Why do some American Christians focus on Guns and Borders?
Question 60046
To observers outside the United States, and to many American believers themselves, a particular strain of American evangelicalism has become closely identified with political positions on firearms and immigration that appear to be held with the same intensity as core doctrinal convictions. The phenomenon raises a legitimate question: when Christians invest as much passion in defending gun ownership and border security as they do in proclaiming the gospel, has something gone wrong? The answer requires both honesty and care, because there are genuine biblical principles at stake alongside genuine distortions.
Understanding the Cultural Context
American Christianity exists within a cultural context that is unique in the Western world. The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution enshrines the right to bear arms as a foundational legal principle, and for many Americans, including many Christians, the defence of constitutional rights is understood as a moral obligation rooted in a broader theology of liberty, self-defence, and protection of the family. Similarly, national borders and immigration policy are understood through a lens that combines patriotism, economic concern, security, and a particular reading of the Old Testament’s treatment of national identity and boundaries.
None of this is inherently sinful. Christians in different nations navigate their civic responsibilities within different constitutional and cultural frameworks, and there is no single biblical template for the political arrangements of a modern nation-state. The Bible does not prescribe a position on gun legislation, and its teaching on immigration does not map neatly onto twenty-first-century policy debates. What the Bible does prescribe is the order of priority in which a Christian holds these convictions.
Where the Distortion Occurs
The problem is not that American Christians hold political views. It is that political identity has, in some visible and influential cases, become fused with Christian identity in ways that distort the gospel witness. When a church’s public reputation is defined more by its position on firearms than by its proclamation of Christ, something has been displaced. When the defence of national borders is articulated with greater urgency than the defence of the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3), the priorities have shifted. When political opponents are treated as enemies to be defeated rather than as people made in God’s image who need the gospel, the church has adopted the posture of a political faction rather than an embassy of the kingdom of God.
Paul’s instruction to Timothy is relevant here: “No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him” (2 Timothy 2:4). Paul is not forbidding civic engagement. He is warning against entanglement, the condition in which secondary loyalties begin to compete with the primary one. A Christian may hold views on gun policy or immigration and express those views through legitimate civic participation. The danger arrives when those views become identity-defining, when they shape the believer’s relationships, language, and emotional investment more than the gospel does.
What Scripture Actually Teaches
On self-defence, Scripture permits the protection of life without making it a central theological category. Jesus told His disciples to buy a sword (Luke 22:36), but He also rebuked Peter for using one (Matthew 26:52) and taught a radical ethic of enemy-love and non-retaliation at the personal level (Matthew 5:39, 44). The right to self-defence is not the same as a mandate for armed readiness, and the difference matters. The Christian’s confidence is in the Lord who keeps and protects (Psalm 121:7-8), not in personal armament.
On immigration and borders, the Old Testament contains extensive instruction about the treatment of the ger, the foreigner or sojourner living among Israel. “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). This does not settle modern immigration policy, because ancient Israel’s theocratic arrangements are not directly transferable to secular nation-states. But it does establish a clear principle: God’s people are to be characterised by generosity and compassion toward the foreigner, not by hostility or indifference.
What Scripture places at the centre is unmistakable. The Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) is the church’s primary mandate. The gospel is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16). The church’s identity is defined by its union with Christ, not by its alignment with any political programme. When any secondary commitment displaces this, even a commitment to something legitimate in itself, the church has lost its way.
A Word from Outside
It is worth hearing the perspective of the global church on this matter. Christians in the UK, Africa, Asia, and Latin America often look at the political entanglement of American evangelicalism with genuine bewilderment. The fusion of faith and firearms, or of gospel and nationalism, is not recognisable as Christianity to much of the worldwide body of Christ. This does not mean the global church is always right or that American Christians are always wrong. But it should give pause. When the church’s witness is unintelligible to fellow believers across the world because it has become indistinguishable from a national political identity, something has gone seriously awry.
So, now what?
Christians everywhere, not only in America, must continually examine whether their political convictions are servants of their faith or competitors with it. The test is not whether a believer holds political views but whether those views have assumed a weight and an emotional intensity that belongs to the gospel alone. The church’s calling is to be salt and light in every culture (Matthew 5:13-16), not to be absorbed into any culture’s partisan conflicts. Christ did not die to make people better Republicans or Democrats. He died to reconcile sinners to God, and that message must always be the loudest thing the church says.
“For our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Philippians 3:20