In late spring of 2013, only a few months after the horrific murder of twenty schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, I received an email from Katharine Rhodes Henderson, a seminary president in New York. She was ordained a Presbyterian minister, but Katharine may as well have been from the other end of the religious galaxy. Her institution, Auburn Seminary, was known in my community as one of the furthest to the left in the Christian world; in fact, most of my colleagues would not have considered Auburn to be even remotely Christian because it had no specific “statement of faith,” much less a distinctly Christian one. Instead, the school’s statement on “Mission, Vision, and Values” said nothing about the Bible, Jesus Christ, the Resurrection, or heaven and hell but did employ words and phrases like “multi-faith,” “justice,” “dignity and humanity,” and, worst of all, “well-being of the planet.” These were all taboo terms in the religious right—code words for a new regime that was at least pagan if not satanic in origin.
Katharine knew about my work and had originally reached out to me as part of her school’s ongoing mission to build bridges of understanding between groups that were otherwise alienated from each other—another suspicious activity in my old universe. When we had first met, I officially represented a camp that was both estranged from and hostile to her progressive community. A few years before that, I never would have accepted her invitation, but after my doctoral work and subsequent reorientation in my understanding of the gospel, I was as interested in listening to her as she was in listening to me. When we had met at my office in March 2013, she and I had gotten along well and discovered a common language of faith. In this latest email, she asked if I would speak with a friend of hers, a documentary filmmaker named Abigail Disney, who was exploring the role of guns in evangelical culture and focusing on the question: “How can one be pro-life, yet also pro-gun?” Disney and her producer were in Washington, and Katharine hoped I could meet up with them for a short conversation.
Happy to cooperate with what I thought was one of Katharine’s projects, I arranged to meet Ms. Disney and her colleague at Union Station, the city’s main rail depot. As I walked the few blocks from our offices, I passed many places that held special memories for me. The corner where we had gathered in the freezing cold before January’s March for Life marking the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The spot where I began my annual pilgrimage during Holy Week, when I carried the cross near the Capitol at Easter. The Bible Reading Marathon that took place on the west steps of the Capitol Building. For ninety continuous hours, every word of the Bible was read aloud until we reached the end of the book of Revelation. It had become a fixture and reference point in my life and work.
Once at Union Station, I approached the café to see two women sitting at a table, sipping wine. The vague apprehension I had while walking over, which I kept at bay by recalling happy memories, got the better of me. Why on earth did I accept this invitation? Prominent evangelicals had been ousted from their leadership positions for far less egregious associations with the left. I thought of one with whom I had worked extensively over the years. He had lost his job at the National Association of Evangelicals only because he said on the radio he was open to the idea of civil unions for gay couples. My career could be in jeopardy if I spent any time with associates of the Auburn Theological Seminary. I resolved that I would chat briefly, then politely extricate myself from what could easily be seen by my supporters as a dangerous dalliance with leftist operatives.
After exchanging the usual pleasantries, “Abby,” as she insisted I call her, said she wanted to avoid all the topics we would inevitably disagree on and instead, make a conscious choice to inhabit the spaces we did share. I wasn’t sure what those spaces were, but her suggestion loosened me up a bit. We exchanged personal information. I told her about Grand Island, my twin brother, Paul, and our Jewish background; that I had married Cheryl when we were only eighteen, and we had a son and a daughter. She told me about her husband, Pierre, and their four children. Her producer, Kathy Hughes, did the same. We were at least successfully convivial.
Abby’s famous last name went right over my head. It wasn’t until we were halfway through the discussion that it dawned on me that Disney wasn’t a garden-variety family name. I hesitated before asking. If she was surprised I was the only person on the planet who hadn’t googled her before a meeting, she didn’t show it. Yes, she acknowledged, she was from that family. Walt was her great-uncle, and Roy, Walt’s brother and her grandfather, had been the business mastermind of the Disney entertainment empire. This was a woman with filmmaking in her genes and, no doubt, the resources to bring them to reality. My hesitation mounted as I realized that, unlike so many filmmakers with big plans, the odds were in favor that this film would actually be made.
After we’d established some rapport, Abby and Kathy finally raised the issue that had brought us together. They began by showing me data on the astonishing number of firearms owned by people identifying themselves as evangelical Christians. They described the close connection between my community and the National Rifle Association, America’s biggest and most powerful gun rights lobby. Among religious groups, evangelicals were shown to be the most resistant to gun control legislation and also the most likely to have access to firearms. She pointed to our overwhelming support of the new “Stand Your Ground” state laws that allowed anyone who felt threatened to pursue and shoot someone they perceived to be a threat. Abby raised the question of how any evangelical could square that with a belief in the sanctity of human life. While I knew many of our people were hunters and sports shooters, I had never owned a gun and had never really considered how much the popular gun culture had insinuated itself into our religious ethos. In all my years of being involved in our evangelical community—even in the leadership of it—the arming up of Christians had just not been a concern for me. Second Amendment rights seemed to be a given. It was in the Constitution, and that was good enough for me.
Abby wanted to meet and try to engage me, because she didn’t want her project to be just another earnest film that liberals would cherish and conservatives would dismiss. She wanted to get into the heart and mind and, perhaps, even soul of an evangelical Christian and explore the issue from that perspective. But I wasn’t sure I was the right person. After all, I didn’t grow up with guns, and at the Teen Challenge house for recovering addicts, the presence of a firearm always meant serious trouble. In other words, I wasn’t a gun advocate. I was cautious and indifferent. At the same time, at least in theory, I defended everyone’s right to self-defense, even if it meant using a lethal weapon.
My preoccupation was with what I considered more urgent problems in our society, and gun ownership seemed to be a given. It was an unalienable right for Americans. Aligned as I was with the Republicans, I had come to support Second Amendment rights as part of the package. Lately, though, I had experienced a creeping discomfort with what appeared to be my community’s growing infatuation with deadly force. Not knowing what to do about it, I left it alone. After staying with Abby and Kathy longer than I had planned, I apologized for having a busy schedule and announced I would have to go. As far as her invitation to talk about the gun issue on camera, I remained adamantly noncommittal and ironically thanked her for setting me up for a night of lost sleep. There was so much at stake for me personally and professionally that I could have easily chalked this up to another never-to-be-repeated chance meeting. And yet part of me wondered whether I didn’t owe it to myself to think harder about the issue in light of my recent philosophical and theological insights. As I walked back to my office, I literally shook my head, seeing how much this fit into my reevaluation of what it meant to be pro-life. It was also consummately Bonhoefferian with its intersection of faith and ethics. It was also dangerous.
Later that evening, I googled Abigail Disney and was shocked. As a wealthy philanthropist, she had heavily funded causes I had spent a lifetime opposing—especially abortion rights. Most of my community would consider her an enemy. Yet I couldn’t ignore the timing of her appearance in my life. I had just finished an exhaustive study of a church gone damningly wrong and had been looking at the life of a minister who courageously took on his community’s moral failure at the price of his own life. I had learned from Bonhoeffer the importance of treating my opponent decently and respectfully. Abby had raised profound moral and theological questions I found difficult to reconcile in my own heart and soul. This project would require me to move beyond the realm of political gamesmanship, it was true, but I wondered if all my recent work—academically, spiritually, even in my marriage and family life—might have been preparation for taking on another important cause.
I grappled with formulating my own position on Christians and gun control, but my mind kept returning to the fact that this was an issue that could likely rupture most, if not all, of my most important personal and professional relationships. Gun rights were part and parcel of social policy that had been assembled by a coalition of conservative forces over almost forty years. To publicly question the Second Amendment could more quickly lead to my being branded a traitor than if I questioned a core article of Christian faith. The right to bear arms was not some idiosyncratic aspect of one community, like, say, speaking in tongues, but a massive organizing principle in the entire Republican worldview, including that of my religious wing. To cooperate with Abby would mean associating myself with an issue that was impossible to separate from the sort of person they neither liked nor trusted. Guns could be the cause of my professional suicide.
On the other hand, I dreaded that cooperating with Abby would expose me to being constantly judged by her and her peers. Viewed by them the way they seemed to view most evangelicals: as dolts, benighted ignoramuses. Even if I did decide to work with her, I couldn’t shake my concern that I would be treated badly—patronized at best or viewed with contempt. We evangelicals had a long history of feeling defensive about the way we were perceived by educated liberals. Even Cheryl warned me to be very cautious. She had seen me misrepresented by the liberal media in the past, and those wounds remained fresh. I broached the subject with trusted colleagues from the pro-life movement who were adamant in warning me against exploring the relationship between evangelical culture and guns. “Take that one on and kiss your ministry good-bye,” one of them said. And yet, I knew that fundamentally I shared Abby’s concern about the basic contradiction between our community’s commitment to the sanctity of life and our love of guns.
Abby not only typified everything I had fought against as an evangelical, but the film she was planning to make would remind people of who I had once been: the activist with the babies in New York, the guy denouncing gays—moments I now wanted to forget. I just couldn’t relive all of that. Each of those episodes in my life reminded me that I had lost the true north of the gospel in favor of playing to expectations and following a script written by someone else. I had to own my internal conflict. If I had really prayed, if I had listened to the still-small voice within me, perhaps I wouldn’t have done half of it, I thought. I was in absolute turmoil. One moment I wanted to forget ever having met Katharine and Abby, and the next moment I thought maybe this was the opportunity to break from the script again.
Abby persisted and I delayed. For five weeks I struggled and prayed and could not stop thinking about the intersection of gun violence with my life: Dr. Gunn and Dr. Slepian, the five Amish girls, and the twenty children at Newtown, shot while I was just a few train stops away in Yonkers, preparing to preach—even Mom’s first husband and his gun suicide in the attic. My sisters still suffered from that trauma. Each tragic event, with the same thread running through them, a firearm, now seemed to demand a response.
Slowly and inexorably, I realized it was time for me to take a big risk. If this wasn’t worth it, I didn’t know what was. “Peter had to leave the ship and risk his life on the sea,” Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship, “in order to learn both his own weakness and the almighty power of his Lord. If Peter had not taken the risk, he would never have learned the meaning of faith.” I had always identified with Peter, the most flawed of the disciples, always questioning and yet fully human in his agonies. Indeed, it was because of Peter’s very humanity that Christ offered him the stewardship of his church. I needed to explore more deeply the unsettling pairing between God and guns. The crisis in morality and ethics seemed clear, but the theological connection was just out of reach.
The next time Abby called, I surprised her by telling her I would work with her. There was a deep moral failing at the center of my community, I explained, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t see it. To assuage my deepest fears, I offered one caveat: I reserved the right to back out at any time. What I didn’t say to her was that I also planned to couch everything I said on camera in a way I could later disavow. She agreed to my stipulated terms, and planned our first on-camera interview for September 17.
Then, on September 16, a lone gunman opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard. It was a shocking episode of violence on a scale almost unthinkable inside a military complex. That complex also happened to be within sight of my living room window. When I heard what had happened, I grabbed my prayer stole and my Bible and went to the gates of the Navy yard, knelt, and prayed. The issue suddenly went from theoretical to concrete. If I had needed some proof that my decision to work on this issue was the right one, I found it in the deaths of twelve people and the wounding of three others on that day. The next morning I headed to New York, where I met up with Abby’s film crew and we began.
A few weeks into filming, Abby introduced me to another person she planned to include in the story. Lucy McBath had lost her teenage son and only child, Jordan Davis, when he was gunned down in front of a convenience store in Florida by a man who insisted he needed to “stand his ground” and defend himself in what he perceived to be a “life-threatening circumstance.” That circumstance? Four unarmed African-American boys playing loud music in a car.
Lucy was also a born-again Christian, which placed her squarely in the evangelical universe. Her grief consumed her, and yet she never became bitter or lost her faith in God. Instead she saw her loss as God’s call to a personal crusade to end gun violence by addressing the inflammatory Stand Your Ground laws that were being instituted in more and more states. Lucy wasn’t a theologian—she was a laywoman, a faithful member of her Pentecostal church—but she possessed sophisticated spiritual insight. Her faith alone would have been enough to embolden my own journey.
During one of our many conversations, captured on film, she got to the crux of the problem when she said to me, “We have replaced God with our guns.” Lucy’s insightful comment connected directly to the thesis of my dissertation on the danger of political idolatry. Had we, as Americans—and, more specifically, as Christians—begun to idolize guns in their power to save us from perceived threats to our lives—or, worse, our way of life? Were we trusting in objects to protect us as we capitulated to our imaginary fears?
One modern translation renders the second of the Ten Commandments as “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.” As I reflected on this, I thought how a gun is something designed by a human being and sometimes even hand-tooled, at least to some degree, and when we entrust our lives to it, we essentially look to those handcrafted instruments to save us—in effect, bowing down and worshipping them. By venerating the Second Amendment, we evangelicals were in danger of violating the Second Commandment.
The more I thought and prayed about this, the more I consulted the theological literature on the sin of idolatry, the more convinced I became that the wholesale embrace of the gun culture indicated that our moral failure in this area was also a theological emergency for the evangelical church. If we couldn’t correct this serious error, it would inevitably nullify our claim to belief in the sanctity of human life and strip us of all moral credibility; not only that, but our community’s infatuation with firearms would leave us living contrary to the core tenets of our Christian faith—essentially making us apostates.
This was no longer a theoretical exercise for me. Instead, this theological emergency demanded my full attention—and that of my fellow clergy. Unlike the Catholic or Orthodox churches, evangelicals have no universal hierarchy to offer a top-down instruction when it comes to practice and belief. At best, we come to conclusions on theological questions by consensus. Doctrinal and dogmatic conflicts must be handled on a denomination-by-denomination, congregation-by-congregation, and, in many ways, person-by-person basis.
What gave me hope was that by framing the issue in theological terms, I could help my community at least understand the problem. Using the Ten Commandments and the teaching of Christ would no doubt help others to come on board with my newfound mission. I began to think about how to talk to my peers about this issue, and Abby wanted to capture those conversations on film. I decided to start with my closest circle of pro-life cohorts.
On a hot July day in 2015, I sat down with three of my most trusted confidants to talk about guns while Abby’s cameras rolled. Troy Newman had successfully rebuilt Operation Rescue and now ran its headquarters in Wichita, Kansas. I was startled to learn he kept a cache of weapons in his home, his office, and in his truck. My old friend Pat Mahoney was the head of the Christian Defense Coalition and an unqualified pacifist who hated guns and saw no use for them. Allen Church was moderator of the oldest line of evangelical Presbyterians in the U.S. and advocated for Christians to arm themselves to check the power of the state.
We had formed our own little discussion group, four middle-aged men who had grown up together in the fight for life and Christian values in our country. Over lunch in an Irish pub called the Dubliner, I told the men I wanted to talk about a pretty tough subject. I began by reminding them of all the pro-life work we had done together for decades. I then asked if they would share their thoughts about a question that had troubled me: Is deadly force consistent with our pro-life position? I wanted a brutally honest treatment of this subject on film.
Troy answered immediately. “I think it absolutely is, Rob. People of conscience and people of faith have responsible gun ownership to protect innocent human life. More so than their own life. And we need to have people in our congregations armed.” Troy then described the scenario in which someone walks into a crowded church, perhaps a former parishioner who had come unglued, and pulls out a gun, threatening to take out the whole congregation. If there were not someone else with a weapon, it would be mass homicide, because the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
I may not have been surprised by what he said, but the speed with which the conversation simultaneously escalated and degenerated took me by surprise.
“You’re living in a delusional fantasyland that you’ve created for yourself in the ivory towers of Washington,” Troy snapped. “You don’t live in the real world.”
I had to work on controlling my temper. “Look, Troy, if you want to hurl that kind of accusation, I could easily say you’re living in a delusional world where the good guys know where to fire and how to fire and they win every time. That’s not the way it happens in a violent confrontation when bullets are flying. Drawing the bead and firing the silver bullet and ending the melee and everything comes back to peace and quiet—that just does not comport with reality.”
“Don’t own one, okay, Rob?” Troy retorted. “You’re afraid of guns, you leave them to other people. I’m not afraid of guns.”
“You know one of the reasons that I’m afraid of them?” I asked. “Because I don’t trust myself in the moment of crisis when I’m awash in adrenaline. I do not trust my judgment, and I’m amazed at how much you trust yours. I’m amazed by that, Troy.”
Pat and Allen both offered energetic arguments on either side of the debate. We spoke for almost two hours and ate very little. By the time we left, we had replicated the intransigence of the gun debate in the country. None of us had changed our minds, but I had a much better appreciation for what I was in for as I waded deeper into this quagmire. If four old friends who agreed on some of the other most volatile social issues in the country could not find common ground on this one, how could any question about guns be resolved?
My vision had been permanently altered around this issue. The more I attempted to discuss it with those around me, the clearer it became that this was a more serious divide than I had ever imagined, particularly between the generations. When I spoke to middle-aged and older evangelical Christians, they expressed the same opinions I had heard from Troy and Allen at that table in the Dubliner. But younger people sided more with my point of view, or the pacifism of Pat, and they were relieved that someone was finally addressing this problem. Many pastors under the age of forty viewed the obsession with the Second Amendment as being inconsistent with the deepest Christian ethical principles. I had worried about losing my old connections—which would happen—but in this work, I was able to build a bridge to the next generation.
In one discussion with young evangelicals, a college student stood up, crying. She described the Sunday school class of her youth, which required children to go to target practice after the lesson for the sole purpose of self-defense—in other words, to learn how to kill human beings. She could never understand how that fit into her Christian belief system. Young evangelicals remained solidly pro-life, but they had a more nuanced understanding about abortion as well as about gay, lesbian, and transgender people. They actually had LGBTQ friends, they knew them intimately, and they realized they shouldn’t be turned into caricatures or political pawns. They were also unafraid to question the presuppositions, dogmatism, and taboos of our community. They yearned for open and unrestricted exploration of all these critical subjects. They weren’t interested in fighting ideological opponents and they rejected what they perceived as my generation’s dismissal of our common humanity. This was the kind of integration of the Beatitudes in real life I had craved. My spiritual journey, my academic work, and my experience with Cheryl and my family were all beginning to harmonize. But the gap between the community that had defined and supported me and who I was was widening. I worried that the differences would be irreconcilable.
Throughout the rest of 2014, work on the film became a big part of my life as Abby’s crew followed me around the country, to churches, conferences, pro-life leadership meetings, even to a shooting range, where I actually fired a variety of weapons. I felt both the thrill of having so much power in my hands and the fear of what these weapons could do if I pointed them in the wrong direction. That was especially true with the AR-15, the semiautomatic long gun often referred to as an “assault-style weapon.” It reminded me very much of the military M16, romanticized during the Vietnam War. I remember as a young boy being enthralled with the images of soldiers in the jungles with that handsome, seemingly all-powerful weapon, barrel extended upward, the gun’s stock propped on the inside of the elbow and hand confidently wrapped around its grip. In those days, the weapon seemed magical to me, but as I took it in my hands at the range, I felt something very different about it. This was the weapon that had been turned on those children, mostly six-year-olds, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. This was the gun that the chaplains, who were among the first responders, told me literally blew apart those small bodies, dismembering and disfiguring them. It was no longer magical in my mind but monstrous.
The crew and I also went to an NRA convention and I threaded my way through the massive crowd, looking at the immense amounts of firepower in the vast exhibit hall: new weapons, bullets, sighting devices, rifles, handguns, new gear for carrying concealed pistols, holsters, munitions that a small army would envy. Billy Graham’s son, Reverend Franklin Graham, offered the opening prayer. “Our country is in trouble,” he said. “Father, we know there’s a lot of people in this country that would like to register guns and take ’em away.”
The most difficult part of this stage of my new work on the gun issue was interacting with the people who were most likely to passively reject my message. I had always enjoyed spirited debates and had had plenty in my pro-life activist days, but quiet, unspoken rejection was harder for me to deal with. I’d rather have someone engage me in a disagreement than silently write me off. As I planned my first sermons and public statements on the spiritual crises surrounding Christians and guns, another terrible mass shooting episode took away the luxury of having time to formulate just the right words.
In May of 2014, as I sat back for the first time in months to simply contemplate how I would convey my new ideas in sermonic form, twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger went on a shooting rampage at the University of California, Santa Barbara, killing six people and injuring fourteen others. I called the father of Chris Michael-Martinez, one of the victims who died. This was the first time I would speak to a loved one of a gun violence victim in real time. His grief was raw, his rage consuming. Mr. Martinez, a lawyer, demanded to know “where the hell the clergy are on this matter?” I needed an answer for this man. I would have to be more public, and on a much quicker timetable than I had imagined. I decided this was the time to do it. My office put out a press release announcing I would go to California to talk about evangelicals and the issue of gun violence in the wake of another tragedy.
The people on my staff who handle media approached this press event as we had all the others, sending out the release to the scores of reporters on our contact list, making advance phone calls to local leaders, issuing invitations to colleagues to join me in making statements. We could always rely on a certain contingent of conservative and pro-life news agencies to cover our activities. They almost never disappointed us.
On the plane to California, I polished my remarks and tried to imagine myself in Mr. Martinez’s place, grieving for my son, Matthew. I couldn’t imagine the pain. When I reached Isla Vista, I presented my first public statement on the problem of gun violence, attached my name to this issue, and spoke about my concerns. I assumed it would make some headlines, at least in the always reliable Christian media outlets. “We are in crisis in America,” I said. “And saying and doing nothing in the wake of this kind of horror and loss is not right or good. I am here today to challenge my fellow clergy. To step forward now and speak their hearts and minds on this subject. To courageously offer clear spiritual, moral, and ethical guidance on this life-and-death matter. The time for the clergy to be brave is now. There is no more time to wait, no more time to be silent. May God help us.”
There were no reporters, no cameras, no satellite dishes; there was no coverage. One person was there: a passerby with a cell phone. He took a few pictures and left. This was going to be a lonely road.