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<h1>Is gun control a religious issue?</h1>
<h3>
By David Gibson| Religion News Service, <span class="timestamp updated processed">Published: July 23</span>
</h3>
<p>Of all the controversies that have followed in the bloody wake of
Friday’s (July 20) shooting rampage in Aurora, Colo., few have provided
such a clarifying insight into the moral tensions and contradictions in
American culture than the argument over whether gun control is a
religious issue.</p>
<p>The Rev. James Martin, a popular author and Jesuit priest, was
among the first to set out the terms of the debate, when he penned a
column at America magazine arguing that gun control “is as much of a
‘life issue’ or a ‘pro-life issue’ ... as is abortion, euthanasia or the
death penalty (all of which I am against), and programs that provide
the poor with the same access to basic human needs as the wealthy.”</p><p>Martin’s
central point was that abortion opponents spare no effort to try to
shut down abortion clinics or to change laws to limit or ban abortions,
so clearly believers should be committed to taking practical steps to
restrict access to guns.</p><p> “Simply praying, ‘God, never let this
happen again’ is insufficient for the person who believes that God gave
us the intelligence to bring about lasting change,” Martin wrote. “It
would be as if one passed a homeless person and said to oneself, ‘God,
please help that poor man,’ when all along you could have helped him
yourself.”</p><p>The debate is as intense today as it has been after
every gun massacre, but it hasn’t changed the dynamics of the issue for
believers or politicians. It may not this time either. Within hours of
posting his views about gun control as a religious issue on Facebook,
Martin had to shut down comments on the page because of the vitriol his
views provoked.</p><p>Still, the Jesuit’s view was echoed by an array of
religious voices and groups who also called on Christians and other
believers to advocate for policies to curb gun violence, with some
putting the exhortation in an explicitly anti-abortion context.</p><p>
“It’s time to say that unregulated availability of assault weapons is
clearly anti-life,” said Sherry Anne Weddell, co-director of the
Catherine of Siena Institute in Colorado Springs, Colo. “It’s time for
pro-life people to take a stand.”</p><p>The Rev. Frank Pavone, head of
Priests for Life and an anti-abortion activist generally associated with
the religious right, made a similar point:</p><p> “Anyone concerned
about protecting human life has to be concerned about the misuse of
guns, and of anything else that can become a weapon against the
innocent,” Pavone told Religion News Service.</p><p> “It’s the same as
Mother Teresa’s famous quote, ‘If we tell a mother she can kill her own
child, how can we tell others not to kill each other?’”</p><p>There was a
vigorous counterargument, however, that followed two main tracks. One
was to resist any public policy prescriptions and debates as beside the
point, or worse, to see them as an inappropriate “political”
exploitation of a tragedy. The second was to see the gun control debate
as a distraction from a spiritual and theological focus.</p><p>As Mark
Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today, the flagship
evangelical magazine, wrote in an essay on Monday (July 23), “we are
kidding ourselves if we think we have within our national grasp an
educational or psychological or political solution to evil.</p><p> “There is no solution or explanation for evil.”</p><p>A
number of other prominent conservative Christians, like Rep. Louie
Gohmert, R-Texas, and former Republican presidential candidate Mike
Huckabee, took that view a step further and argued that it wasn’t just
the mystery of evil but also the nation’s self-inflicted spiritual
wounds that led to the massacre.</p><p> “We don’t have a crime problem,
or a gun problem, or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin
problem,” Huckabee said on his Fox News show on Sunday. “And since we’ve
ordered God out of our schools and communities, the military and public
conversations, you know, we really shouldn’t act so surprised when all
hell breaks loose.”</p><p>On one level, this debate seems to represent a
classic theological divide: There are those who argue that human beings
should not try to supplant God’s role with their own efforts to redeem
the world, and others who argue that believers have a duty to protect
the God-given gift of life and human dignity.</p><p>On another level,
however, the dispute illuminates the current realities of America’s
political and religious life. The fact is, Americans of all persuasions
have become increasingly opposed to gun control laws, despite the
regular shooting rampages that have targeted houses of worship as well
as movie theaters and military bases.</p><p>No surprise then that in his
remarks on the Colorado shooting, President Obama — who might be seen
as a champion of the “religious left” — has resisted calls to mention
gun control and instead counseled the nation to realize that “such evil
is senseless.”</p><p>Complicating matters politically is that
conservative Christians who form the bulk of the anti-abortion movement
are less enthused than almost everyone else about gun control.</p><p>In
an essay at the Patheos website in which she wondered “why Christians
aren’t bringing the same dedication to talking about guns as we do to
other issues, notably abortion and homosexuality,” Ellen Painter Dollar
recalled her effort to write a piece for Christianity Today in the wake
of the January 2011 shooting of former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle
Giffords and several others.</p><p>Dollar said she “gently” raised the
issue of gun control in the piece but the editors spiked it because
“they felt they ‘cannot win’ on the gun-control issue with their
evangelical readership.”</p><p>Another challenge is that many
conservatives see opposing abortion rights as the paramount issue today,
and adding anything to that agenda could hurt the cause and divide the
movement.</p><p> “Our convictions about the dignity of women and
children harmed by abortion ought to prompt us to stand against criminal
violence and dehumanization wherever it is. But we ought not to let the
term ‘pro-life’ become so elastic as to lose all meaning,” warned
Russell D. Moore, a well-known Christian ethicist and dean of theology
at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.</p><p> “In most cases, the
expansion of ‘pro-life’ is a way to divert attention from the question
of personhood and human rights” Moore wrote in an email.</p><p>Unlike
the gun control debate, Moore added, “The abortion issue isn’t about
prudential means to a common goal, but about legally protecting those
who are subject to lethal violence.”</p><p><br></p></div>
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