White Evangelicalism, Gun Control, and Fall Narratives
“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Like all great falsehoods, there is a hint of truth to it—a tiny crumb of wisdom upon which its deceptions are parasitic for life. Likewise, “all lives matter” has, of course, something undeniably true about it. All lives do matter. And yet that truth has been misappropriated.
As the Genealogies of Modernity podcast episode on gun violence argues, war normalizes gun use. During the Cold War, many white evangelicals in the United States found a “godless” enemy in communism, making it God’s war. Billy Graham was brought to the White House, James Dobson to the military, and “manly men” back to predominantly female churches. This association between warfare and white Evangelicalism occurred around the same time that both were being linked to conservative politics, such that being a white evangelical in the United States now makes you more likely than the general public to be pro-gun.
Yet whatever the historical factors, in the aftermath of the 2022 Uvalde shootings, a Christian professor I generally admire thought it made sense to write an article against gun control (I have not linked the article due to my continued relationship with the individual. Additionally, this allows me to strawman them to my heart’s content). In it, he argued that societies scapegoat guns as a way of avoiding the truth about our individual human condition. Each human person is fallen and in need of a savior. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Adam and Eve (1528)
My colleague further argued that because humans are fallen, we need guns to protect ourselves from one another, as well as from the government. We cannot let the government take our guns, for power must be in the people, since sin perverts any and every ruler. Just look at Communist Russia. Power cannot be centralized in big government with oversight of gun control laws because power corrupts. And power corrupts because humans are fallen and sinful. His article thus expressed a seemingly logical link between the Judeo-Christian fall and pro-gun, free-market economics and values.
What is fascinating is how this argument can, and often has, gone in the opposite direction. Thomas Hobbes’s insistence on the necessity of government stemmed precisely from his pessimism toward human nature. We need oversight, Hobbes argued, precisely because humans are messed up. Contrary to Rousseau, Hobbes believed that humans, if left freely to their own devices, would not bring about paradise but rather its ruin. Ours is a tale of paradise lost, not found. It’s because people cannot be trusted that we cannot trust them with guns, without any government oversight or accountability. Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people.
One might hope this spin could appeal even to white evangelicals, as it fits well with the underlying Christian narrative of the fall. But another narrative has been drowning it out. American faith and practice has been read through a deeply modern individualism, such that it is not actually humanity or society as a whole that is fallen—it is the individual. The emphasis in Western Christianity has been placed upon individual fallenness and the need for a personal conversion—contrasting the deeply collectivist culture in which Jesus originally spoke.
Tintoretto, Cain and Abel (1550-1553)
Perhaps this is what allowed certain strains of pro-gun Christianity in America to wed personal fallenness with a broader optimistic trust in the free market. They will often uncritically adopt one aspect of modernity’s narrative of progress on the macro-level, while combining it with an individualized view of fallenness on a micro-level. Now, this is confusing, because their skepticism towards sinful individuals also extends to the government as a collection of fallen individuals, but does not seem to extend to the impersonal, social, economic, and systemic structures the government helps shepherd and shape.
Thus, to many white evangelicals of this ilk, we don’t need to deal with systemic racism; rather, I personally need to repent of my racist thoughts and actions. The problem is not institutional sexism; it’s a few bad apples who need to come to Jesus. The problem is not gun culture or a lack of systematic gun regulations; the problem is the soul of the teenage boy.
While there may be an underlying truth in such statements, it’s a truth that arguably cuts deeper the other way. For if sin is real, that would of course impact the individual. But it would also impact society and require big picture, social, economic, and systemic solutions. Once again, the Judeo-Christian narrative, with its Old Testament emphasis upon the nation of Israel and the New Testament emphasis upon the collective church, actually has the resources to provide such a communal account of sin, morality, and redemption (cf. the debate between John Piper and NT Wright on justification). As the podcast episode showed, while one Quaker gunmaker may have seen their individual role in social injustice as moot, their Christian brothers and sisters appreciated the inherently communal, systemic, and interconnected nature of the rising modern, global economy. Indeed, perhaps the whole point of the Judeo-Christian fall is that an individual’s sin is never just their own. It gets communally passed on—from Adam to Cain, tribe to tribe, and nation to nation. And this nation needs to repent.
Jonathan Lyonhart (PhD, Cambridge) is an assistant professor of Theology and Philosophy at LCU, a fellow at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism, co-host of the Spiritually Incorrect Podcast, and the founder of The Numinous Institute for Faith & Neurodiversity. To learn more, visit jdlyonhart.com.