherent government?
As to that, religion does require its communicants to believe a variety of difficult doctrines, and it may be that aspiring theocrats have enough faith in miracles to hope for a working priesthood of elected believers. But on what will the gun rights discussed above be based, and who will get to exercise them?
If the answer is the Constitution, I must object. The First Amendment—the one that comes before the Second—specifically forbids the establishment of any religion, and while the courts have lurched to the right wing over recent decades, I would like to think that even they would understand that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” means what it says. If that is not the case—or if the theocrats manage to find enough votes to amend the Constitution to suit their whims—what, then, would be the security in the Second Amendment’s protections, given what is a sentence that gun control advocates find easy to interpret as needed? It is worth remembering that England’s 1689 Bill of Rights, one of the inspirations for ours, guarantees “that the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” My readers will likely know how well that has worked out for English gun owners, but also note the protection there only being for Protestants, and the more religion worms its way into government, the easier it is for right and wrong kinds of the favored group to be officially defined, to the detriment of the latter. One of our Supreme Court justices—Alito, for example, with his willingness to ask seventeenth century English judges what they think—might conclude that “Protestant” in text and tradition means only one type extant at a favorite time and find no right for others to keep and bear arms.
And then there are the trends of decline in affiliation with Christianity, the rise of the Nones (those who identify with no religion) and the growth of Islam in America, all directions of demographic change that no fantasies of prayer in schools and walls at our borders can do anything to change. If the exercise of rights were to be tied to one’s fidelity to the leading religion, that would place a lot of faith in whatever religion I and you and that person over there happen to belong to being the one that wins.
Better it is to say that human rights are just that: human rights, regardless of what religion any of us may practice or not practice.