How our gun culture ignores religious lessons about community

Even though Christianity has been the dominant religion in the U.S. since the nation's creation in the late 1700s, America has been stained over and over by astonishing gun violence. The bloodshed must break the sacred heart of the Prince of Peace.

Four of our sitting presidents have been assassinated and attempts were made on several others as well as on two former presidents -- most recently Donald Trump.

Brady (a gun violence prevention organization named after President Ronald Reagan's press secretary, Jim Brady, who was also shot in an act of political violence) reports that "Gun violence costs the U.S. economy $557 billion each year" and that "since 2017, guns are the leading cause of death of children and teens (aged 0-19)."

(Yes, all of that raises the question of why, as Trump alleged, God saved him, God didn't save all those kids in schools or the other man killed at the event where Trump was wounded. But I've already asked that.)

I have never understood how America's historically deep connection to religion and religious liberty -- including its long history as a nation made up of people who have predominantly identified as Christian -- can be squared with the outrageous number of gun violence incidents.

A new book has helped me understand this a little better, even though its primary focus has little to do with religion. It's One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, by historian Dominic Erdozain.

The book includes a careful review of various court decisions over the years, including a few U.S. Supreme Court rulings that Erdozain considers disastrous. They include the 2008 Heller decision that said the Second Amendment, as the Wikipedia entry to which I've linked you puts it, "protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms — unconnected with service in a militia — for traditionally lawful purposes such as self-defense within the home, and that the District of Columbia's handgun ban and requirement that lawfully owned rifles and shotguns be kept 'unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock' violated this guarantee."

Erdozain, by contrast, argues that "when the founders placed their trust in 'the people,' they did not mean the imperious individual. They meant the community. The whole thrust of their philosophy was to move the sword away from the storms of private judgment to the calmer waters of collective wisdom."

He contends, persuasively, that the Heller decision tossed such original thinking in the trash and that the National Rifle Association and others have been primary actors in keeping America armed and dangerous.

The idea of "collective wisdom" is, in fact, deeply rooted in institutional religion. That's largely because we need the wisdom and advice of others to keep us from running into theologically anarchistic streets where we can justify almost any behavior. The collective church, synagogue, mosque, temple or other gatherings of people of faith make up the banks of the rivers of theological thought and action that, if we let it, can keep us from disastrous behavior because of disastrous, individualistic thinking.

The idea of collective wisdom does not violate the core religious belief in the ultimate value of every individual, but it does remind us that we can think more clearly when we think in partnership with others.

"Gun rights," concludes Erdozain, "are claimed as an American birthright and clothed in the dignity of the Constitution, but this is a false and fabricated history. To believe in the gun, you have to subscribe to a series of fantasies about the American past." Among them, he writes, is the need to believe "Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when he writes that firearms brought 'possibilities of salvation' to African Americans after the Civil War."

And, Erdozain says, you'd also have to believe "that for two hundred years every court in the land got the Second Amendment wrong until (Justice) Antonin Scalia rode in with his dictionaries in 2008 (Heller case). For me, the question is aesthetic as much as moral or political. When I see a handgun, I do not see freedom. I do not see possibilities of salvation. I see an open wound. I see the hole in the American promise. I see a failure of imagination."

I find his careful historical scholarship persuasive. Which doesn't mean we should prevent everyone from owning guns. What it does mean is that our current system of deregulation and the wide availability of weapons to someone like the young man who tried to assassinate Trump shows that we aren't thinking and acting like the wise community we can be. Instead, we seem to act like a long series of unconnected individuals. Which differs significantly from the wise sense of community that our religions have taught us is the way to live.

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LOTS OF MINISTRY OPTIONS IN PARIS

As the 2024 Summer Olympics roll on in Paris, a large group of clergy has gathered to provide spiritual support and counseling for athletes. Good for them. And good for what so far looks like amiable relations between representatives of different faith traditions. How about we use that as a model for when there are no Olympic games to watch?

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P.S.: Native Americans were allowed to become U.S. citizens under a law adopted 100 years ago. How has that gone? This analysis from The Conversation gives a pretty good wrap-up. One conclusion from the piece: "Though U.S. citizenship was imposed without consent, Native Americans have come to terms with being dual citizens of the same country. They have learned to navigate the complexities of living in two civic and legal systems simultaneously – with the ups and downs of both – and become active participants in American political life."

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ANOTHER P.S.: If you missed my latest Flatland column when it posted this past Sunday, it's still here -- and free.

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AND A THIRD P.S.: Death row exonerees led by Witness to Innocence will gather at 11 a.m. Thursday in Jefferson City, Mo., to call out Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and his office for what the exonerees call Bailey's indifference toward the possibility of executing an innocent person. The protesters also will criticize Bailey for trying to block an Aug. 21 hearing at which a circuit court judge is to consider DNA evidence that could prove Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams is innocent. Williams is scheduled to be executed on September 24. You can watch a live stream of this news conference here as you continue to educate yourself about why capital punishment must end all across the U.S.