During the month of April at the Anxious Bench, a number of our columnists are participating in a joint collaboration with the AACC (Asian American Christian Collaborative) to draw attention to the history of gun violence in the United States. Since the shootings in Buffalo, Laguna Woods, and Uvalde, the AACC has been a crucial Christian organization that is actively pursuing advocacy and policy efforts to address gun violence in the United States, and the Anxious Bench is proud to partner with them to raise awareness about the long and terrible history of gun violence in the United States.
As Indianapolis prepared to host the 2023 NRA annual meeting earlier this month, safety emerged as a matter of public concern. The city expected to welcome 70,000 conference participants, including high-profile public officials like former President Donald Trump and former Vice President and Indiana Governor Mike Pence, along with gun control activists organizing protests against the NRA. Aside from managing the people, there was the issue of their guns. The Indiana state legislature had recently removed licensing requirements for carrying handguns, and local law enforcement officials shared safety recommendations for gun owners and local residents, noting that they expected many visitors to openly carry firearms.
I happen to live in downtown Indianapolis, about a mile from where the NRA gathered at the Indiana Convention Center. Knowing that the convention would occur not far from where I live, several friends and family members sent me text messages. “Be safe,” they urged.
NRA convention or not, their concern about my safety was warranted. Gun violence is a significant problem in Indianapolis. The NRA convention occurred exactly two years after nine people were gunned down at an Indianapolis FedEx facility. In addition to this and similar high-profile mass shootings, gun-related injuries and deaths are commonplace in my city. In the first three months of this year, for example, a dozen children have already died by gun violence in Indianapolis. Gun violence is a problem that literally hits close to home. Stray bullets have hit bystanders on the same streets that my daughter travels when she walks to school. Shootings have occurred on the routes that I take when I visit my neighborhood grocery store or go for an evening run. My husband, a surgeon, is regularly called into the hospital to care for patients with gunshot wounds. Though he trained in New York City—a city that my Midwestern family considers dangerous and crime-ridden—it has been here in Indiana where he has cared for more patients with gun-related injuries.
Amid the everyday horrors of gun violence in Indiana, I sometimes wryly joke that Hoosiers do guns like they do religion. Guns, like religion, are a means of protection and a source of power. Guns, like religion, are part of one’s identity. Guns, like religion, are carried openly and proudly in public.
This potent overlap of American Christianity with fervent gun love is exactly what I saw when I visited the NRA convention earlier this month. But I also witnessed the exact opposite: Hoosiers of faith protesting the convention and drawing explicitly on their religious beliefs in their moral crusade against guns and gun violence. On the streets outside the Indiana Convention Center, groups on different sides of the gun control debate both invoked religion as the foundation for their claims—an indication of the intensity of their commitment to their positions, as well as the intractability of the issue.
Over the weekend, the evangelical political commentator David French discussed the religious dimensions of American gun culture in an opinion essay in the New York Times. “In many quarters of America, respect for firearms has turned into a form of reverence,” he wrote. “As I wrote in 2022, there is now widespread gun idolatry. ‘Guns’ have joined ‘God’ and ‘Trump’ in the hierarchy of right-wing values.”
What French described as “gun idolatry” was part of the spectacle outside the NRA convention in Indianapolis. A street vendor I encountered peddled merchandise that deployed the very same language that French used to describe America’s religious devotion to guns. One shirt on display was emblazoned with the words “God, Guns, and Trump” along with images of a cross and two pistols. Above the shirt hung a large flag that illustrated the convergence of American gun culture with Christian nationalism. The flag advanced a religious origins story of the American nation that put guns at the center. “God, guns, and guts made America,” it read. “Let’s keep all three.”
The fusion of religious faith and reference for firearms was also reflected in the NRA’s annual meeting programming. For the final day of the convention, the NRA planned a morning event that merged the Christian tradition of Sunday worship with the contemporary political ritual of the ecumenical prayer breakfast. NRA members were invited to “come together in Christian devotion for a morning of inspirational encouragement and thought-provoking messages” led by the Bible teacher and outdoor sportsman Jimmy Sites.
The Sunday breakfast, held annually, was the site of both prayer and protest last year when the NRA held its convention in Houston shortly after the mass killing of nineteen children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. At that prayer breakfast, Christian activists urged others at the event to pray for the Uvalde shooting victims by name. The activists were ordered to leave, threatened with arrest, and escorted out by police.
The course of events at last year’s prayer breakfast reflected what David French believes will be the ultimate consequence of indiscriminate violence against innocent people: urgent calls for change. “…[E]very one of these acts increases public revulsion of gun ownership generally,” he wrote. “The cry for legal and moral reform will sweep the land. America will change and gun rights will diminish. And the gun owners and advocates who fail to grasp the moral weight of their responsibility will be to blame.”
Indeed, the cry for legal and moral reform was vocal and visible at the NRA convention in Indianapolis, just as it had been in Houston, and in these efforts, religious activists were front and center. Even before I saw the crowds of NRA members with their camouflage outfits and conference tote bags, I saw a solo protester standing on a street corner. He carried a neon-colored sign that made the case for gun reform by referencing the rhetoric of the religious anti-abortion movement. “Pro-life = sensible gun laws!” his sign read.
Further down the street and across from the convention center, I encountered a retired minister standing among a small group of demonstrators. The minister had chosen to wear his clerical collar to the protest, making clear his role as a religious leader who carried the responsibility of calling people to conscience. He held up a gruesome sign featuring blood-splattered body outlines and a condemnation of “NRA cocktails.” Next to him stood a woman carrying sign with the names of the Indianapolis FedEx massacre victims—a reminder of the local impact of the national problem of mass gun violence.
A block away stood another cluster of protesters, all women. Their signs drew on a different moral argument for the need for gun control: the responsibility to protect children, the most innocent among us. “Protect kids not guns!” read one sign; “Children’s lives matter,” said another. The three women smiled as they sat serenely in the spring sunshine and gently engaged NRA members in conversation. Their work reminded me of the long tradition of female activists who have centered motherhood in their campaign for social change and legal and moral reform.
Yesterday, Tish Harrison Warren asked, “What should Christians do about guns?” As she pointed out in her essay and as I observed at the NRA convention in Indianapolis, Christians are already doing quite a bit about guns. They are showing them off in their family Christmas cards. They are lobbying legislators for their control. They are celebrating them in their prayers. They are mourning for their victims.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the NRA convention was witnessing how Christians have been undertaking these activities, many of which are in direct opposition to one another, while also living (or attempting to live) in community. Christians who have different religiously-rooted beliefs about guns send their children to the same schools, worship in the same churches, and reside in the same cities. In downtown Indianapolis, I watched as they shared the same very same sidewalk: gun enthusiasts carrying their firearms alongside gun reform crusaders carrying their protest signs, both groups maneuvering around local families who were doing nothing related to guns at all, but instead enjoying springtime walks, going to dinner downtown, and participating in a cosplay Alice-in-Wonderland-themed scavenger hunt. All of these people crowded together was disorienting and confusing. It was a microcosm of America, and also of American Christianity.
Reflecting on that day, I often wonder how we manage to share space with each other at all—in our streets, in our cities, in our nation. We all want to feel safe, and many of us feel a faith-based responsibility to create communities that are safe, not just for ourselves, but for the ones we love. But when it comes to guns, our vastly different ideas of what safety requires creates a conundrum. Our shared desire for safety is one reason why, more than ever, we feel so unsafe living among one other.
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