“Religion does matter to gun ownership, but not in any one simplistic way,” said David Yamane, a professor of sociology at Wake Forest University who found that evangelical Protestants were more likely to be gun owners compared with mainline Protestants, members of other religions and people with no religious affiliation. Few studies examine gun ownership and religion, but scholars who have explored the subject see a definite link. Sharon Risher’s family were killed, is cordoned off after the mass shooting in 2015.īRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images Religion’s relationship to gunsĪs a pastor who owns and carries a gun, Pomeroy is not an outlier. The Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where three members of the Rev. “The cross and the gun give us two really different versions of power,” said Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist and co-author of “ Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence.” “One of them says, ‘I’m willing to kill,’ and the other one says, ‘I’m willing to die.’” Even so, security-training companies say houses of worship make up the fastest-growing segment of their business as more churches, synagogues, mosques and temples are arming their congregations. However, activists, scholars and pastors now point to a shift in the relationship between religion and guns, with more people of faith realizing that despite a range of views on the proliferation and use of guns, they have a theological and moral imperative to speak out on the issue. But the relationship between religion and guns is often obscured by the horror and tragedy of mass shootings like those that terrorized the Charleston and Sutherland Springs congregations. And, perhaps what’s most important, Risher’s and Pomeroy’s dividing paths highlight two very different relationships between guns and God in America today.Īmericans’ passion for the right to bear arms has a long and well-known history. Yet on the issue of guns, there is a gulf between them. How did these two Christian leaders come to such opposite conclusions? Both read the same Bible, worship the same God and have suffered unfathomable losses to unspeakable violence at the hands of disturbed individuals who managed to acquire legal firearms. Josie Norris / The San Antonio Express-News via AP Pastor Frank Pomeroy, who wears a gun in the pulpit, preaches to his Sutherland Springs, Texas, congregation in 2020. And then if he says, yes, carry that firearm, I have no problem carrying that firearm.” And that’s why it’s important that we go to the Lord and seek what we’re supposed to do individually. Both are equally important, but they’re gifted in different ways. “Some are on the frontline, and some are in the supply room. “God has endowed some of us with the capability to be a warrior and others not,” he said, sitting at his dining room table during a video interview. He is both licensed and trained to use a handgun and often carried one before the shooting at his rural church. Pomeroy, who has a military background and grew up hunting, sees carrying a gun as an extension of his responsibility to protect his flock.

And that just because you have a right to own a gun does not mean you have to exercise the right to use it.” “My thinking is, I don’t condemn anyone for owning a gun, but I want people to realize the power of the violence they hold in their hand when they have a gun. “To me, being a follower of Jesus means that I will always advocate for nonviolence,” Risher told me from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, just a few days after the sixth anniversary of her mother’s murder. Capitol, joins other survivors of gun violence to call for gun control. Sharon Risher, flanked by Democratic senators at the U.S. Pomeroy, a Southern Baptist, armed and trained his church members and routinely wears his weapon in the pulpit. But Risher, a nondenominational Christian pastor, dedicated herself to gun-law reform and reducing access to weapons. This is also a tale of two very different responses to tragedy and trauma.īoth pastors buried their dead, mourned their incalculable losses, read their Bibles, prayed and eventually returned to their ministries. A pregnant woman, her unborn baby and the 14-year-old daughter of the church’s pastor, Frank Pomeroy, were among those killed. Two years later, on a bright Sunday morning in November, a man in a skull face mask fired some 700 rounds outside and inside the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, leaving at least 20 people injured and 26 dead.

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