Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
Word has it that Liberty University, home of the Falwells, is now putting in the country’s first on-campus firing range. I also recall reading on the internet that your wife once attended Liberty. Should Christians be firearms proficient? Does your wife pack heat? Do you? And though they didn’t have guns back when He walked the earth, What Would Jesus Carry?
Guns Ablazin’
Dodge City, USA
As a rule, I generally abstain from discussing my wife’s security provisions in print. You just never can tell what kind of creep is reading this—aside from my editor, I mean. You share too much, and next thing you know, you’re getting letters from face-tatt’ed prisoners named “Shank” who include self-addressed return envelopes asking you to send along her worn socks or used Loofah. Not for any perverted reasons, they assure you—they just need something to smell until they get paroled and can come visit in person. Besides, at my advanced age, I don’t want to look like an over-sharer to my future trophy wife, who is probably in kindergarten right about now and just learning to read.
Since the factlets are out there, however, I’ll admit that my wife did indeed go to Liberty in the days before it became an armory—just for one year. But even as a good Baptist girl who wasn’t afraid to drown in the human oil slick that was Jerry Falwell Sr., God rest his soul, she transferred out of there, deciding she’d be better off serving the Lord without the strictures of Liberty’s no drinking/no-dancing/no rock’n’roll rules. (Which I’m told they’ve since relaxed, along with their no-shooting rules—last year the trustees also decided to allow students to carry concealed weapons in dorms.)
After all, King David danced and Jesus was a bootlegger, turning water into wine. This was always part of the fun of being a Southern Baptist, sitting confounded in the pew with your friends as the preacher tried to convince you that the Word of God didn’t say what it actually says. And if Liberty had permitted concealed carry back when my wife was in college, she might have stayed, as she’d have been more readily able to shoot her RA for making her turn off her Poison records, or whatever god-awful hair band was afflicting us at the time.
I will cop to the fact that she packs plenty of heat, even if no guns are involved. (Note to current wife: only kidding about the trophy wife. I burn for you, Sugar Smacks.) As for me, I keep my 12-gauge, Ol’ Myrtle, handy just to ward off potential invaders, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and in-laws who decide to drop by unannounced. But at the risk of committing high heresy for a conservative kid who spent the bulk of his childhood in the Bible Belt, I’m not at all into guns. I prefer to do most of my talking with these. (Holding fists of fury/typing fingers aloft.)
It’s not that I’m against guns, mind you. I revere the Second Amendment. It may not be as good as the First Amendment, but it beats the hell out of, say, the Twenty-Sixth (allowing 18 year-olds to vote.) Many of my good friends own tons of them, and one is even a weapons dealer. (When the Apocalypse comes, I’ve reserved a futon in his basement.) And as it says in newer translations of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the heavily armed, for they shall repel those who’d forcibly take over the earth.” It’s just that I feel like sometimes, there’s a lot of…how shall we say…overcompensating going on in the firearms department. Men (and women) trying to pass off their snubnoses as long guns, if you catch my phallic drift.
You see it in the hyper-eager kill-it-and-grill-it ethos of Ted Nugent, who you suspect enjoys killing it a lot more than he does grilling it. You see it in the legions of snarling pundettes, all of whom seem intent on larding up their Instagram pages with pictures of themselves blasting away at shooting ranges, as though we’re supposed to regard them as Annie Oakley or Lara Croft, instead of just another poseur trying to hold on to their television contract.
Taking things back to church, it tends to remind me of those sometimes lonely, semi-desperate souls who’d join “Karate for Christ” in my youth group days. Maybe they’d been bullied and understandably wanted to feel stronger. Maybe they just enjoyed breaking boards for the Lord. But to the man, they always seemed less like they were preparing for an unavoidable self-defense situation and more like they were hoping for one. And if I’d put in that many hours on a gym mat, wearing pajamas, getting barked at by my sensei, well, I might want to try my hand at kicking ass for Christ, too.
The Old Testament runs red with rivers of blood. People were smote left and right, by everything from rocks to the jawbone of a donkey. But excepting one or two intemperate outbursts, Jesus, it’s hard to argue otherwise based on the New Testament record, was pretty much a pacifist. Sure, He had a granite chin, as they say in the fight game. They scourged Him, they speared Him, they even crucified Him, and He came back strong. (See Easter.) But He was also, inconveniently, into turning the other cheek, which makes me think He probably wouldn’t have carried, concealed or otherwise.
Then again, times change, people change. So when I put the question to an ex-pastor of mine—what would Jesus carry?—he offered the following, which might seem like a bizarre thing for a pastor to say, though in the era of mass shootings, you can’t be too careful:
I checked in with another theologian pal of mine, Tucker Carlson—an old friend, former colleague, and host of the new ratings juggernaut, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. Tucker is also a bona fide gun nut. When we discuss the End of Civilization—only three or four times a month since we’re both optimists by nature—Tucker’s answer to every potential problem is, “Buy more ammo.” He has more guns than he has children, and he has lots of the latter, doing his level-best to outbreed those who would bring Sharia law to America. When I ask Tucker what Christ would carry, he has definite opinions: “A straight stock English sidelock Damascus barreled side-by-side 20 bore. Obviously.” When I ask why, how is this unique to Jesus’s weaponry needs, he replies: “Because it’s the best f—ing shotgun ever made, and I doubt He’d settle for less.”
All of this makes perfect sense. And even non-gun-nuts like me find it comforting to know that we can buy equalizers that give us the illusion of safety. But even still, they are just that—illusory. I respect guns, because they help stack our odds against the unknown threat. But ultimately, the house banks on the principle of uncertainty. I’ve fallen down a Viking-history rabbit hole lately. Maybe it’s due to an oncoming midlife crisis, maybe it’s because they seem almost appealing contrasted with the mealy-mouthed, ambiguous times that we live in. But Vikings fascinate me. They were a people hell-bent on evening their odds, which they managed to do from the 8th to the 11th centuries—longer than America has been a certified concern. They didn’t have guns. Instead, they waged war with the cutting-edge technology of their time—from seaxes to battle-axes.
And yet, for all their martial prowess, you’ll notice we don’t come across many Vikings today. Though one of my favorite pieces of Viking-related writing comes from Wells Tower, who wrote a short-story collection several years ago, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. The title story concerned that of Vikings in a sort of Office Space-like existential crisis, many of whom, for all their pillaging and village-torching proclivities, were on the downward slide, having a reckoning with their own vulnerability.
Even for Vikings, seaxes and battle-axes don’t make us invincible. Nor do guns. They might slightly improve our odds of survival and sense of well-being, the projectile-firing equivalent of carrying a lucky rabbit’s foot. But in the end, we are all subject to circumstance and fate’s fickle whims. As Tower’s primary character states in the clincher:
Still, it’s good to know that when you do hear the creak and splash, Ol’ Myrtle is waiting for the unknown right alongside you.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
