America and the Cult of Firearms

Pushback against social change is not just limited to race either. White nationalists and Christian nationalists are also very explicitly defending a specifically patriarchal social order. Conservative Christians often defend male headship or "complementarianism", which is the idea that women are somehow equal. But not really. This patriarchal order, the argument goes, is increasingly threatened by feminists, homosexuals, transgender people and the so-called "gender ideology". These conservatives claim that the real danger today is the so-called war on men, whose ultimate goal is to destroy the "traditional" family, the supposed foundation of traditional social order. This is why, in their view, men can and must push back against all of these forces. The gunmen we read about in the news are just people who have taken this message to heart - and to the extreme. They are often alienated, troubled young men who attribute the problems they faced in their lives to the supposed war on men, and, therefore, are out to attack various Others. The clearest example of that was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando which was explicitly targeting gay people.

Despite the bipartisan bill on restricting access to guns, Americans remain (dare I say) religiously attached to their right to bear arms. Where does this unusual obsession with guns find its roots in American history? 

This attachment to guns is something that is puzzling for non-Americans, as well as many secular progressives in the United States. Looking at Jesus's teachings, turning the other cheek, for example, they see fundamentally nonviolent teachings so it can then seem odd for believers to engage in violence in the name of Christianity. Of course, however, from the moment that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, people have engaged in violence in the name of Christianity to suppress rival religions and heretical movements - during the Crusades, for example. In that sense, the historical relationship between Christianity and violence is always more complicated than it seems.

If we shift our focus to the history of the United States, we see Christians searching for justifications for violence within scripture in two places: one place is the Old Testament, specifically the stories about wars of ancient Israelites with their various enemies and oppressors; and the other place is in apocalyptic teachings, especially the Book of Revelation, which portrays a cosmic battle between good and evil, natural and supernatural. Both of those sets of scriptural references are absolutely core to white Christian nationalism, which is a very old theological tradition within the United States. It fits in with this idea of the English colonists in the New World being the successors of the Biblical Israelites, North America being their promised land and the Native Americans their demonic enemies. This is a trope that you can find throughout history, from the Puritans right up through the war on terror and the Iraq War. 

Guns are, for some, almost sacred objects. They are incredibly important symbols of masculinity, individuality and freedom. That is the work of gun manufacturers, who have played an incredibly important role in the creation of gun culture in the United States. For a long time, guns were mostly sold to the military. This changed after the Civil War when more people suddenly had experiences with guns, and there were more guns in circulation. Gun manufacturers had ramped up capacity for wartime efforts, and suddenly didn't really have anybody to sell guns to. So manufacturers started to market guns as a form of protection, a tool for self-defense, and then increasingly as a kind of a symbol of masculinity. In recent years, they have even begun to do this in a very cynical way, explicitly drawing in religious symbolism. One gun manufacturer, Daniel Defense, markets expensive assault rifles, including those used in the Uvalde shooting, used explicitly scriptural references in their ads. Another gun manufacturer, Spike's Tactical, actually engraves Bible verses on their assault rifles. They are really transforming the gun into a sacred, almost religious object. Some right-wing churches have contributed to this too, raffling off an AR 15 assault rifle, or offering weapons training. It is not unusual in some parts of the United States for parishioners to have guns and bring them into church, where it is legal.

How does religious nationalism relate to racially-motivated violence in American society? Should we consider this brand of nationalism as mimicking religion itself?

White Christian nationalism, as I understand it, is first and foremost a narrative. The story goes something like this: the United States was founded as a Christian nation. The American founders were Orthodox Christians and the founding documents, the Declaration and the Constitution were based on biblical principles. America has been entrusted by God with a mission to spread freedom and Christianity around the world, and to that end has been given extraordinary power and prosperity. 

To be clear, I do not think there are that many people out there who would go much beyond violent rhetoric, but there is a small minority who would and those are the kinds of folks who showed up at the at the US Capitol on January 6^th, the kinds of people who are joining militia groups and actively training in hopes of inciting and engaging in a civil war. 

In a way, this raises another complicated question, which is: what is the relationship between white nationalism and Christian nationalism? When talking about the history of white supremacy in the United States, we will often mention the Ku Klux Klan first, but one thing that is forgotten about that organization is that it was not just anti-Black, it was anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant, too. So, there has always been a complicated relationship between white nationalism and Christian nationalism. Since the Civil Rights movement, a lot of conservative Christians, or at least their leaders, have been distancing themselves from white supremacy and explicit racism, but those boundaries and prohibitions are really beginning to break down. This is in part because of the demographic fear and moral panic amongst a lot of white Christians who historically were the overwhelming majority of American citizens and are now faced with a minority status. The other part of it is that a lot of radical white nationalists find it convenient to portray themselves as defenders of Christian civilization or the Judeo-Christian tradition, or Western civilization or something it sounds nicer than just saying, "I am defending the white race or I am against white genocide". They use Christianity as a fig leaf. You can see this in the mainstreaming of the so-called Great replacement theory. Great replacement theory, which actually has some of its roots in France, was something that you would only encounter in the extreme far-right in the United States. But over the last couple of years, right-wing media figures and political figures, like Tucker Carlson or Ron Johnson. 

Copyright: SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP