Editorial introduction: Bullets,Baptists,and the Bible

The day we agreed to undertake the co-editing of this issue of Review & Expositor was December 14, 2017, which happened to be Ben’s birthday. It was also the fifth anniversary of an event the memory of which now casts a somber shadow each year over any birthday festivities: the massacre of twenty children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Although the timing was coincidental, the day seemed a grimly appropriate one for signing on to an issue related specifically to guns and the exceptionally US phenomenon known as “gun culture.” Given the journal’s history, mission, and readership, we would focus on that part of American gun culture exhibited especially among evangelical Christians, and Baptists in particular. Alliteratively, this issue would be titled, “Bullets, Baptists, and the Bible.”

What are we to make, we wondered, of the observation that Americans who profess to “lean on the everlasting arms” are among those most likely to arm themselves? How are we ethically to evaluate the proliferation of armed security in places of Christian worship? What have guns to do with the gospel? What, if any, biblical guidance might we find for what twenty-first-century Christians ought to do in regard to armed self-defense and/or the defense of innocent others? Are there clear correlations or inherent contradictions between Christian first principles and the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution? What is or should be the response of evangelical believers especially to current controversies around Second Amendment rights, gun regulation, and gun violence in schools, churches, and elsewhere?

At no point in the months that followed our editorial pledge were we blessed with the opportunity to reflect that perhaps these questions might no longer be pertinent by the time of this issue’s intended publication date. During the two and a half years that work on this issue has been underway, America’s gun owners—lawful and unlawful, evangelical and unaffiliated—furnished a steady supply of material and inspiration for us and our contributors. Never has it felt so wretched to receive such overwhelming affirmation of a project’s continuing relevance.

As we write this introduction, in the late spring of 2020, US citizens have become starkly aware of our long history of systemic racism and violence against people of color—black bodies in particular. The gun muzzles of law enforcement officers have been responsible for multiple deaths of black citizens. Several of those killings were video recorded on the smart phones of bystanders for the world to see. Millions of formerly passive, oblivious white folk are now enraged along with our sisters and brothers of color at the systemic violence that has been occurring since the onset of the slave trade from Africa. Possibly for the first time in US history, both progressive and conservative Christians are speaking out about and against white supremacy and the sins of racism. It is an unusual time of unity across a religious and political chasm that has grown deeper and wider during the Trump administration.

During this awakening of social conscience among white people, however, there has been the co-occurrence of record-breaking gun sales. ¹ This phenomenon began before the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks. Americans flocked to gun stores as a result of a virus pandemic and the fears it stoked, perhaps especially among those already alarmed by changes in racial and ethnic demographics leading to the inevitable end of the white majority.

As we write this, everyone in the world has felt the impact of a coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 brought chaos with shocking swiftness to nearly every aspect of life and work. By the time of publication, we will know better Americans’ share of the death toll along with the overall economic damage of global pandemic as experienced in this nation. If or when effective vaccines and better treatment options emerge, this public health crisis may pass. But another public health crisis will continue to plague us, one that is every bit as deadly as COVID-19 and correlates directly with American gun culture: almost certainly, the epidemic of gun violence will remain and spread like a contagion unchecked by any vaccine.

Gun violence as “epidemic” and “contagion” is a perspective not shared by all in US society, although it comes through all articles of this Review & Expositor issue in one way or another. In that regard and some others, we did not succeed as co-editors in attaining the sort of diversity in authors we had sought. Readers should read with that caveat in mind. We are only slightly diverse by gender identity and not at all by skin color or ethnicity. We failed to avoid that shortcoming. Our diversity is primarily generational and by academic discipline. We are all teachers but practice that vocation in a variety of classrooms: both undergraduate and graduate institutions, seminaries and secular. One of us teaches in medical schools, some in departments of English or Ethics. Several of us have been pastors and are pastoral theologians; others are neither. Most of us were raised and educated within evangelical Christian families and churches, and we comprise a range of church affiliations, including Baptist, Episcopalian, and others undeclared by denomination. For the most part, we are reflecting on and writing about “our people,” with painful recognition of our having sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23).

For a journal like Review & Expositor to address phenomena related to US Christians and gun culture is in keeping with advice offered by Kahan and Braman in their important study, “More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions.” Given that attitudes toward gun violence are rooted in the deep soil of worldview, well beyond the ability of rational argument to penetrate effectively, they argue:

Rather than focus on quantifying the impact of gun control laws on crime . . . academics and others who want to contribute to resolving the gun debate should dedicate themselves to constructing a new expressive idiom that will allow citizens to debate the cultural issues that divide them in an open and constructive way. ²

The various methodologies and ideologies here are informed but by no means confined to data’s explanatory or persuasive power. Our expository and thematic articles are personally inflected and narrative driven, at times with no attempt made to disguise emotion behind a scholarly tone. Yet, we are scholars, and we have mined relevant data so as to inform and, in some cases, change our minds on matters that also move us to action. Reflective, critical writing is a form of social action.

In this vein, Ruth Lofgren Rosell writes persuasively, we think, as a pastoral theologian and counselor, a social activist also, in “Guns and human suffering: A pastoral theological perspective.” Her theological perspective includes discussion of concepts of idolatry, sin and its consequences, and “redemptive violence.” She considers pastoral responses to the repercussions on individuals and families of endemic gun violence within American society and Christian congregations.

In “A word about . . . Evangelicals, violence, and hermeneutics,” Dan R. Stiver, contributing from the Review & Expositor consortium, traces the dominant position of a literalistic or “Biblicist” hermeneutic from pre-Civil War United States into post-Civil War white evangelicalism. Stiver asserts that the “outlines” of contemporary white US evangelicalism remain similar: “literalistic, insensitive to genre, to history, to development, supposedly accessible in a simple way to all, and lends itself to disallowing serious, sincere disagreement.” To do the challenging work of interpreting the Bible, including encountering violence in the text, Stiver argues that a more viable and complex hermeneutic must guide interpretive work.

Tad DeLay strikes a provocative pose in the very title of his article, “This is supposed to happen here: American gun culture and the rhetoric of child sacrifice.” He correlates historical child sacrifice with American gun culture, which he claims “is designed to delegate to persons, white men in particular, the ability to liquidate themselves, their families, and people of color.”

In “‘Accessories included’: Armed Christians and the mythos of heroic violence,” Benjamin D. Utter approaches this matter as a scholar of medieval English literature. He sees striking similarities between the ancient “mythos of heroic violence” and the contemporary, “seductive” myth of “the good guy with a gun.” Utter’s co-editor, Tarris Rosell, finds especially interesting the comparison of armed Christian would-be heroes with Sir Gawain in his quest for the Holy Grail. None of the many versions of that Arthurian tale turns out as planned for the well-armed knight. Utter opines that we probably ought not to expect a different result from the “accessorizing” of chosen church members with concealed weapons for the planned heroic defense of innocent congregants if attacked by a “bad guy with a gun.”

Myles Werntz is a Christian ethicist and practical theologian who takes that thought further. In “The sign of contradiction: Church defense and the liturgical gun,” he explores “not only what is at stake in establishing an armed presence to protect a church, but how such actions cohere with the nature of the church’s core acts of baptism and Communion.” Werntz argues that guns belong in church, not as weapons to be used in violent defense of self or others, but liturgically as icons—hence, “the liturgical gun.”

Tarris Rosell, even before reading the Werntz article, had acquired a handgun for research and artistic expression. His pistol-cross visually portrayed and reflected on here (“A Word About . . . This pistol-cross: The artist’s reflections”) is a liturgical icon that generates, in the artist anyway, the sort of revulsion that would or should have been generated by iconic liturgical crosses when they first populated places of Christian worship. Rosell goes on in his longer thematic article, “‘I have a gun and I know how to use it’: A phenomenology of handgun ownership by evangelical Christians,” to explore the phenomenon of twenty-first-century evangelical Christians’ infatuation with handguns, not as art but for protection. Or is it worship? The handgun is now iconic in an idolatrous sort of way, or so it appears to this phenomenological scholar of Christian and social ethics, whose research took him to concealed-carry classes at an evangelical-Christian-owned gun store and boutique named “Frontier Justice.”

Two expository articles round out this volume. New Testament scholar David M. May explores “The sword-violence of Luke’s Gospel.” His “wholistic lens” examines the biblical text for theological, cultural, and social cues as to what might constitute a Lukan approach to the use or refusal of “sword-violence”—now gun violence—for those who would follow Jesus.

“In gun we trust?” by ethicist and preacher Paul Lewis, is an exegetical homily based especially on Exod 20:4–6: “You shall not make for yourselves an idol . . . ” (v. 4a, World English Bible). Lewis calls out Christian gun culture as a contemporary version of idolatry, alleging that “current events involving mass shootings . . . may be indicative of the judgment of God.” Forget the fundamentals of Judeo-Christian faith and do not be surprised if it turns out badly in the end.

Christian Fundamentalism of the twentieth-century was never about Exodus 20 fundamentals, and twenty-first-century expressions of Fundamentalism focused on idolatrous armed defense arguably are no more so. Literary scholar John McClure contends that one means of responding to fundamentalisms of any religion is to “imagine vigorous forms of spiritual life disarticulated from the will to ‘power and grandeur.’” ³ The articles gathered here, each in their way imaginative, represent a range of responses to American gun culture as reflected in evangelical Christianity. We hope that cumulatively they constitute a vigorous contribution to one of the most urgent debates taking place in the United States today.