Moore and Small Study the Relationship between Guns and Evangelicals

Last academic year, Professor Andy Moore obtained a summer research grant from Saint Anselm College’s Center for Ethics in Business and Governance. Moore used part of the grant to pay History major William Small ‘22 a stipend to serve as a research assistant. One Thing after Another asked them about the project on which they worked together.

The blog first asked Professor Moore some questions.

Q: Please tell us about your research topic.

A: Within the past couple of years, I started to notice a public and very distinctive relationship between Protestant evangelicals and the gun rights movement. This project explores that relationship both historically and in its current state. So in a sense, I am exploring the 21st-century culture wars and the nature of the conservative movement now. If we created a Venn diagram of the people I will be studying, there would be considerable overlap between Protestant evangelicals and gun rights supporters. Both groups are politically conservative, both tend to come from rural areas or the South, and both supported Donald Trump by overwhelming majorities in 2016. Beyond simply acknowledging the overlap, however, I hope to tease out some of the theological underpinnings of these evangelicals’ connection to guns and the Second Amendment.

Q: How did a historian come to work with the Center for Ethics in Business and Governance?

A: I have been developing a new course called “Guns in America” that I am teaching for the first time this fall. As part of my interest in guns, I started to notice these examples of Protestant evangelicals closely aligning themselves with gun rights, the National Rifle Association, and defending the Second Amendment. I started to collect news accounts and other sources about this trend, thinking I might come back to it at some point after I finished other projects that I have been working on for a long time.

When the Center for Ethics in Business and Governance (CEBG) announced its summer research grant, I started thinking about the ethical questions inherent in this topic. Because I think this could be a great opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary conversation with another discipline, I reconsidered the project in light of the CEBG’s mission. A good friend who is an ethicist critiqued my original proposal for me, so even in writing the proposal I have engaged in interdisciplinary conversation.

For me, one aspect of the grant that made it attractive was the opportunity to work with a student researcher. Will Small agreed to work with me this summer to track down and analyze sources. Last year, Will had helped me locate primary sources to use in my new course, “Guns in America,” so this gave the chance for us to continue that research and take it in a different direction.

Q: What types of sources were available for this project?

A: Will found a lot of online sources that were relevant. Those include news stories from both Christian and secular publications, as well as blog entries and discussion forums by activists on both sides and by people who have given this issue some theological thought. Also, I visited the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville, Tennessee. The Southern Baptists are the largest evangelical denomination, and they have leadership that has been increasingly political the past 40 years. There I found official church publications and letters from lay Southern Baptists from all over the country about gun rights and gun control. About 20 years ago, there was a mass church shooting at a Baptist church in Fort Worth, Texas. I found some information about that shooting and its aftermath.

Q: Given the controversial nature of gun rights in the United States, have you envisioned opening up the discussion of them to Saint Anselm students in any way? If so, how?

A: I hope so. The research grant requires a public presentation of the research. I hope that proves to be an opportunity to engage with students—or anyone with an interest in guns and gun-related issue—in a fruitful dialogue about a controversial topic.

 Q: Besides the public presentation, what are the goals of this research?

A: I hope that an academic journal article will be the ultimate product of this research. By the end of the year, I expect Will and I to have a serviceable article manuscript that we can begin to shop around to potential journals for feedback and eventual publication.

Next, One Thing after Another turned to Will Small for some questions.

Q: What was your experience doing research over the summer? What skills did you develop? 

 A: I was allotted approximately 125 hours of work over the summer, so I decided to schedule this number out to encompass the entire season rather than front or back-load it all. I ended up with a routine that involved working two hours a day every week, minus weekends. Towards August, though, I began to work three hours every other day, including weekends, as I felt that it fit my schedule better. I found, as probably is to be expected, that digging up new materials on the topic was more engaging than taking detailed notes on what I had already found. Throughout the project, I was able to develop efficient methods of online research and further my knowledge use of the college’s databases. I was also able to put some analytical thought into action in attempting to figure out how all of these pieces of research fit into the larger narrative of American or evangelical history or culture.

 Q: Did anything surprise you during this research?

A: As Professor Moore mentioned, the majority of my research involved finding and taking notes on newspapers or other editorial articles that expressed a Christian perspective on gun rights. Surprisingly, much of what I found from evangelical authors supported a more restricted view of gun rights, especially from the Reverend Robert Schenck, president of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute and a faith consultant for many officials in Washington, D.C. In fact, according to an August 2017 survey by the National Association of Evangelicals (https://www.nae.net/evangelical-leaders-own-guns-but-want-stricter-laws/), although 58% of evangelical leaders live in a home with guns, 55% of them also support stricter gun laws. I was not expecting the sheer volume of pro-gun control (or gun safety, as some prefer to call it) evangelical writings. Additionally, in rifling through public forums, I was a little surprised to find how common concealed carrying in churches is in some places in America. Since I had never come across this phenomenon in my daily life or given it much thought, it was interesting to find a way that others in the country lived differently.

Very Short Reviews: Karen Armstrong’s _Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence_

Since many people associate religion with the contemporary conflicts we have witnessed across much of the globe since 9/11, it seemed to make sense that this blog review Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. In other words, One Thing after Another read the book so you don’t have to.

Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (New York: Anchor Books, 2014).

1. Armstrong asserts that her primary motive in writing this book consists of refuting an assertion repeated to her relentlessly “like a mantra” by people from all walks of life: “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.”
2. Attempting to disprove this assertion makes it unclear who this book is for; scholars do not make these kinds of generalizations in academic forums, and laypeople who do make these kinds of generalizations are unlikely to read an overlong book larded with so much detail that the thesis is occasionally lost.
3. Along the way, Armstrong does remind her readers of some important, well-established truths: religion is difficult to define; until the emergence of the modern age, people could not really make a distinction between religion and politics; over time, religious traditions have been interpreted in a variety of ways and therefore have no true “essence” (although she undermines this argument by claiming from time to time that a religious tradition was not implicated by the violent acts of its adherents because they were not acting according to the “true” spirit of that tradition); and most faiths have experienced an ambivalent relationship with violence.
4. Armstrong’s main argument is that the responsibility for the great majority of violence lies with the state and that in the contemporary period, war is the product of imperialism or the strains of modernization; religion has been distorted by these forces and often reflects rather than instigates them.
5. So far from being the problem, she argues, religion is the solution: “Somehow we have to find ways of doing what religion—at its best—has done for centuries: build a sense of global community, cultivate a sense of reverence and ‘equanimity’ for all, and take responsibility for the suffering we see in the world.”
6. One of the main problems with this book is that it is too broad (it starts with the Sumerians and proceeds to the present), which means that Armstrong often ventures into areas where she has no experience or background; to name just one of many examples, she claims there is little evidence that humans fought one another before the advent of agriculture and civilization—but since Laurence Keeley wrote War before Civilization (1996), scholars (backed by mounting archaeological evidence) have increasingly taken the view that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were pretty violent.
7. As other reviewers have pointed out, her history inclines toward an economic and social determinism that tends to be superficial and poorly explained; culture does not display much autonomy in her narrative. (See The Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21636708-secularism-or-religion-more-authoritarian-trouble-and-strife)
8. It is not clear whether Armstrong’s sources influenced or express her stance, but her notes and bibliography are idiosyncratic and often do not reflect the latest literature in the periods or topics she studies.
9. There are important contradictions in her argument; to name perhaps the most important one, if, as she states, religion could not be distinguished from politics up until the modern period, and political motives generally inspired warfare, it would seem that religion is still culpable.
10. Or, to look at the same problem from another angle, as Mark Juergensmeyer writes in his Washington Post review of Armstrong’s work, “Religion — in the sense of what theologian Paul Tillich called ‘the repository of symbols’ — has also had long relationships with grandiose power, violence and blood. So religion is not totally off the hook.” (See the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-fields-of-blood-by-karen-armstrong/2014/10/23/a098e374-4d90-11e4-aa5e-7153e466a02d_story.html)

Hugh Dubrulle

Professor Moore Studies “The Lived History of Vatican II”

One Thing After Another’s recent ruminations on anniversaries pointed to many milestones and turning points. In addition to the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and the brutal murders of Cheney, Schwerner, and Goodman, 2014 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s electoral whipping of Barry Goldwater. Johnson’s victory opened the door to his Great Society programs (in addition to the Civil Rights Act, think Medicare, Medicaid, and the War on Poverty). This year is also  the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the British Invasion. Both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones toured the United States for the first time in 1964.

Some events (like the British Invasion, frankly) cannot be pinned down to one year, but their anniversaries are just as important to recognize. In this category—especially important for Catholics—is the Second Vatican Council. Pope John XXIII (SAINT John XXIII as of Sunday April 27), announced the Council in 1959; its first session convened in Fall 1962. John XXIII’s call for “aggiornamento”—or bringing the church up to date—would fundamentally alter the Church. Between 1962 and 1965, Catholic bishops met in Rome for four sessions. By the time they were finished, they had, among other things, changed the Catholic Mass from Latin to the vernacular, opened up the possibility of ecumenical cooperation between Catholics and Protestants, and encouraged a re-thinking of the Church as the “people of God” rather than a hierarchical institution.

As historians know, however, what those in authority (like bishops or the pope) tell people (like the world’s Catholics) to do and what actually gets done are two very different things. Now, fifty years on, historians are taking up the question of how “regular” Catholics actually lived the reforms of Vatican II. Since 2012 Professor Andrew Moore has worked on a research project sponsored by the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame called “The Lived History of Vatican II.” Fifteen scholars have been examining dioceses around the world, conducting close-grained studies of how Catholics experienced the reforms of Vatican II. Some weeks ago that project culminated in a conference, in which those fifteen scholars joined more than twenty others to present their research about Vatican II.

The conference program can be found here. http://cushwa.nd.edu/about/history/conference-program/

In short, these historians found that Vatican II often fell victim to the law of unintended consequences. What the bishops intended was not always what happened. That was true for Professor Moore’s case study, the Archdiocese of Atlanta. He focused his research on one parish, Our Lady of Lourdes Church, which is in the “Sweet Auburn” neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. For most of the twentieth century, this neighborhood was the heart of black Atlanta. Ebenezer Baptist Church (home church of Martin Luther King, Jr.) is down the street, for example. Our Lady of Lourdes was an all-black parish founded in 1912. When the civil rights movement rolled around, its members participated in demonstrations in Atlanta. After Vatican II, the archbishop and other archdiocesan leaders believed that the central message of the Council was that they had to close black parishes and force integration between black and white Catholics. This was not easy, however, and many whites moved to the suburbs to avoid “urban” problems like integration. For their part, black Catholics felt like they were being treated as problems to be solved. It would not be until the early 1980s when black Catholics finally felt like they were truly a part of the local Catholic Church and that their contributions were taken seriously. That was a good result of Vatican II, but the route they took to get there was longer and more circuitous than anyone expected.

After this conference, the plan is for the papers from the project to be collected into a book. The gears of academic publishing grind slowly, but all the authors hope that the book will appear next year, in time to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council.