Most Christian pastors use armed church members to thwart a possible mass shooting

Prayer is not a part of their safety plan

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A recent survey from Lifeway Research, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, found that most Protestant pastors (54%) plan to thwart a potential church shooting by having armed members of the congregation. (In 2019, that number was 45%.)

Only 5% of those pastors said their safety measures involve having a uniformed cop on site while only 20% have “armed private security personnel.” Shockingly, for people who seem to think a shootout could occur on any given Sunday, only 1% of pastors bother with metal detectors at the entrance.

It might make sense if smaller churches with less money felt like hiring security wasn’t a viable option so they relied on their own armed members… but that’s not the case at all. In fact, it’s the larger churches (with over 250 attendees each week) that are more likely to have armed members.

That means more pastors think they’re better off having random church members with weapons on them instead of hiring private or public police officers with presumably more training in those situations.

None of the security measures involves praying more. Which is telling since that’s the typical response from Christian leaders whenever there’s a shooting in a public school. Thoughts and prayers are the default conservative responses after mass shootings, but conservative Christians refuse to let Jesus take the wheel when it comes to their own safety. They want action. They’re wrong about which action to take, but they know something needs to change, and a Higher Power won’t help.

It’s also noteworthy that so many of these pastors have just accepted that their places of worship could become actual battlegrounds. Apparently God can’t protect them as much as an assault weapon could.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with having a plan in place in the event of a mass shooting, even in church, and there are legitimate debates to be had about the best ways to stop someone with the intention of harming others. Arming “good guys” isn’t always the best option. We’ve unfortunately seen multiple situations, like in Parkland and Uvalde, where armed cops did nothing significant to stop the shooters.

Given all that, it would be nice if these pastors put an ounce of thought into why gun violence is on the rise.

You may recall that, shortly after the Uvalde shooting, a (now-deleted) tweet from a gun manufacturer called Daniel Defense went viral. That was the company that made the weapon used to kill 19 children and two adults. The tweet featured a child holding a weapon, justified with a Bible verse (Proverbs 22:6).

That wasn’t an accident. Daniel Defense is a Christian company that mixes religion and death for an audience that eats it all up. That company also created the weapon used in the mass shooting in Las Vegas, which killed another 60 people and injured literally hundreds more.

Conservative Christians think guns are the solution to a gun culture they helped create. Just as God is their solution to another problem they created (sin), they see more weapons as the response to a society made worse by more weapons.

Last year, historian Peter Manseau published an essay in the New York Times (gift article) in which he linked the conservative Christian obsession with guns and God:

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.

There’s a reason those companies exist. White evangelical Christians have a higher rate of gun ownership than any other religious (or explicitly non-religious) demographic in the country. The people who loudly and proudly declare themselves to be “pro-life” are also the most eager to put a bullet in a theoretical enemy. And the companies that profit from their gun fetish have helped create a culture where mass shootings are commonplace and citizens are falsely led to believe more guns are the solution to any safety issue—even though other countries are well aware that fewer guns and more restrictions on them are the way to go.

Manseau also (correctly) pointed out that this created another obstacle to gun safety measures: Anything politicians do to keep weapons off the streets and out of the hands of people who might use them for evil is inherently seen by these zealots as anti-Christian.

To imagine yourself as a Good Guy With a Gun… may inspire action-movie day dreams, but it is ultimately a religious vision of a world in which good and evil are at war, where God and firepower make all the difference.

Some of us want to see guns regulated like cars. Owners should have to go through a registration process that involves significant training and insurance and a license that could be taken away if you’re irresponsible. But the conservative Christians who see guns as an extension of their faith—and the solution to a potential shooting in church—refuse to accept any kind of sensible restriction on them. They couldn’t handle attendance restrictions or mask mandates in church during the pandemic, and they can’t handle red flag laws or mandatory registration on their weapons.

They believe freedom involves their ability to hurt as many strangers as possible. (It’s what Jesus would have wanted.) And they apparently also think freedom means having people in their churches who spend at least a part of Sunday morning thinking about how they might have to kill someone that morning in case of an emergency.

Obviously, #NotAllChristians are on board with this belief. Many side with progressives on gun safety and understand what all the data in the world has repeatedly told us about what we need to do to save lives. They are victims and first responders and as troubled by the right-wing obsession with guns as the rest of us. But unless they acknowledge the role their religion has played in creating this increasingly dangerous environment Americans currently live in, it’ll be virtually impossible to create change from within. That means pastors with a spine need to speak out against the Second Amendment extremists even if that means denouncing their fellow Christian leaders.

Disarming the church doesn’t mean putting their congregations in harm’s way. Disarming everyone means more safety for more people. At the very least, weapons should be limited to the hands of trained professionals as opposed to anyone who can get his hands on a weapon and wants to cosplay as a hero.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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