THE LEADING CAUSE of death for children in 2020 wasn’t COVID-19. It wasn’t cancer. And it wasn’t car crashes. Rather, more than 4,300 of our children in the United States died by firearms — the first time in at least 40 years that guns have accounted for more deaths than motor vehicle incidents.

The numbers are stark: More than 110 people in the U.S. are killed every day with guns, while more than 200 others are shot and wounded. “Gun violence in any form — any form — leaves a mark on the lives of those who are personally impacted,” Giselle Morch, a deacon and mother whose son, Jaycee, was shot and killed in their home, told Sojourners. “So many of us will never be the same.”

On July 19, 2017, Morch took her grandson to Vacation Bible School, where she played the role of the Lord in a skit from Judges about Gideon and the Midianites. “One of the lines was ‘For God and for Gideon,’” Morch said. “And when I got home, that’s when the battle was: That’s when my own son was murdered — my son who said, ‘I may not change the world, but I want to inspire many.’”

One thing about the senseless loss of Jaycee has always been clear to Morch: “This could have been prevented.” Shortly after he was killed, Morch began volunteering with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America to advocate for cultural and legislative change. She has since joined Everytown for Gun Safety’s Survivor Fellowship Program to connect with others who have been impacted by gun violence. “There are others in this movement, because it’s not a moment,” Morch said. “A moment was when my son died; a movement is the call to action to make the change so that nobody else does.”

Embedded in our psyche

IN JUNE, NEARLY a decade after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., the first significant piece of gun violence prevention legislation in nearly 30 years was signed into law. It was a major victory for survivors like Morch and gun violence prevention groups like Everytown. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act followed a string of shootings at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, the Tops Market in Buffalo, N.Y., and elsewhere. It seeks to address the roots of gun violence by enhancing background checks, disarming convicted domestic abusers, and investing in mental health services to address the approximately 60 percent of annual gun deaths that occur by suicide.

In an increasingly divided Congress and country, the bipartisan breakthrough showed that conversations about guns — perceived as one of America’s most contentious policy issues — might signal a key to finding common ground. “I’m not sure that there is an issue that Americans agree on more than that we need to be doing more to prevent gun violence in this country,” Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, told Sojourners. Recent polling backs Watts up: Three-fourths of Americans believe that gun violence is a “major problem” in the United States, and similar numbers support “common sense gun legislation” such as universal background checks, preventing those convicted of domestic violence from purchasing a firearm, and setting 21 as the federal minimum age to purchase a gun.

But supporting common sense doesn’t mean that the country with more guns than people is ready to disarm. More than 40 percent of Americans own a gun or live in a household where one is present, and more than two-thirds of gun owners say a primary reason for having a firearm is “self-defense” — even though the risk of homicide or suicide can increase by as much as three times with the presence of guns in a home, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

The U.S. allegiance to firearms is rooted in religious, cultural, political, and economic reasoning — and there are powerful players keeping this embedded in our psyche. “The reason we have a 25-times-higher gun homicide rate than any other [high-income] nation is because we have something that no other nation does,” Watts said. “It’s a gun lobby that has essentially been allowed to write our nation’s gun laws — laws that are meant to profit gun makers, not protect constituents. It is the sort of logical outcome of that that we have a gun violence crisis.”

Too many gun owners are buying into what the gun lobby is selling: fear. But the gun marketers aren’t only peddling fear; they are also tapping into a “savior complex” deeply embedded in the American religious psyche. When you consider that white evangelicals are more likely than any other faith groups (or the average U.S. citizen) to own a gun, it’s clear that Christians must continue to take an interest in this issue — because the gun lobby has already taken an interest in Christians.

The rise of Christian Reconstructionism

ONE ROOT OF gun culture in the U.S. was the white fear that grew out of the successful effort to integrate public schools in the 1950s and the subsequent civil rights movement. Soon after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education invalidated the separate but equal standard in public education, the Christian school (and, later, homeschool) movement gained ground — with Christian Reconstructionists leading the way.

Rousas John Rushdoony, “the father of Christian Reconstructionism,” was a Calvinist philosopher and ardent segregationist who “argued that it was unbiblical to have the civil government overseeing education because that belonged within the purview of the family,” according to Julie Ingersoll, a professor at the University of North Florida and scholar of religion, the Religious Right, and American culture. “He advocated that not just in his writings, but also in helping people establish these alternative schools,” Ingersoll told Sojourners. “And even more than that, when those alternative schools had to establish their legal right to exist autonomously from government regulation, he served as an expert witness in court cases, arguing that it was a fundamental First Amendment, religious freedom right to choose how to educate your children.”

Rushdoony and other Christian Reconstructionists used the “virtue of home schools and Christian schools” as a mechanism to bring about a shift in the larger conservative Christian culture by basing their framework in an apologetics position called presupposition, Ingersoll said. According to Reconstructionists, how we exist in the world comes down to “two possible realities: Either you believe in and get your authority from the Bible and God, or you believe that you on your own can figure out better answers,” Ingersoll said. “And for these folks, that is actually the sin that’s in the Garden of Eden: deciding good and evil for yourself.” According to this perspective, if all human actions — including, say, writing the Bill of Rights — flow either from sinful disposition or biblical revelation, then the right to bear arms is either fatally flawed or a divine gift from God.

Gun Owners of America (GOA), the second-largest pro-gun group in the country (behind the NRA), would lean toward the latter. In NPR’s Pulitzer-winning investigative series on “the most uncompromising corner of the gun debate,” journalists called GOA the “Johnny Appleseed of the whole no-compromise movement,” a seed that grew, in part, due to Rushdoony. GOA’s founder, the late California state senator H.L. Richardson was, in Rushdoony’s words, a “friend” and a “very fine Christian, thoroughly reformed,” who founded the GOA in 1976 in response to a series of gun control measures that passed throughout California and the rest of the U.S.

“We don’t get to the kind of conservative evangelicalism that we have dominating today that has become compatible with QAnon, and pro-Trump, and basic authoritarianism — you don’t get to all of that without this pivotal figure Rushdoony,” Ingersoll told Sojourners. “Persecution narratives, anticipation of martyrdom, conspiracies — all those kinds of qualities have overtaken conservative evangelicalism in the last 50 years. And I see this movement, Christian Reconstruction, as part of that.”

The power of Christian Reconstructionism is not found in the movement’s numbers. It has always been a fringe movement of a small minority of Christians, and few people openly identify as Reconstructionists today. Rather, the enduring legacy of Reconstructionist ideology — including the way that deep-seated racism and a strong skepticism for government authority are couched in an allegiance to God — is found in the way it has infiltrated political and cultural structures today. “[Reconstructionists] started fostering a view of an adversarial relationship: Christians vs. everybody outside of the Christian world,” said Ingersoll. “Is it still around? Yeah, it’s everywhere.”

Even the National Rifle Association, arguably the most well-known player in the American gun rights conversation, has recognized the value of getting Christians on its side to gain financial and ideological traction in the U.S. culture war. Rev. Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who challenges pro-life Christians to reconsider their relationship with guns, told Sojourners he was on “the ground floor” of the “political co-optation of evangelicalism” in the early 1980s because of the “seduction of power and control” that it offered. Although he’s since shifted his views, Schenck — who chose to become a lifetime member of the NRA to better understand its culture — had a front-row seat to the effects of the enmeshment of secular and spiritual concepts by the leading voice in America’s gun lobby. In 1977, a fringe group of employees took over the NRA at its annual convention, dramatically altering its structure from a sportsman’s association to one devoted to the “defense of the Second Amendment.” Jessica Dawson, a professor at the U.S. Military Academy, revealed in an analysis of the NRA’s journal American Rifleman that the organization post-overthrow “has increasingly used religious language to shape the discourse surrounding the Second Amendment,” transforming it “from an important Constitutional amendment to an article of faith in religious nationalism.”

Schenck said, “The NRA needed access to church communities, and here’s one reason: Because when you make something a matter of faith, not only do people stop questioning it, but they’re actually forbidden from questioning it. It gives them a fantastic advantage over their competition.”

While the NRA has been attempting to enshrine the “divine right” of guns in America, as Christians, we’re called to think more deeply about where our allegiances lie.

‘What kind of society do we want to be?’

“THE CONSTITUTION IS a document that I revere, having been a diplomat and defended it for 30 years, but it’s not the Bible,” said Rev. Anne E. Derse, deacon and minister of community engagement at St. John’s Norwood Episcopal Church in Maryland. “We do have to look with a much more nuanced view at the rights that are guaranteed under the Constitution,” Derse told Sojourners. “And we, as Christians, have to really think: How can we permit what is going on right now?”

Following the string of mass shootings in the last decade, Derse’s congregation established a gun violence prevention ministry with three goals: to educate themselves and their community on the many facets of gun violence in the U.S.; to pray for change and for those most impacted by the issue; and to take congregational action to lobby at the federal, state, and local levels for gun violence prevention legislation and regulations. The church also participated in civil dialogues with gun owners in Washington, D.C., and in Wyoming to sincerely understand their point of view. And although the two “sides” had, at times, differing views on what to do about America’s gun problem, Derse said there was universal consensus in the group that “something needs to be done.”

“There’s no us vs. them, and it’s not zero-sum. It’s a question of what kind of society do we want to be?” Derse said. “Are we a society that is willing to pay with the blood of our children, in the blood of our elders, in the blood of our neighbors, for an unfettered right to carry and use a gun whenever, however, whoever wants to do so? You have to answer that question that we are, in fact, that kind of society — because that is what is happening right now.”

The U.S. gun violence crisis is too multifaceted for simple solutions. But Christians must challenge themselves to remain committed to repeated, intentional action — starting now.

Taking action can begin by reflecting on scripture and what it means to faithfully follow Jesus while considering your relationship to firearms. If you don’t own a gun, examine your heart to expose judgments — conscious or not — that you may have formed about the other side of the gun issue. For those who are part of the 40 percent of Americans who live in a household with a firearm, Michael W. Austin, author of God and Guns in America, urges “praying and soul-searching” with others to determine whether your heart is oriented toward guns as tools or as idols. “We’re supposed to be willing to give up everything, right? And if I’m a gun owner, that includes guns,” Austin said. “If I say, ‘No, I will never do that,’ and I confess my ultimate allegiance to Christ, then those things are in tension.”

RAWtools, an organization based in Colorado that lives out the biblical concept of turning swords into plowshares by turning guns into garden tools, is one place that people can go if they determine that their faith conflicts with their firearms. They have a nationwide “disarming network” where people can donate their weapon and “be a part of turning it into something that brings life,” said Mike Martin, the founder and executive director of RAWtools.

For Martin, a faithful orientation toward guns begins with one question: Do we need this firearm to be a Christian? “I don’t think any reasonable or commonsense person would say yes,” Martin told Sojourners. “I think it really comes down to: Is this what Jesus is calling us to do? And if we are serious and believe in the reconciliation of all things, then the fewer lethal tools we have in our toolbelt, the better we’re going to be at that.”

Most important, Christians are called to pursue the greatest commandments — and to recognize when our own human nature gets in the way. “Hate is a sin, and hate paired with a firearm is deadly,” said Giselle Morch, the mother whose son was killed five years ago. “We are commanded to love our neighbors.” The person who chose not to obey that commandment changed Morch’s life forever. On the 19th of every month — the day in 2017 that Jaycee was killed — Morch visits the cemetery where he is buried. She remembers his favorite color (red), his talent at all sports (especially football), and that he loves the rain; she thinks of him in the present tense because what God “created does not die; it lives on in another realm,” she said.

A world that exists without gun violence is in Morch’s thoughts and prayers every day. But “because a parent should not outlive their own child,” Morch puts those prayers into action — and she urges other Christians to do the same. “It’s up to us as faith leaders to show this world, to show this nation, to show our community who God is, who Jesus is, to bring people back to Christ. And the way to do that is to show love to everybody. The way to do that is to choose love over hate. Those guns, they show hatred,” Morch said. “Can we stop gun violence? Yes, we can. The question is, do you want to?”