Chapter 17: Guns, Violence, and Enemies

There is no way to write this chapter without offending some readers, and I am not going to try. The subject sits too close to the center of the argument to be treated politely. I will say at the outset what I mean and do not mean. I do not mean that a Christian cannot own a firearm. I do not mean that a Christian cannot serve in the armed forces. I do not mean that self-defense is a sin, or that the state has no legitimate use of force, or that police officers do not have a difficult job. Those are separate arguments, and honest Christians disagree on them.

What I mean is narrower and, I think, undeniable to anyone who reads the New Testament with an open Bible. Conservative American Christianity has developed, over the last several generations, a culture around weapons, violence, and enemies that cannot be reconciled with the teachings of Jesus, and that increasingly does not even try. That culture treats gun ownership as a nearly sacramental practice. It treats the willingness to use lethal force against another human being as evidence of Christian courage. It treats immigrants, protesters, political opponents, the mentally ill on the street, and anyone else who fits the category of threat as enemies to be feared and, if necessary, killed. And it does all of this while carrying a Book whose central figure said, from a mountainside, in one of the most famous sermons ever preached, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

The gap between the culture and the Book is not a matter of interpretation. It is not a matter of context. It is not a matter of subtle theological nuance. It is a plain, brutal, unmistakable contradiction, and the only reason more Christians do not see it is that they have been trained not to.

The Sermon on the Mount Is Not Optional

The Sermon on the Mount is not, in the Gospel of Matthew, a private teaching for spiritual elites. It is not a set of impossible ideals meant to drive us to grace by showing us how far short we fall. It is not a description of what heaven will be like once we are all glorified. It is Jesus's inaugural public teaching, delivered to ordinary people, describing how the citizens of his kingdom are supposed to live in the world that is actually here.

And in that sermon, on the subject of enemies and violence, he says this. You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles (Matt 5:38-41).

Then, a few verses later, the passage that ought to hang above every altar in every conservative American church. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust (Matt 5:43-45).

Read those verses out loud. Do not skim them. Do not soften them with the assumption that you already know what they mean. Read them as if you had never heard them before and let them do what they are doing. Jesus is describing a way of dealing with hostile people that is not the way most of the human race deals with hostile people. He is not saying "love your enemies in your heart while you shoot them in the doorway." He is not saying "love your enemies in principle while you dehumanize them in your rhetoric." He is describing a positive, active, costly love directed at the specific people who wish you harm, and he is grounding it in the character of the Father, who sends rain and sunlight to the very people the disciples would like to see cursed.

The historic Christian church, for its first three centuries, took these words seriously enough that widespread Christian participation in the Roman military was rare, controversial, and often refused. Tertullian, Origen, Justin Martyr, and others wrote openly against Christians taking human life, even in war, even in self-defense. Whether they were right or wrong about every application, the fact that they treated the question as a live one is a rebuke to a modern American Christian culture that treats the question as long since settled in favor of any use of lethal force whatsoever.

Put Your Sword Back Into Its Place

The most direct thing Jesus ever said about weapons is not a subtle saying. It is not embedded in a parable that requires unpacking. It is a command spoken in a specific moment, to a specific disciple, holding a specific weapon.

The scene is in Gethsemane. Judas has arrived with a crowd from the chief priests. Peter, still ready to fight for his rabbi, draws a sword and slices the ear off a slave named Malchus. Jesus reacts immediately.

In Matthew's telling: put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword (Matt 26:52).

In John's telling: put your sword into its sheath. Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me (John 18:11).

In Luke's telling, Jesus goes further. He heals the slave's ear (Luke 22:51). The man came to arrest him. Jesus healed him. That is not a footnote. That is the last recorded healing of Jesus's earthly ministry. He heals an enemy in the act of arresting him, and he rebukes his own disciple for the violence that made the healing necessary.

If you had one sentence to summarize the Christian ethic on weapons, "put your sword back into its place" is a strong candidate. Not "own a sword and use it wisely." Not "own a sword for self-defense but only in extremity." Not "carry a sword under your cloak in case the world turns against you." Put it away. Put it in its sheath. Draw no more Malchus blood.

There is a passage in Luke 22 that gun-carrying Christians sometimes quote in an attempt to rebut this. In it, Jesus tells his disciples on the night of his arrest that whoever has no sword should sell his cloak and buy one, and the disciples answer, look, Lord, here are two swords, and he says, it is enough (Luke 22:36-38). This has occasionally been read as Jesus endorsing personal armament.

Read carefully, the passage does the opposite. Jesus is explaining that he is entering the hour in which he will be numbered with the transgressors (Luke 22:37, quoting Isa 53:12). The two swords are enough because the two swords are enough to fulfill the prophecy, not enough to fight off a Roman detachment. The very next thing that happens is the arrest, and the very next thing after that is one of the disciples drawing one of those swords and Jesus telling him to stop and then healing what the sword has done. If the two-swords passage is a mandate for Christian armament, then Jesus's own reaction to the use of those two swords, less than an hour later, is a mandate against it. You cannot have it both ways. The plain sense of the whole scene is that Jesus knew his followers were confused, that he let their confusion play out just long enough to demonstrate the alternative, and that the alternative was to put the swords away.

Paul Does Not Contradict His Master

Paul's letter to the Romans has a chapter, chapter 12, that would function as a full ethics of enemies on its own if the church treated it as seriously as it treats some of Paul's other chapters.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them (Rom 12:14). Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all (Rom 12:17). If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all (Rom 12:18). Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord (Rom 12:19). To the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head (Rom 12:20). Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Rom 12:21).

The whole chapter reads like an application of Matthew 5. Paul, the former violent persecutor of the church, understood in his own bones what it meant to be met with mercy by the God he had been hunting. His counsel to the Roman believers, living under an empire that would eventually kill him, is not "arm yourselves." It is "overcome evil with good."

Chapter 13 of the same letter, immediately after this, contains the passage about the governing authorities bearing the sword. Christians who want to endorse violence often reach for Romans 13 as a counterweight to the Sermon on the Mount. That reading misses what Paul is doing. Paul is not describing an ideal. He is describing an institution. He is saying that the state, imperfect and often ungodly, has been given a limited role by God in restraining evil. He is not authorizing individual Christians to appropriate the sword of the state for their own use. He is not saying that Christians should aspire to be the ones bearing the sword. He is saying that the sword exists, that Christians should be law-abiding, and that Christians should keep paying their taxes. That is a much narrower claim than the reading that has been imposed on Romans 13 in service of American gun culture. Paul does not say the Christian should bear the sword. He says the state does. Those are not the same sentence.

The Cross Is an Answer to Violence

The central image of the Christian faith is a Roman instrument of state torture and execution. Every time a Christian looks at a cross, that Christian is looking at what the empire did to Jesus. And every time a Christian looks at the resurrection, that Christian is looking at what God did in response to what the empire did to Jesus.

The response was not more violence. The response was not a heavenly counterstrike against Rome. The response was to raise the crucified one from the dead, to vindicate his refusal to fight, and to send his disciples into the world to preach a kingdom whose weapons are not carnal but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds (2 Cor 10:4). Paul's list of the armor of God in Ephesians 6 is worth reading beside a photograph of the average American church parking lot on Sunday. The belt of truth. The breastplate of righteousness. The shoes of the gospel of peace. The shield of faith. The helmet of salvation. The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God (Eph 6:14-17). Not one of those weapons is metal. Not one of them can be discharged. Not one of them ends a human life. The armor of God is the armor of a soldier who does not kill.

The Christian who reads the New Testament and comes away thinking that the gospel is compatible with an aesthetic of personal firepower has not read the New Testament. He has read a story about Jesus embedded inside a larger story about American self-reliance, and he has confused the second story with the first.

The Enemies List

The most sinister part of this chapter is not about weapons at all. It is about the definition of enemy.

The American gun-culture version of Christianity has, in recent decades, been busy expanding the category of enemy to include more and more of the people who share the country with us. The immigrant is now an enemy. The protester is now an enemy. The teacher who does not want to carry a firearm is now an enemy. The doctor who provides care the movement disapproves of is now an enemy. The journalist who reports what the movement wishes were not reported is now an enemy. The politician of the wrong party is now an enemy. The trans child in a public school is now, incredibly, an enemy. And the ambient logic of the culture is that enemies are people you prepare to shoot.

Compare this list to the list of people Jesus called enemies. Jesus lived in an occupied country whose actual enemy, the Roman military, walked its streets in armor. When he taught about enemies, his hearers were not thinking about a hypothetical hostile stranger in an alley. They were thinking about the centurion at the intersection. And Jesus told them, love those enemies. When one of those enemies, a Roman centurion, came to him asking for the healing of a servant, Jesus healed the servant and praised the centurion's faith and did not lecture him about the empire he served (Matt 8:5-13). When he was hanging on a cross put there by that empire, he prayed for the soldiers driving the nails. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34).

If a Christian in America cannot see how far the current cultural definition of "enemy" has drifted from Jesus's definition, that Christian is not paying attention. Jesus's enemies were the ones actually killing him, and he loved them. Our movement's enemies are usually not killing us. Our movement's enemies are, in most cases, people who inconvenience us politically, culturally, or economically. If we cannot love that lesser class of enemy, we should stop pretending we would have loved the ones nailing him to a cross.

What the Prophets Saw

The Old Testament vision of the future is not a vision of a well-armed people victorious over their neighbors. It is a vision of a world in which the weapons themselves are gone. In Isaiah 2 and Micah 4, the prophets describe the mountain of the Lord's house established as the highest of the mountains, with all the nations flowing to it. And what happens when they arrive is spelled out.

He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore (Isa 2:4, Micah 4:3).

Read that verse and then walk through the parking lot of the average conservative American church, where the back windows of the trucks display, side by side, the sticker of a cross and the sticker of an assault rifle, and ask which text is winning the argument in the imagination of the driver. The prophet describes weapons being converted into farming tools. The truck describes farming tools being converted into weapons. These two theologies cannot occupy the same faith. One of them will have to give.

A Confession About the Word "Christian"

I want to make one more thing plain. When American gun culture and Conservative American Christianity fused, in the last few decades, into a single subculture with a single aesthetic and a single set of enemies, something died that is not going to be revived by better sermons alone. The word "Christian" started to mean, in large parts of the country, an armed and angry person who is prepared to take life in defense of a way of life. That is not what the word "Christian" has ever meant in the New Testament. The New Testament word "Christian" is a name given first to a group of people at Antioch (Acts 11:26) who were noticed by their neighbors for a specific pattern of behavior, and the pattern that got them the name was not their weaponry. It was their willingness to eat with the people other groups would not eat with, to share their possessions with people who had none, to bury the dead the empire threw away, and to love their enemies to the point of forgiving the executioners in real time as the executions were happening.

If the modern American church wants to reclaim the name "Christian," it will have to reclaim that pattern. And that means beginning with the sword in Peter's hand and hearing the master's voice, again, in the garden.

Put your sword back into its place.

That is a hard sentence. It costs something. It might cost a certain kind of identity that has been carefully built over decades. It might cost the approval of relatives whose whole political self-understanding is bound up in weaponry. It might cost membership in a certain kind of congregation. But it is what the man in the garden said, out loud, to a disciple who thought he was doing the right thing by drawing steel to defend him.

And if he said it to Peter, in the middle of the arrest that would lead to the cross, in defense of the Son of God himself, on the one night in human history when a sword might have seemed most justified, then it is going to be very hard to argue that he would say something different to us, in defense of our smaller and more comfortable causes, in the safety of our suburbs.

Put it back.

Where do your ethics actually live?

If they live in the Book, they will not live at the end of a barrel. They will live in a garden, next to a healed ear, in the voice of a man who was about to die rather than kill.