Abstract: My presentation will address religion and armed self-defense in the United States through an examination of the historical emergence of religiously inflected gun cultures.

On Dec. 29, 2019, a man with a gun killed two people during a Sunday morning service at the West Freeway Church of Christ before being shot and killed by Jack Wilson, a member of the church’s security team. Wilson, interviewed the following day, explained, “I don’t feel like I killed a human, I killed an evil.”1 Research reveals a whole network of volunteer church security teams across the country, many calling themselves “sheepdogs” who protect the flock. Within an American culture of patriarchy and gun ownership, sheepdogs articulate a standardized biblical exegesis promoting armed defense and employ a binary conception of good and evil. My study of these sheepdogs has prompted me to ask how armed self-defense became such a cozy fit with contemporary evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in the U.S. This has necessitated an investigation into the role of guns in the history of the United States and how they have been used by people in different ways and for different purposes by people of different genders, races, and religious groups. Then, I trace this theme forward again as gun manufacturers and proponents transformed American gun cultures rooted in militarism and hunting into gun sportsmanship and finally into what sociologist David Yamane calls Gun Culture 2.0, centered around armed self-defense. Here I focus on three overlapping religiously inflected gun cultures and their practices: armed volunteer church security members; concealed carry lifestyle influencers; and survivalists.

Challenges to the study of firearms abound, ranging from the siloed locations of gun researchers to the dearth of reliable data, due in part to the de facto 1996-2018 freeze on federal funding for gun research. Yet, with our expansive methodological toolkit and our interdisciplinarity, scholars trained in religious studies are uniquely positioned to take on this challenge.