Guest post: Gun Rights and Pagan Christianity
An examination that finds pagan logic within Christian gun rights discourse
Father Trent Pettit is an Episcopal priest and a dear friend. He has been a wonderful and challenging conversation partner, who always has a fresh insight about a topic that I think I already know well. This gift of fresh insight is readily apparent in this piece that he wrote and agreed to publish here, which details what may be implied theologically when one argues that violent self-defense is a right. I found this piece disturbing to my intuitions, and I'm not entirely sure where I agree with Trent and where I disagree--which is exactly the sort of thing that makes this essay worth sharing.
Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
Matt 10:39
The court, Ian Prasad Philbrick recently wrote, is “pro-religion.”[1] The religion the court is for is presumably Christian. But is it?
Following a shooting in 2019, Texas Representative, Matt Schaefer, tweeted that he was “NOT [sic] going to use the evil acts of a handful of people to diminish the God-given rights of my [his] fellow Texans. Period.”[2] In the wake of the Uvalde shooting this year other self-styled Christian pundits repeated this sentiment. Georgia GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted: “We don't need more gun control. We need to return to God.”[3] Texas Governor Greg Abbott, said the same thing: “The problem is not guns, it’s hearts without God.”[4]
Peter Manseau explains how the confluence of evangelicalism and the right to bear arms “is a step beyond the ‘natural rights’ argument for gun ownership” because as it replaces the Jeffersonian deistic god with a “biblical deity” who "apparently takes an active interest in the availability of assault rifles.” Manseau’s observation of the religion of the court is correct insofar as he notes the theological oddity that is the profusion of god and guns in America, but he does not demonstrate of what that religion is—the one represented by the court, the one that so often runs afoul of traditional Christian confession and metaphysical orthodoxy.
As Manseau gestures, for Schaefer and others like him, the “god” to which he refers is identical with the unalterable character of the Constitution. At best, the metaphysical immutability (inability to change) of God is transferred to the promise of American positive law. This has to take place because there is no agreed upon anthropology, nor a set of moral standards that enjoy a consensus today to rationally defend the idea of natural gun rights. The force of right is today attributed to a whole variety of non-obvious moral claims in order to treat a subset of those claims as if they have a kind of ontological originality that demands they be treated as immoveable. When the Constitution is questioned, self-styled Christian pundits make perfunctory, instrumental appeals to the divine to justify what the court cannot rationally (or theologically) decide. “God," in this sense, actually describes defensive cultural assumptions. The grammar of the god-and-guns clique suggests that the court has run counter to the Christian narrative, raising the question of which god corresponds to the “pro-religious” court. Its appeals to the right to violent self-defense not only reflects a modernistic vocabulary, but also a dualistic cosmology.
Observers of secularism like Charles Taylor note that the paganism of the post-Christian West will inevitably be Christian in form. Weber famously said that concepts undergo transformation when the theological context for them is dropped in a process of either demythologization or rationalization. Arguments defending self-defense through the use of firearms on the basis of natural rights, I want to argue, represent a Christian-pagan rationalization, and also an instance of what Cyril O’Regan has called, “gnostic return in modernity”[5] —in this case, a Manichean one. In what follows, I will “only [be] speaking of those “who have chosen to make the gospel the starting-point of their heresies” (Irenaeus Against Heresies).
The beliefs of Manicheanism arose in the third century BC, and were influence in the early centuries of Christianity. Mani’s wanted to explain the existence of evil—an effort that falls under the umbrella of “theodicy” in Christian theology. His explanation resorted to a harsh dualist cosmology between good, light, and spirit on one hand and evil, darkness, and matter on the other. Among Augustine’s critiques of Manicheanism was that Mani’s god could not be perfect because his kingdom was limited by its dualistic other: corporeal darkness. In other words, Manicheans were unable to explain the existence and cause of evil in a way that preserved divine sovereignty because he assumed that evil and god shared an equivalent status.
Manichean theodicy is relevant to us because of its anthropological and cosmological dualism, and its claim to possess privileged insight into universal law. Versions of these dualisms and claims are present today in the religious right’s understanding of a universe as one locked in a battle between the wholly good and wholly evil without resurrection. Its god is an abstract representation of the sovereign individual in the Constitution and whose corresponding rights are guaranteed by self-assertion rather than argued on the basis of natural law. Gun-rights religion is a consequence of the Founder’s appropriation of Christianity in the interests of nation-building. The preoccupation with evil in the new Manicheananism is evident in its insistence on the right to violence. It rationalizes this right by appealing to natural law—a kind of Manichean special knowledge.
Alasdair MacIntyre famously noted how the modern belief in rights constitute a form of mythology—one on the level of the belief in “witches and unicorns”[6]— since there is nothing empirically demonstrable or common about them. In the case of the religiosity of Schaefe and his ideological peers, they fail to distinguish the older Christian doctrine of creation that supports natural law from those “rights” that came to be attached to persons according to the a-theological presuppositions of eighteenth-century modernity.
Christian practice in America was never expected to be an actual expression of Christianity. The Constitution was not created to support the virtues necessary for the doing of the incredible moral demands of Jesus, but created a structure supporting the success of the nation. For this reason, American ambition has been, and still is, easily confused with churchly success. Eventually, as Weber mentioned, Christianity in America could be emptied without notice while the rhetoric of American discourse remained grammatically Christian. Christianity could be free because the state could shape it, which has resulted in a heretical form of community within Christianity itself.
Like ancient Manicheanism in Rome, because Christian paganism exists within mainstream Christianity, it is difficult to identify and to remove.
The increasing pattern of school violence has come to be seen among the new Christian-pagans, not as evidence that militant arms should be limited, but as vindicating the truth of its mythos. Violent self-defense consequently does not need to be justified on any Scriptural basis and needs no Christological credit.
Taken in Christian terms, Greene and Abbott’s assertions are true, but what would follow in an authentically Christian logic would be a rejection of the “right” to violent self-defense.
Augustine—to moderate, orthodox example on self-defense—explained in his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount that Christians might be able to kill to protect the innocent, but he ruled out violent self-defense.[7] “Rights” and “autonomy” is the language of pagan Christianity in America that comes from a partisan distortion of what it means for each person to have the dignity of God’s image.
Most importantly, Christ, being the perfect image of the Father, is the one by whom we are to seek that likeness in the face of the enemy, not only our own. This is why the drift to Constitutional language—rights—for Christians is strange. The individualist definition of the person, taken as sovereign, reflects the Feuerbachian insight about religious projection. The new Manicheanism is a projection of the self. The individual sovereign can integrate “rights” “god” and “guns” into a novel religious grammar without contradiction. The religion of Schaefer, Greene, and Abbot express a unique Manichean grammar befitting defense of the post-Christian, kingdom of the American god: the self.
Christianity does not need violent self-protection; to believe in the Gospel is to believe that the self is already kept in God and, therefore, has been made for peace.
“We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Rom 6:4). I can’t find a better synopsis of Christian political theology that Paul’s words. Martyrdom is exhalation on the basis of baptism into the crucified One. Owning guns for the purposes of self-defense is a denial of the resurrection. Christian claims about violent self-defense are “paganly” Christian.
The Father let his innocent Son be killed. Should he have stopped it? Should the apostles? Pro-gun Christians must answer in the positive, since dying is denied redemptive possibility. The consequence of this answer is the total transformation of Christianity by utterly removing the scandal of the Cross. Pro-gun “Christianity” is not consistent with historic Christian confession.
For most American Christians the justification of armed, violent self-defensive is definitive of their faith, but this fact simply exposes the pragmatic allegiance to the self whose confession sounds from the most despairing fringes of dogmatic theological affirmation, one absolutely antithetical to the triumph of a martyr.
If Christians participate in the pro-gun movement, what can be concluded about what the telling of martyr missionary stories so often held up in Protestant churches? That they hold them up cannot be explained but for any reason but these faithful deaths occurred outside the “promised land,” that is America and the West. School shootings do not for them, as they should, indicate that America participates in what John Paul II called the “culture of death.”[8] American self-critique can be avoided on the basis of individualism and descriptions of violent acts as “random.” America has no cultural problem, it is insisted; the problem remains with the individual heart alone. The drama of rights can go no deeper than individualistic challenges of sin and temptation. America and the West is simply part of the Manichean mythos; it is the city of light distinct from others. The death of the missionary, from the Manichean perspective, is not an affirmation of the Lord’s triumph over death, but the triumph of the individual will.
Recent appeals to the right to bear arms on the basis of revelation shows just how little Christianity in America requires Christian content. This phenomenon reflects America’s continued project to dictate just what Christianity must be if it is to continue to gnash teeth its teeth amidst the intractable moral conflicts of secular public life. In the process, it has produced, not just heretical speech in the courts, but definitively Christian-pagan communities within the church itself. Christianity in America must differentiate itself from the partisan determination of its politics and moral forms, lest it be construed with the construction of the kingdom of man rather than the Kingdom of God.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/briefing/supreme-court-religion.html
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/29/texas-mass-shootings-self-defense-gun-ownership/
[3] Marjorie Taylor Greene, Twitter Post, May 2022, 5:33 p.m.,
[4] https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-governor-greg-abbott-nra-convention-problem-not-guns-hearts-without-god/
[5] Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Return in Modernity. New York: Suny Press, 2001.
[6] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue 3rd ed., 69.
[7] Augustine, “On the Sermon on the Mount,” https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/16011.htm.
[8] John Paul II. Evangelium Vitae. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html