Liberal Baptist ethicist David Gushee of Mercer University is a serious man who has written a silly column about the idolatry of gun ownership.
“Some will find this post sacrilegious,” Gushee opens his Religion News Service piece. “What is truly a sacrilege is our devotion to an Object that keeps killing us and our children.”
Gushee continues: “Early in the morning we rise to greet You, O Gun Almighty. With all due reverence we bow before You.” He goes on at great length with his satirical “prayer” to The Gun.
In one revealing line, Gushee sarcastically intones: “But we know, O Gun, that it is not You that kill, but instead we who kill, and certainly we who kill wrongly.” And he adds: “May they find success in deflecting blame from You after every mass killing in which people wrongly use You.”
Here mostly is the crux of the gun control argument in theological terms: ultimately it is inanimate objects that are morally at fault for gun crimes, not the ensouled creatures made in God’s image and who will stand before Him in judgment who bear moral responsibility when they maim, intimidate, rob or murder. So take the guns away, by force, relying on other guns, belonging to the state, and then there will be moral harmony.
The obstacles to this harmony are obvious for Gushee. His “prayer” to The Gun pleads: ‘And so we implore you, O Gun, to strengthen your priests and ministers as they pursue Your work in the world: May they find success in weakening Gun control efforts.”
If only skeptics of gun control would abandon their idolatrous worship of The Gun and step aside for the purposes of the true God, who evidently wants the government to seize all guns.
Contrary to Gushee’s statist assumption, Christianity offers in its historic teachings no clear direction on private ownership of guns. Saint Peter, when he walked with Jesus, carried his own sword, which he used against the temple guards who arrested Jesus. The Lord chastised Peter for resisting what was to be the first stage of Jesus’ divinely ordained path to the Cross, but evidently Jesus had not earlier objected to Peter’s ownership of the sword.
Of course this brief biblical anecdote about an apostle doesn’t tell us all we need to know about ethics and private ownership of weapons, nor does it necessarily endorse unrestricted gun ownership for all. There are lots of competing arguments in Christian tradition about individual rights versus state power and the common good.
But Gushee doesn’t acknowledge or bother with any of these arguments. He just assumes that gun owners and skeptics of gun control are idolaters resisting God’s purposes.
Well, maybe. But more typically it is authoritarian and especially totalitarian societies that comprehensively banish private gun ownership. A citizenry that owns its own guns signifies a people who govern themselves and who are not completely subordinate to the state.
A sarcastic riposte to Gushee’s “prayer” to The Gun would be a prayer to “The State,” which displaces God by providing all that is needed for security and nourishment, banning guns, regulating diets, providing and controlling health care, micromanaging all education, substituting itself for the the family, religion and civil society and suppressing any meaningful dissent. Only then will God’s Kingdom be realized.
Traditionally limiting the power of government has had an important spiritual imperative for protecting human dignity and human liberty to worship God as the transcendent authority over the state.
Obviously it’s an exaggeration to say Christian moral teaching warns against any limitations on private gun ownership. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that Christianity has, at its best, been reluctant to cede power to the state without compelling reasons and evidence. Crime rates have been declining in America for several decades, unrelated to gun control, the cities having the tightest limits on weapons often having had the highest crime rates. This year there has been an uptick of crime in some cities, the reasons for which are debated.
Hopefully this uptick in crime is temporary, and addressed by rigorous law enforcement. Gushee, a Christian ethicist, is called to offer serious ethical and theological reflection. Instead he simplistically mocks his opponents as worshippers of The Gun.
In his 1915 State of the Union, President Woodrow Wilson, himself a strong Presbyterian and progressive, defended gun ownership as intrinsic to liberty and the sovereignty of a free people:
But we do believe in a body of free citizens ready and sufficient to take care of themselves and of the governments which they have set up to serve them. In our constitutions themselves we have commanded that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” and our confidence has been that our safety in times of danger would lie in the rising of the nation to take care of itself, as the farmers rose at Lexington.
Wilson’s public theology saw a spiritual purpose in the people “ready and sufficient to take care of themselves.” Was he just worshipping The Gun? Or does Gushee have a more serious answer?
Comment by Straight Shooter on September 7, 2015 at 5:16 pm
Funny, the Constitution plainly says that citizens have the right to own guns, and the left doesn’t like that at all, yet the Constitution says not one word about marriage of homosexuals, yet they run around screaming “It’s in the Constitution!!!”
I could not be a leftist, just way too many contradictions to contain inside your head.
Comment by Kenny Bobby Johnny on September 7, 2015 at 10:00 pm
The left hates the Bill of Rights. There is literally nothing in it that they actually like. But for the Bill of Rights, the states were very clear that they would not ratify. J.P. Stevens, as WASPy as you can imagine for the early 20th century, wrote a book about how he would change the Constitution and it is basically trashing the Bill of Rights. Imagine what the drafters would think if they were ruling the roost??? They would probably get up and leave.
Comment by Mike Ward on September 8, 2015 at 11:02 am
“But Gushee doesn’t acknowledge or bother with any of these arguments.
He just assumes that gun owners and skeptics of gun ownership….”
Should that be “skeptics of gun control”?
Comment by Namyriah on September 8, 2015 at 9:29 pm
People of the religious left suffers the delusion that the New York Times editorial board will summon them in and pat them on the head, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” They’ll never hear that from the NY Times. Or God.