Imagine the following sign at your church door: “please hand your gun to the greeter before entering” or imagine the following bulletin footnotes: “please leave your gun in your seat as you proceed to the altar” or “please leave your gun holstered during the passing of the peace.” Of course, none of these notifications would be legally sufficient to prevent guns from being carried into a church in many states, but the specificity of the restrictions ought to give us pause.
For those who support gun ownership and honestly believe that more guns would produce greater safety, the general idea of having a gun in church (or anywhere else) brings a sense of security. However, when we begin to imagine the actual things we do in church, the incongruity of doing these things with a gun at our side (or our neighbor’s side) ought to produce some theological dissonance.
What would it mean to pass peace with an openly carried firearm? My wonder is not just how it would feel but how the very act might come to mean something different.
I am less interested here in a general argument about Christians owning or carrying guns than in the more specific question of whether it would ever be liturgically appropriate to bring a gun to church.
A friend of mine, who is both a priest and a liturgy professor, once led his congregation through a renovation of their sanctuary. As they made decisions about what should be present in the sanctuary space, he returned again and again to a central question, “what does this object do in the worship space?”
The idea was that everything present during worship affects the activity of worship—the cross, the baptismal font, the altar, the rack of pamphlets at the back, the flags, the banners, etc. If the object did not do something that contributed to the purpose of the liturgy, then it was removed from the space.
So, in this spirit, I am led to ask, what does the presence of a gun do to a worship space? How would it affect the carrier (if concealed) and others (if open) as they sought to do what the liturgy asks us to do—that is, to bring ourselves openly and vulnerably to the altar at which Christ made himself supremely vulnerable unto death? Can one bring a gun to the altar and still in any meaningful way receive the body and blood with empty and open hands?
This question of carrying guns in church has spilled over in Texas to the question of carrying guns on a seminary campus. On June 1, 2015, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the “Campus Carry” law, which permits holders of a concealed handgun license to carry a handgun on campuses of higher education beginning August 1, 2016.
Seminary of the Southwest is currently undertaking a legally required process of consultation after which we can opt out of the law through a vote of the governing board. The seminary currently has a policy against firearms on campus or in campus housing, but this policy will have to be reaffirmed to meet the legal requirements of the new law.
This law, then, gives us the opportunity to meet and talk and hear one another on a culturally controversial issue. If we reaffirm our prohibition of firearms it will be because we have thought again as a community about what the presence of guns does in our common space, how it shapes the reality of our campus, the conversations of our classrooms, and the worship of our chapel.
This discussion will, first, allow us to model honest Christian discernment around a contested issue and, second, require us to say again to ourselves and to others what it is that makes us different as the Body of Christ. It is regrettable that this conversation is brought on by a law seeking to extend the presence of guns into a space of higher education and Christian formation, but the process itself may turn out to be a gift.
How would you be affected if someone openly carried a handgun into your worship space?
Where does our safety come from as Christians? What would it look like if security had become our god? How would we know?
