The Christian Handgun Owner and Just War

Abstract

This article considers the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with evangelical Christian handgun owners in central North Carolina through the lens of the just war tradition—particularly that trajectory of the tradition that sees justified violence within the scope of charitable action. The article opens with an ethnographic vignette that describes taking a concealed carry course taught from a “Christian perspective” to explore how the author’s interlocutors describe and enact their firearm-related practices in terms of service, protection, and care. The article then engages Augustine and Paul Ramsey to show how the just war tradition can assist in rendering these ethnographic accounts in a Christian ethical register. The article then considers a second case, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an African American self-defense group founded in the mid-1960s that viewed firearms as integral to the advancement of civil rights, to show the limits of this trajectory of the just war tradition for closing the gap between description and norm. In considering these cases together, this article advances Christian ethical reflection on guns in a manner that centers and speaks to the lived experience of actual handgun owners while also showing the benefits and limits of using an established Christian ethical paradigm (viz., just war) for doing so.