Surprising no one, The New York Times published one of the most insulting commentaries I’ve ever witnessed, directed mainly at Christian gun owners. It’s a guest commentary written by Peter Manseau, who claims to have published elsewhere, but I’ve never read any of this books, nor will I considering the lack of scholarship displayed here. We’ll start, lift some commentary out, and I’ll make remarks along the way.
Is our gun problem a God problem?
The AR-15-style rifle used in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last month was made by an arms manufacturer that regards selling weapons as part of its Christian mission. In a state where Gov. Greg Abbott declared, six months after an earlier massacre, “The problem is not guns; it’s hearts without God,” the gun’s provenance challenged pious suggestions that declining religiosity might bear some of the blame.
That this paragraph made it through editing is amazing. Provenance is “the chronology of ownership, custody or location of a historical object.” In the following paragraphs he takes aim at Daniel Defense and the religious beliefs of Marty Daniel, but no editor worth his salt would have let this paragraph go unmodified. Presumably the writer is trying to link Daniel’s views with the gun he built, but that case cannot possibly be demonstrated. I know plenty of irreligious men who own AR-15s, and many more who work on them.
Daniel Defense, the Georgia company whose gun enabled the slaughter at Robb Elementary School, presents its corporate identity in explicitly religious terms. At the time of the shooting, the company’s social media presence included an image of a toddler with a rifle in his lap above the text of Proverbs 22:6 (“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it”). For Easter, it posted a photograph of a gun and a cross resting on scriptural passages recounting the Resurrection.
So Marty Daniel is a Christian. What of it? What does that bring to bear on the case he’s trying to prove?
While some might suggest a Christian firearms company is a contradiction in terms, Daniel Defense is hardly alone. According to a Public Religion Research Institute study, evangelicals have a higher rate of gun ownership than other religious groups. Across the country, they account for a significant share not only of the demand but of the supply.
So now the writer has expanded the sweep of his analysis and is targeting all evangelicals.
In Florida, Spike’s Tactical (“the finest AR-15s on the planet”) makes a line of Crusader weapons adorned with a quote from the Psalms. Missouri-based CMMG (“the leading manufacturer of AR15 rifles, components and small parts”) advertises its employees’ “commitment to meet each and every morning to pray for God’s wisdom in managing the enormous responsibility that comes with this business.” And in Colorado, Cornerstone Arms explains that it is so named because “Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our business, our family and our lives” and the “Second Amendment to our Constitution is the cornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens.”
For many American Christians, Jesus, guns and the Constitution are stitched together as durably as a Kevlar vest.
“We are in business, we believe, to be a supporter of the Gospel,” Daniel Defense’s founder, Marty Daniel, told Breitbart News in 2017. “And, therefore, a supporter of the Second Amendment.”
He is on the outside looking in. Most of my readers would say that the constitution (and thus the 2A) only matters the extent to which is comports with Biblical law. The foundation of our rights is to be found in the Holy Writ, and our philosophical pre-commitments are to the Lord of the universe and His law, not a piece of paper. The piece of paper is a covenant and contract, null and void upon unfaithfulness. You don’t have to be a Christian to understand my point of logic. If the writer is targeting Christians, he’s gotten it exactly backwards. The constitution isn’t infallible and wasn’t written by God. Christians don’t turn to the constitution to ascertain rightness and wrongness in their lives.
Entwining faith and firearms this way has a long history. It encompasses the so-called muscular Christianity movement that began in England in the 19th century with a focus on physical fitness as a path to spiritual strength and that in America made exemplars of pastors roaming the frontier armed with Bibles and six-shooters.
More than a hundred years ago, this trope was already so well established that a popular silent western from 1912, “The Two Gun Sermon,” told the story of a minister assigned to a rough-and-tumble outpost; when ruffians menace him, he holds them at gunpoint until they listen to him preach. The film’s message is one with which 21st-century Christian gun enthusiasts would probably agree: Sometimes guns are necessary for the Lord’s work.
It is easy to miss, but this melding of evangelism and the right to bear arms is a step beyond the “natural rights” argument for gun ownership, which holds that self-defense is a law of nature required to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are often said to be God-given in the sense of being taken for granted, and they are enshrined as such in the Declaration of Independence. As interpreted by many evangelicals, the distant deistic “creator” Thomas Jefferson credited with endowing such rights has become a specific, biblical deity who apparently takes an active interest in the availability of assault rifles.
He has now turned to an irrelevant English movement and a movie to prove his point. But here he misses so badly that it’s going to take a few moments to sus this out.
If he was a scholar he would have first turned to OT law, where the right of being armed is founded in the Pentateuch. As I’ve observed so many times before, John Calvin discusses this aspect of the ten commandments and makes it clear that defense of life is not only allowed, but required as a good work by the Godly man.
We do not need to prove that when a good thing is commanded, the evil thing that conflicts with it is forbidden. There is no one who doesn’t concede this. That the opposite duties are enjoined when evil things are forbidden will also be willingly admitted in common judgment. Indeed, it is commonplace that when virtues are commended, their opposing vices are condemned. But we demand something more than what these phrases commonly signify. For by the virtue of contrary to the vice, men usually mean abstinence from that vice. We say that the virtue goes beyond this to contrary duties and deeds. Therefore in this commandment, “You shall not kill,” men’s common sense will see only that we must abstain from wronging anyone or desiring to do so. Besides this, it contains, I say, the requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can … the purpose of the commandment always discloses to us whatever it there enjoins or forbids us to do” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter viii, Part 9).
Calvin has here expressed the Biblical position. “Thou shall not kill” also means “Thou shall protect life.” This is of course at least partially why Jesus himself commanded his disciples to sell their robes and buy a sword. He won’t have His followers being defenseless against the onslaught of ne’er-do-wells. Any loss of life, trials or tribulations, will be by His hand, in His timing, for purposes that He knows, not by anyone else.
But here it’s important not to miss one of the main points of the command in Luke 22:36 like so many do. Quite literally, He is commanding the purchase of weapons in spite of strictures against ownership and carry of said weapons at the time. He is commanding His followers to be law-breakers for the sake of self defense.
… for some evidence, see Digest 48.6.1: collecting weapons ‘beyond those customary for hunting or for a journey by land or sea’ is forbidden; 48.6.3.1 forbids a man ‘of full age’ appearing in public with a weapon (telum) (references and translation are from Mommsen 1985). See also Mommsen 1899: 564 n. 2; 657-58 n. 1; and Linderski 2007: 102-103 (though he cites only Mommsen). Other laws from the same context of the Digest sometimes cited in this regard are not as worthwhile for my purposes because they seem to be forbidding the possession of weapons with criminal intent. But for the outright forbidding of being armed while in public in Rome, see Cicero’s letter to his brother relating an incident in Rome in which a man, who is apparently falsely accused of plotting an assassination, is nonetheless arrested merely for having confessed to having been armed with a dagger while in the city: To Atticus, Letter 44 (II.24). See also Cicero, Philippics 5.6 (§17). Finally we may cite a letter that Synesius of Cyrene wrote to his brother, probably sometime around the year 400 ce. The brother had apparently questioned the legality of Synesius having his household produce weapons to defend themselves against marauding bands. Synesius points out that there are no Roman legions anywhere near for protection, but he seems reluctantly to admit that he is engaged in an illegal act (Letter 107; for English trans., see Fitzgerald 1926).
Jesus knew the law, and the potential legal troubles He was exposing His disciples to by issuing this command, and yet, that didn’t stop Him. So going back to the law of Moses, to the command of Christ, and then on to the Crusades which were primarily defensive in nature, the history of armed self defense isn’t traced back to an English movement a few years ago or a silly movie. It’s in the very nature of the beliefs.
But then the writer can’t stop at merely misunderstanding the subject he purports to analyze. He then decides to expand his (ill-fated) analysis to insults. “As interpreted by many evangelicals, the distant deistic “creator” Thomas Jefferson credited with endowing such rights has become a specific, biblical deity who apparently takes an active interest in the availability of assault rifles.”
Christianity has always been about a specific, living being who loves us and redeems us and commands us, not about a distant deity who once interacted with His creation. If he means that the second amendment would have been written differently if Jefferson was not a deist, that point is unproven at best and misguided and simply historically incorrect at worst. Jefferson wasn’t responsible for the second amendment. Maddison wrote the text, but the entirety of the colonies insisted on it, most of the Southern colonies being Presbyterian. It’s too much to discuss in the present context, but in English circles they knew the basis for the war of independence and called it “The Presbyterian Rebellion.”
Why does this subtle shift in the meaning of “God given” matter? It’s important to understand that for the manufacturer of the Uvalde killer’s rifle, and many others in the business, selling weapons is at once a patriotic and a religious act. For those who hold them to be sacred in this way, the meaning of firearms proceeds from their place at the intersection of American and Christian identities. Proposing limits on what kinds of guns they should be able to buy — or how, when, where and why they can carry them — is akin to proposing limits on who they are and what they should revere.
He’s just making things up now. Ownership and bearing of arms, if a God-given right, doesn’t depend in the least on where one lives or what system of government obtains. It didn’t in the case of the Armenian Christians who were slaughtered in the deserts of Turkey by the Muslims, it didn’t to the Christians targeted by Idi Amin of Uganda, and it didn’t to the Russians and Ukrainians starved by Stalin. He wants a scary boogieman to blame, but the intersection of Christians and America has nothing to do with it except in his imagination.
Since then, despite being debunked by data showing that firearms are more likely to injure their owners or their owners’ families than safeguard them, the protection offered by good guys with guns has emerged as an article of faith, supported with anecdotal evidence passed around like legends of the saints.
I vow never to use that word, debunked. It has become the wordy-word of progressives trying to prove something wrong and who have run out of ideas. Guns are only unsafe to those who do not treat them with respect and obey all the rules of gun safety.
As the historian Daniel K. Williams has noted, “Gun rights advocacy is not an intrinsic feature of every brand of evangelicalism.” While recent surveys find that four in 10 white evangelicals own guns, the majority do not, and other denominational affiliations offer examples of religious participation discouraging a fixation on firearms. It is possible that the less one sees oneself as an itinerant loner in a hostile world, like the armed preacher in a silent western, the less one is likely to look to guns as a source of salvation.
Nonetheless, the ways Christian ideas may be contributing to a gun culture that abets our epidemic of mass shootings by helping to keep the nation well armed should inspire reflection. None of the recent mass shootings had explicitly religious motivations, but the religious contexts of our seemingly eternal problem with gun violence — its history, its theology, its myths — are too important to ignore.
Mass shootings are, in a way, assaults on the idea of community itself. They occur where there are people gathered — for entertainment, for learning, for shopping, for worship — in the spaces we create together. Some believe that such attacks are the fault of armed individuals alone and can be addressed only through armed individual response. Others believe they occur within the framework of what we collectively allow and must have communal solutions.
After blaming Christians for mass shootings, he has finally, at long last, divulged his own philosophical pre-commitments, or religion. He is a collectivist, and says that the solutions to problems are to be found in the collective.
What he doesn’t mention is that in the twentieth century alone there were over 212,000,000 mass murders by governments across the globe. The writer doesn’t explain how his collectivist solutions would be better than ours, nor do I believe he can.
The New York Times has paid for another loser commentary that wanders and fails to stay on point, refuses to interact with the real scholarship of its intended target, insults a large constituency of Americans, and considers neither the history of the subject nor the failures of its own solutions.
Is it any wonder that they’re constantly begging for money?
1 year, 11 months ago
