Why do some American Christians focus on guns and borders?

Question 60046.

Guns and borders occupy a place in the public witness of some American Christians that puzzles believers almost everywhere else in the world. I am writing as a British Baptist minister, and I want to be careful, because it is easy for an outsider to be superior about another country’s debates while being blind to the ones in his own.

Still, the question is a fair one and it gets asked of me often enough. Why do guns and borders appear so prominently in the political theology of a section of American evangelicalism, and is there any biblical warrant for the prominence? Let me try to answer the first part with sympathy and the second part with candour.

Understanding where the emphasis comes from

The American story has a shape that the rest of us do not share. It begins with people crossing an ocean to escape state coercion in matters of conscience, and it is founded on a revolution against a distant government. Suspicion of centralised power is therefore not an eccentricity there; it is close to a national instinct, and it was written into the constitutional order deliberately.

Add to that the frontier experience, where for generations the nearest law officer might be a day’s ride away and a household really was responsible for its own protection. Self reliance in that setting was not a slogan but a survival skill, and cultures remember such things long after the conditions have changed.

So when American Christians talk about guns and borders, they are usually not making a naked policy argument. They are expressing a set of instincts about liberty, self government and the limits of the state, instincts that have a long history and that many of them associate, rightly or wrongly, with the survival of their freedom to worship.

Where guns and borders become a distortion

The difficulty is what happens when those instincts get fused with the gospel. A political preference is a legitimate thing for a Christian to hold. It becomes something else when it is treated as a test of orthodoxy, so that a believer’s standing in the congregation depends on his position on firearms legislation or immigration policy rather than on his confession of Jesus.

That fusion is idolatry in slow motion, and it does not require anybody to bow to a statue. It only requires that a secondary loyalty be given the weight that belongs to a primary one. When guns and borders become identity markers for a church, the church has adopted a badge that the New Testament never issued.

There is also a straightforward matter of proportion. If a visitor sat through a year of a congregation’s teaching and could tell you its views on immigration but not its view of justification, something has gone badly wrong with the allocation of pulpit time.

What Scripture actually teaches

Take the two subjects in turn. On the state and force, which is where the argument about guns and borders usually begins, Romans 13 is the key text. The governing authority does not bear the sword in vain and is God’s servant, an avenger who carries out wrath on the wrongdoer. You can read it at Romans 13:4. That passage grants a real and God given role to the magistrate in restraining evil, and Christians who read it honestly cannot be simple pacifists about the state.

On the individual, the emphasis runs differently. Jesus told Peter to put his sword away, and Paul tells believers never to avenge themselves but to leave it to the wrath of God. Self defence is not forbidden in Scripture, and Exodus 22 makes a distinction between a householder confronting a night intruder and a killing in daylight, but the New Testament does not present armed readiness as a Christian virtue.

On foreigners, the Old Testament is remarkably insistent. The word ger, usually translated sojourner, appears more than ninety times, and Israel is repeatedly commanded to love the sojourner as herself because she had been a stranger in Egypt. See Leviticus 19:34. At the same time Scripture recognises nations, boundaries and the ordering of peoples, and Acts 17 says God determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.

Holding both truths without collapsing either

So a Christian can hold, without contradiction, that a nation may set and enforce a border and that the person arriving at that border bears the image of God and must be treated accordingly. The Bible gives us both a doctrine of nations and a command to love the foreigner, and the honest work is in holding them together rather than choosing the one that suits our politics.

That is why I am reluctant to give a policy prescription from the pulpit on immigration numbers. Scripture supplies the principles and leaves the application to prudence, and prudence is precisely where Christians of equal sincerity will differ. What Scripture does not leave to prudence is the manner in which we speak about people, and that is where much of the damage is done.

The same applies to firearms. I can see how a believer weighing Romans 13 and the duty to protect his family reaches one conclusion, and how another believer weighing the sheer volume of blood reaches another. Neither is a heretic. Both should be able to break bread together on Sunday.

A word from outside

Since I am not American, let me offer the observation an outsider is placed to make. From here, the association of the gospel with guns and borders is one of the most significant obstacles to evangelism among people under forty in Britain and Europe. They have met the association through media before they have met a Christian, and it has already answered the question of what Christianity is for.

That is not a reason to change our doctrine, and I have no interest in trimming the faith to suit European sensibilities either. It is a reason to be careful about what we attach the name of Jesus to. Paul was willing to give up his rights, which he genuinely possessed, rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel.

And let me apply the knife closer to home before I finish. British evangelicals have our own version of this. We have our respectable political assumptions, our unexamined class loyalties and our sacred cows, and we are just as capable of confusing them with the faith. The speck and the plank do not respect national boundaries.

What a watching world hears

There is an evangelistic dimension to all this that gets too little attention. Paul became all things to all people so that by all means he might save some, and he was prepared to surrender liberties he genuinely possessed when exercising them would put a stumbling block in somebody’s path. That principle has obvious application here. A believer may have every right to a political conviction about guns and borders and may still choose not to make it the loudest thing about him.

I do not say that to recommend cowardice. There are moments when a Christian must speak into public life and take the consequences, and history is full of believers who did so at real cost. The question is one of proportion and of what we allow to be attached to the name of Jesus in the mind of a stranger who has never opened a Bible.

Ask yourself what a colleague who knows you are a Christian could predict about you. If they could predict your voting habits more confidently than they could predict your kindness, honesty and readiness to forgive, then the witness has been miscalibrated somewhere.

Guarding the unity of the church

Romans 14 is the chapter nobody quotes in these arguments and everybody needs. Paul is dealing with believers who held opposite convictions on matters of conscience, and his instruction is not that they should reach agreement but that they should stop despising and judging one another, since each will give an account to his own Master. Applied to guns and borders, that is a demanding word for both sides of a congregation.

It also tells us something about what a local church is for. It is not a lobbying organisation with a worship service attached. It is a body in which people who would never otherwise have met are bound together by a shared Saviour, and that binding is itself part of the message we preach to the world.

When a church divides over policy, the world learns that the gospel is not strong enough to hold people together. That is a lesson we cannot afford to teach.

So, now what?

Take an inventory of your own convictions and sort them honestly into three piles: what Scripture commands, what Scripture permits, and what you happen to prefer. Most of us have items sitting in the wrong pile, and the ones in the wrong pile are the ones we defend most fiercely, which is a useful diagnostic in itself.

Then ask the practical question. If somebody watched your church for a year, what would they conclude it was chiefly about? If the answer is guns and borders, or indeed any political configuration, the remedy is not a different politics but a recovered gospel. I have written more on the wider issue in should Christians be involved in politics and in should churches be involved in politics.

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

Leviticus 19:33 and 34, ESV