Gundamentalism

I learned a new term a few weeks ago, "gundamentalism," coined by Presbyterian pastor James Atwood a decade ago. An excerpt, quoted by Diana Butler Bass:

Many modern-day shamans and religious gun enthusiasts proclaim God wants all citizens well armed so they can protect our values, even our faith. . . These religious cults have become an integral part of the religion of the Gun Empire that give the idols of power and deadly force what they most need: a divine status. For these men and women the command to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself, is placed right alongside their new commandment to be ready at all times to defend yourself against your neighbor. . . (They) built an idolatrous religious framework around guns and have worked feverishly to justify biblically their unwarranted fascination with guns. . . Millions worship at this shrine. 

Atwood, America and Its Guns: A Theological Expose, 82-83; qtd The Cottage

Bass and Atwood were responding to the American subculture which brandishes Bibles and guns together with no sense of contradiction, something which has been, frankly, incomprehensible to me. An opinion piece by Peter Manseau in this morning's Times, provoked by the explicitly Christian identity of the company which manufactured the assault weapon used to such lethal effect in that elementary school in Texas, argued that many gun owners believe in their guns, and that American gun culture is explicitly Christian. This is part of white Evangelical religion specifically. Most other Christian denominations discourage gun ownership and there seems in fact to be a negative correlation between religious participation and gun ownership. Even among Evangelicals: those most gun-idolizing are those who don't regularly attend worship. But, Manseau argues, the disagreement is at root a religious one. Referencing Paul Tillich's idea of "ultimate concern," it's about the most basic ideas about the way the world is and what matters. To many gun nuts, the world is a battlefield, with Jesus calling us to join his battalion. Manseau concludes

Mass shootings are, in a way, assaults on the idea of community itself. They occur where there are people gathered — for entertainment, for learning, for shopping, for worship — in the spaces we create together. Some believe that such attacks are the fault of armed individuals alone and can be addressed only through armed individual response. Others believe they occur within the framework of what we collectively allow and must have communal solutions.

My view is closer to Abbott's fury. Those who believe in guns - who believe that individuals have the right to wield lethal force - seem to to me in thrall not of a religion but of something different and worse, idolotry, even something demonic. Tillich's concept of religion includes a demonic (and he'd agree that much of Christian history is demonic) but Manseau isn't spelling it out, concerned as he is with defending good religion against this bad one. Usually I err in his irenic direction.

But then we get today's latest attack on the common good from the conservative justices of the Supreme Court (all six!), subscribers to another kind of gundamentalism. Their dogmatic interpretation of the Second Amendment is absurd, as clear a case of reading an "unelaborated" right into the Constitution as you can ask for. ("Well regulated militia" - hello?!) It's a sign of the craven soullessness of originalism, kin to the self-righteous dishonesty of biblical fundamentalism. 

I have not read the ruling, but it doesn't seem that it allows for any countervailing right not to be shot, let alone to feel safe. How many of these constitutional gundamentalists are also religious gundamentalists? And, yes, in thrall to the demonic?