God, Guns, and Country: The Evangelical Fight Over Firearms
By Eliza Griswold
Shane Claiborne is part of a wave of millennial evangelicals who are distancing themselves from American conservatism, especially when it comes to gun culture.Photograph by Travis Dove / NYT / Redux
On the afternoon of Good Friday in April, 2010, Shane Claiborne, a thirty-five-year-old evangelical activist sporting dreadlocks and homemade pants, followed a group of teen-agers carrying an eight-foot-tall wooden cross down a street in North Philadelphia. They marched to a gun store in Kensington called the Shooter Shop, which was notorious for allowing straw buyers to purchase guns illegally. Philadelphia has been hit hard by the heroin epidemic and its associated gun violence. In 2010, some two hundred and fifty people were killed with guns in the city, and more than a thousand people have been killed in the last four years—far more than in Los Angeles, though it has a much larger population. Claiborne—along with hundreds of members of Heeding God's Call to End Gun Violence, a faith-based group that advocates for gun reform—was going to hold a vigil outside the shop to convince its owner to adopt a ten-point code of conduct to render the store more accountable for the weapons it sold.
When the protesters arrived, they found a group of counter-protesters lining the sidewalk and waving American flags. Claiborne led a recitation of the Lord's Prayer while the counter-protesters loudly chanted the words to "God Bless America." Then Claiborne told the crowd about a night, a month earlier, when he'd heard gunfire coming from outside his home and ran out the door to find a young man named Papito bleeding in the street. Claiborne held Papito's hand until an ambulance arrived, but he died later that day. At the end of the rally, a woman approached Claiborne and told him that she was Papito's mother. "I understand something I hadn't understood before," he recalled her saying. "God knows what it feels like to lose a son."
Claiborne refers to himself as a "holy troublemaker," and over the past decade he has become something of a celebrity in Christian circles, for challenging believers to scrutinize the difference between the Bible's teachings and those espoused in conservative American culture. His first book, "The Irresistible Revolution," about finding his calling in social-justice work, sold more than three hundred thousand copies. "As I crisscross the country, I can feel a new momentum and movement," Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine, wrote in the foreword. "The monologue of the religious right is finally over, and a fresh dialogue has begun."
Claiborne grew up in a conservative Christian household in East Tennessee. In 1993, he moved to Philadelphia, to attend a Christian college, and was shocked by the poverty and homelessness he saw in the city. He became involved with student activism and, in 1995, occupied an abandoned church where homeless families were squatting in order to help keep the church from being knocked down and the families from being displaced. In March, 2003, he travelled to Iraq, to protest the American bombing campaign, and was injured in a car accident during the visit. He has written, "It's difficult to know where Christianity ends and America begins."
Claiborne believes that conservative culture often conflates Christianity and nationalism, placing, as he puts it, "the American flag above the cross." This has long involved aligning religion with American gun culture. Last year, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, said, in a speech, that the Second Amendment was not a right "bestowed by man, but granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright." In 2017, after a shooting at a Southern Baptist church near San Antonio, Texas, left twenty-six people dead and twenty injured, some Christian leaders called for members of their church to arm themselves; Robertson Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, said, on "Fox and Friends," that he felt more secure knowing that his congregants were carrying weapons. After the shooting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015, Jerry Falwell, Jr., the president of Liberty University, urged his students to procure gun permits. (Along with a year-round ski facility, Liberty's campus is home to a sprawling firing range.) "I've always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in," he told students. Claiborne said, "The irony is you can't have a beer at Liberty, but you can have a gun."
Some pro-gun Christians argue that scripture supports their claims; many rely on a passage from the Book of Luke in which Jesus says, "Let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one." This, they argue, is proof that Jesus believed in the use of deadly force. "Some folks would say he was calling on his followers to arm themselves, but that's definitely misused," Claiborne told me. He is part of a movement of millennial evangelicals who are trying to separate their faith from the Republican politics of their elders. Claiborne—along with the members of Heeding God's Call and the Live Free Campaign, which tries to convince congregations to support gun control—believes that living as Jesus did requires renouncing violence. He often quotes a passage from the book of Matthew in which Peter, attempting to defend Jesus against the Romans, pulls out a sword and lops off the ear of a Roman servant. Jesus rebukes him, saying, "For all they who take the sword will perish by the sword."
On a recent afternoon, Claiborne, who had cut off his dreads and now wears glasses that frame eyes perpetually widened in glee, took me on a walk to the Shooter Shop. Kensington is an impoverished neighborhood, but Claiborne has been trying to help the community. On our walk, we passed an aquaponic greenhouse that Claiborne had built with the help of a drummer who'd toured with Nine Inch Nails, and an empty lot where construction vehicles were digging the foundation for a recreation center that Claiborne had convinced the city to let a local nonprofit build. We passed under an El station and arrived at the store, which was now shuttered. "Now homeless veterans are living up there," Claiborne said, pointing to the apartments above the storefront.
Soon after the vigil at the shop, Claiborne had decided to take on the issue of guns full-time. In March, with his friend Michael Martin, a bearded Mennonite and amateur blacksmith, Claiborne published a book called "Beating Guns," which discusses the role that white evangelicals play in promoting gun culture. "Forty-one per cent of white evangelicals have guns," he told me. "The same people who worship the Prince of Peace are packing heat." Claiborne was planning to drive across the country, along with his wife, Katie Jo, and Martin, in a decommissioned school bus that Katie Jo has refitted into a tiny home with saffron curtains, a composting toilet, and solar panels. They would hold vigils in places riven by mass shootings or drug-related violence, during which they would collect guns and melt them down in a mobile forge. They would invite survivors to help beat the molten metal into hoes and spades—an enactment of a passage from the Book of Isaiah, which advises believers to "beat their swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks."
A gun is sawed in half during the "Beating Guns" tour.Photograph by Rex Harsin
The afternoon before Claiborne left for the trip, I visited him at the pale yellow row house in Kensington where he lives. Outside his home is a large mural—a Banksy replica—of two children standing atop a mountain of defunct weapons. Inside, a purple tandem bike hangs from the ceiling near a painting of Mother Teresa. Katie Jo, who is thirty-six, with a blond braid down her back, had lain awake for the past few nights, trying to account for every square inch of the bus. Claiborne and Martin were now loading it under her watchful eye, shuttling backpacks and boxes from the house out to the porch. At one point, Claiborne disappeared into the basement to fetch some wooden signs that he had made by cutting up old gun advertisements and fashioning them into inspirational words, like "Hope," "Faith," and "Love." He returned with a large stack, and Katie Jo glanced at him with the patience of one accustomed to trying to speak in practical terms to a self-styled visionary. "Oh, no, is all that coming?" she asked. "It ain't gonna fit on the bus."
Claiborne moved to Kensington in 1998 and started the Simple Way, a Christian community-service organization that runs a food bank, which distributes four tons of food each week. He was living as a celibate man for religious reasons when, a few years later, he met Katie Jo, a teacher, who had moved to Philadelphia on a one-year mission program. Neither liked the term "missionary"—"It's more of a short-term, drive-by thing," Claiborne told me. Katie Jo said, "Our mission isn't to make people Christians. Our mission is to love people, and if they love Jesus, great!" Kensington, even more than the rest of Philadelphia, has been devastated by the opioid crisis. "Six or seven times, I've come home to find people dying on our doorstep," Katie Jo told me. When she called 911 for help, the first responders often assumed that she was an addict, too. "They always ask, 'What are you on?' " she said. Outsiders often dismiss Kensington as "Zombieland" because of the number of addicts who live there. "That's what people thought about Nazareth," Claiborne said. He quoted a passage from the Gospel of John when a skeptical man asks one of Jesus' disciples, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" The disciple replies, "Come and See."
In recent months, following a major drug bust several blocks away, both the use of heroin and the tempo of shootings in the neighborhood had decreased. "We thought it might have something to do with our presence," Katie Jo told me, with a self-aware smile. "But then we found out they aren't putting fentanyl in the heroin so it's not as strong, and people aren't buying as much." In the past few weeks, new dealers had come into the neighborhood to hand out free samples across the street from the Simple Way. Workers worried that the dealers' presence would scare people in the neighborhood off from reporting violence, and cause shootings to increase again. "Snitch culture is still really strong here," Miguel Diaz, who helps run the Simple Way's food bank, told me. "The state can't afford to move people, or help them if they testify in shootings."
Claiborne believes that race plays a larger role than religion in influencing white evangelicals' fondness for guns. According to a Pew study, fifty-seven per cent of white evangelical gun owners cite "protection" as the main reason that they carry firearms; they envision themselves defending their families against criminals, who are often rendered as black or brown inner-city men. According to Claiborne, many evangelicals imagine Jesus in their own image, "as a white, middle-class Republican" who shares their interests and fears. They have bumper stickers that read, "Jesus would still be alive if he'd had an AR-15." In fact, gun violence disproportionately affects people of color, and white Americans are largely insulated from its day-to-day toll, though this may be changing as school shootings affect suburban communities.
That evening we drove to Broad Street Ministry, a large Presbyterian church in downtown Philadelphia that serves four hundred and fifty people lunch each day and houses hundreds more each night. When we arrived, paint was flaking from its walls, and the sexton was mopping vomit off of the stoop. Claiborne and Martin were launching their book, and holding a vigil for survivors of gun violence. When the event began, Movita Johnson-Harrell, the first Muslim woman to serve as a state representative in Pennsylvania, told the story of losing her son Charles, in 2011, to a shooter in northwestern Philadelphia who mistook him for someone else. "It is each individual's responsibility to be part of the solution and not the problem," she said. "There is no gray area."
When Claiborne took the stand, he brandished what looked like a black leather Bible and then opened the cover to reveal a gun holster. "This is what people are using to carry their guns to church," he said. Hidden holsters were growing more popular, he told the crowd, as church shootings made Christians think that they needed to protect themselves while at prayer. Then, he began listing gun-violence statistics, in a call-and-response with the audience.
"In America, we make nine and a half million guns a year—twenty-six thousand a day," he said. "Can I get a 'Lord have mercy'?"
"Lord have mercy!" the crowd replied.
"A hundred and five people die from guns every day, and thirty-eight thousand a year."
"Lord have mercy!"
The next morning, before leaving on their trip, Claiborne and Martin kneeled on the sidewalk in Kensington next to their mobile forge, among a pile of guns that they'd collected from neighbors or found in abandoned homes. Martin was sawing an AK-47 in half, and preparing to turn it into a mattock—an old-fashioned hoe with prongs on one side, which is used for breaking up clods of earth. He had grown up in a conservative evangelical church in Colorado. "It was very much God, guns, and country," he said. But in college he'd decided to return to his family's Mennonite roots—a tradition that emphasizes nonviolence. With the help of a metalworker in Colorado, he had taught himself the rudiments of blacksmithing. Martin picked up the barrel of the AK-47 with a pair of long steel tongs and placed it into the forge until it softened and glowed a molten red.
Claiborne picked up a microphone. "Come on out, folks," he called to his neighbors. "If you're out here and you've got guns, we'll chop them up." The crowd of two dozen people who gathered came mostly from Circle of Hope, a network of Christians who do community work in the toughest neighborhoods in Philadelphia and support one another's "weird progressive Christian activities," as one member in the crowd put it. Not all share the same opinions about politics, or guns. "I see firearms as a useful tool," Mark Mumbauer, a thirty-nine-year-old Mennonite and hunter, told me. Once, while leading a discussion among his progressive friends about spiritual warfare, he brought a gun to use as a visual aid, which caused alarm. "I realized it was a terrible idea," he told me.
P. J. Rainey, a nineteen-year-old wearing a Balenciaga baseball cap and an eyepatch, stood at the edge of the crowd. When Rainey was thirteen, she was shot in the eye with a stray bullet. "At first, I was afraid that no one would ever love me anymore," she told me. Jonathan Olshefski, a friend of Claiborne's, had spent the last five years filming a documentary about Rainey's family's recording studio, which they ran out of their basement so that local kids could record music. After the shooting, Olshefsky kept filming, and made the incident the focus of the project; the film, "Quest," premièred at Sundance in 2017. Since then, Rainey has travelled around the country, talking to people about guns. She hadn't been through formal counselling; she didn't trust paid professionals to empathize with what she'd gone through, and preferred speaking with small church groups, in cities or small towns affected by gun violence. "It's my therapy," she said. When she travelled the country, she was surprised at how backward some of the Midwestern towns seemed. "Their sneakers are always way behind," she told me.
The mattock that Martin was making was going to be a gift for Rainey, which she would use in the small garden behind her house. She took a turn striking the molten metal with a hammer and, afterward, turned to address the crowd. She still didn't know who had shot her; many young men in the neighborhood used her family's studio, and she thought that some of them must know but were too scared to tell her. She said that she had forgiven the shooter but that she had some ideas for how to hold people accountable in the future. What if each gun were fired before it was sold, and a photo of the bullet's signature was stored in a database? Then whoever bought and sold the weapon could be traced, she explained.
Claiborne stood at the edge of the gathering in front of a sign that read "Jesus Was Homeless," listening intently as Rainey spoke. He had called for a similar measure as part of the code that he'd proposed for the Shooter Shop before it closed. "Although it was never our goal to shut down the shop, it's nice that homeless veterans are now living there," he said. "I'm reluctant to attribute this to God, but it's kind of a swords-to-plowshares thing."
Eliza Griswold, a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2003. She won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for "Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America," in 2019.
More:Gun ViolenceGun ControlReligionEvangelicalsPhiladelphia
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