I Gave My Gun to My Pastor. You Know

This is a tale of two pastors and 2 mass shootings.

On a balmy June evening in 2015, a young man with a blunt bowl haircut walked into the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church building in Charleston, South Carolina, to bring together a Wednesday night Bible report. As the worshipers airtight their optics in prayer, the man fired at to the lowest degree 70 shots, killing ix people. Among the dead were Ethel Lee Lance, the mother of the Rev. Sharon Risher, and 2 of Risher's cousins.

Two years subsequently, on a bright Sunday morning in Nov, a man in a skull face up mask fired some 700 rounds exterior and within the Outset Baptist Church building of Sutherland Springs, Texas, leaving at least 20 people injured and 26 dead. A meaning adult female, her unborn baby and the 14-year-old daughter of the church's pastor, Frank Pomeroy, were among those killed.

This is likewise a tale of ii very unlike responses to tragedy and trauma.

Both pastors buried their expressionless, mourned their incalculable losses, read their Bibles, prayed and somewhen returned to their ministries. Merely Risher, a nondenominational Christian pastor, dedicated herself to gun-constabulary reform and reducing admission to weapons. Pomeroy, a Southern Baptist, armed and trained his church building members and routinely wears his weapon in the pulpit.

The Rev. Sharon Risher, flanked past Autonomous senators at the U.S. Capitol, joins other survivors of gun violence to telephone call for gun control.

Win McNamee / Getty Images

"To me, being a follower of Jesus means that I will always abet for nonviolence," Risher told me from her dwelling in Charlotte, North Carolina, just a few days after the sixth ceremony of her mother's murder. "My thinking is, I don't condemn anyone for owning a gun, but I want people to realize the power of the violence they hold in their hand when they have a gun. And that just because you have a correct to own a gun does not hateful yous have to exercise the right to use it."

Pomeroy, who has a military background and grew upward hunting, sees carrying a gun as an extension of his responsibility to protect his flock. He is both licensed and trained to employ a handgun and often carried one before the shooting at his rural church.

"God has endowed some of us with the capability to be a warrior and others not," he said, sitting at his dining room table during a video interview. "Some are on the frontline, and some are in the supply room. Both are equally important, merely they're gifted in different means. And that's why it's important that we go to the Lord and seek what we're supposed to do individually. And then if he says, yeah, bear that firearm, I have no problem carrying that firearm."

Pastor Frank Pomeroy, who wears a gun in the pulpit, preaches to his Sutherland Springs, Texas, congregation in 2020.

Josie Norris / The San Antonio Express-News via AP

How did these 2 Christian leaders come up to such opposite conclusions? Both read the aforementioned Bible, worship the same God and have suffered unfathomable losses to unspeakable violence at the hands of disturbed individuals who managed to acquire legal firearms. Even so on the effect of guns, there is a gulf betwixt them. And, perhaps what'south well-nigh important, Risher's and Pomeroy'southward dividing paths highlight two very different relationships between guns and God in America today.

Americans' passion for the right to bear arms has a long and well-known history. But the human relationship between religion and guns is often obscured by the horror and tragedy of mass shootings like those that terrorized the Charleston and Sutherland Springs congregations. However, activists, scholars and pastors at present signal to a shift in the relationship between religion and guns, with more people of religion realizing that despite a range of views on the proliferation and use of guns, they have a theological and moral imperative to speak out on the effect. However, security-training companies say houses of worship make up the fastest-growing segment of their business organisation as more churches, synagogues, mosques and temples are arming their congregations.

"The cross and the gun give the states two actually dissimilar versions of power," said Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist and co-author of "Chirapsia Guns: Promise for People Who Are Weary of Violence." "One of them says, 'I'thousand willing to kill,' and the other one says, 'I'k willing to die.'"

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The Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where three members of the Rev. Sharon Risher's family were killed, is cordoned off after the mass shooting in 2015.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images

Religion'southward human relationship to guns

Equally a pastor who owns and carries a gun, Pomeroy is not an outlier. Few studies examine gun ownership and organized religion, but scholars who have explored the subject come across a definite link.

"Religion does affair to gun ownership, but not in whatever one simplistic way," said David Yamane, a professor of sociology at Wake Forest University who found that evangelical Protestants were more likely to be gun owners compared with mainline Protestants, members of other religions and people with no religious affiliation. "The connexion between gun ownership and religion is unlike depending on whether you are talking about religious behaving, belonging or believing."

Yamane establish, for instance, that Americans who hold more theologically bourgeois beliefs are more likely to own guns, simply those who are more actively involved with their house of worship's congregation are less likely to ain guns. "These differences are essential to keep in mind if we desire to accept an authentic understanding of the connection between religion and guns," he said.

Forty states have no restrictions on carrying firearms in places of worship.

Ed Reinke / REUTERS

The Pew Research Center plant in a 2017 survey that about 4 in 10 white evangelicals ain a gun, the highest share of whatsoever religious grouping, and that 74 per centum of all gun owners in the U.South. concur with the statement that their right to own a gun is essential to their sense of liberty. Today, only iii states and Washington, D.C., prohibit firearms inside places of worship, according to the Giffords Law Center.

Overall, shootings in houses of worship are rare, but they are condign more frequent. According to a database published past The Washington Post, 95 people accept died in a mass shooting at a identify of worship in the U.S. since 1966, and more than one-half of those people were killed in the past 5 years.ⁱ The impetus for these rampages ranged from domestic disputes — the motivation of the Sutherland Springs killer — to religious- or race-based hatred — the Mother Emanuel shooter hoped to start a race war. Meanwhile, FBI data shows a 65 percent increase in detest crimes² at churches, synagogues, temples and mosques from 2014 to 2019,³ while the Religion Based Security Network notes a 60 pct increase in "non-adventitious deaths" at houses of worship between 2014 to 2017.

The perpetrators of these shootings take targeted houses of worship indiscriminately. In the past decade, shootings at houses of worship with more than one fatality include:

• Oak Creek, Wisconsin — On Aug. v, 2012, a man belonging to several white supremacist groups shot and killed six people and wounded iv at a Sikh gurdwara. A seventh person died of his injuries in 2020.
• New York Urban center — On Aug. thirteen, 2016, two people, including an imam, were shot outside a mosque.
• Antioch, Tennessee — On Sept. 24, 2017, a man shot and killed a woman outside Burnette Chapel Church of Christ. He entered the church building and wounded at to the lowest degree 6 others before some other worshiper held him at gunpoint until police force arrived.
• Pittsburgh — On Oct. 27, 2018, a gunman killed eleven people and wounded six on a Saturday morning, the Jewish sabbath, at the Tree of Life synagogue that housed 3  congregations. It is the deadliest shooting at a synagogue in American history.
• Poway, California — On April 27, 2019, a 19-year-old human being posted an anti-Semitic screed online before walking into a synagogue on the last mean solar day of Passover and shooting and killing ane worshiper and wounding 3 more, including the rabbi.
• White Settlement, Texas — On Dec. 29, 2019, a man shot and killed two worshipers during a morning time service at the Due west Thruway Church of Christ. A fellow member of the church'due south security team, licensed to carry, shot and killed the perpetrator. The incident was captured during live video streaming of the service and has been watched on YouTube and Twitter millions of times.

Subsequently every shooting, religious leaders appear in the media and call for peace and unity. Some, like Risher, call for "common-sense gun laws," a term proponents of these measures adopt over "gun command," which they say has a negative connotation. Others, including the Rev. Robert Jeffress, a member of former President Donald Trump's faith advisory board, have no trouble with their flock bringing guns to church for greater safe.

"I'd say a quarter to a one-half of our members are concealed-carry — they have guns and I don't think in that location's annihilation wrong with that," Jeffress said on "Fox and Friends" after the Sutherland Springs shooting. "They bring them into the church building with them ... if somebody tries that in our church, they might get one shot off or two shots off, and that'southward the last thing they'll ever do in this life."

Ryan Burge, a professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and an American Baptist Church pastor who has studied guns and organized religion, finds that political affiliation is a stronger indication of one's views on guns than religion is, with Republicans more probable to support less legislation and Democrats in favor of more than.

"Gun control is a fascinating issue in American organized religion, because the information points to a clear determination," he wrote in 2020. "Religious leaders are, by and large, not guiding the views of their congregations on this topic ... Americans of all religious faiths are less supportive of gun control now than at any point in the last two decades."

During the 2020 Autonomous primary, Female parent Emanuel hosted then-presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker to speak nigh gun violence and its connectedness to white nationalism.

Randall Hill / REUTERS

On the organizational level, most denominations have fabricated statements against gun violence — and sometimes, confronting guns themselves — specially after mass shootings. Only only the Presbyterian Church (United statesA.) has ordained a "minister of gun violence prevention," the Rev. Deanna Hollas, who lives in a religious community outside Dallas.

Hollas felt chosen to this role when her girl attended a Texas higher that allows students to carry weapons on campus. Now she visits mainline Protestant churches across the country to speak out confronting gun violence and perform "disarmings" — the dismantling of firearms per Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives guidelines.

"Non everyone is going to lay downwards their guns," she said. "But we are going to say there is a dissimilar mode."

While Hollas is the only known minister exclusively assigned to work on gun violence, she believes that more people of faith are taking upwards the outcome.

"The expert news is people are waking upwardly to this," she said. "Sight is existence restored to the blind. The tools nosotros accept been using — that we are going to read and recall our manner out of gun violence — have not been effective. We are in the process of deconstructing that and realizing that we demand to render to spiritual practices and encompass the faith of Jesus instead of the church of empire that we have inherited."

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Shane Claiborne grew up in a gun-owning family but now travels the land urging Christians to put downward their weapons.

REX HARSIN

The violence interrupters

Increasingly, religious leaders in favor of gun reform are framing their argument equally anti-violence rather than anti-gun. Among these are Claiborne, the Philadelphia-based leader of Red Alphabetic character Christians, a faith-based organization that emphasizes the words of Jesus — which are printed in cerise messages in some Bibles — to oppose gun violence and other societal ills. Clairborne was raised in a hunting and gun-owning family simply at present travels the U.S. literally chirapsia surrendered guns into garden tools and other implements.

"We're worshipping the Prince of Peace on Sunday and packing heat on Monday, sometimes fifty-fifty packing heat on Lord's day," he said a few days before traveling to Houston to dismantle guns collected past a local congregation. "Some of our idolatry of individual rights is at the heart of this too."

Claiborne knows Christians who carry guns and bring them to church — twoscore states have no restrictions on doing then. He said he understands Pomeroy's conclusion to arm himself and his congregation but added that this doesn't align with his agreement of the same faith.

"It's very reasonable to do what the pastor at Sutherland Springs did," he said, noting that he does not know Pomeroy and does not desire to judge him. "In fact, information technology's exactly what [Jesus' disciple] Peter wanted to exercise when he picked upwardly a sword to try to defend Jesus, and Jesus says, 'Put your weapon abroad.' For me, every bit a Christian, there'southward no fashion that I can reconcile Jesus' call to love our enemy with this idea that we're going to stand our ground or kill our enemy."

That is Risher's conclusion, too. She said she has forgiven her mother's murderer. "If I did non, it was going to eat me alive," she said. "And I wanted to live. And I did not desire to alive as a victim." Now she travels the country to encourage other people of faith to put down any weapons they may own.

Claiborne dismantles guns nerveless past church congregations and turns them into garden implements and other tools.

Male monarch HARSIN

"You lot know, every bit a person of religion, I believe prayer moves things," she said in an interview at Knuckles Divinity School. "Simply it takes more prayers to bargain with the things that nosotros take to deal with as a social club right at present. Aye, God gives us prayer, but he gives us the motivation and the willingness to accept action."

Claiborne'southward deportment have included organizing a peaceful protest and demonstration outside a Philadelphia gun store. Risher volunteers with Everytown for Gun Safe and Moms Need Action for Gun Sense in America. Catholic priests, Muslim imams, Jewish rabbis and other religious leaders have walked the streets of cities plagued by gun violence in the hope of interrupting the violence.

The Rev. Michael McBride is one of those pastors. As managing director of the Alive Costless Campaign, an anti-violence and anti-mass-incarceration activist group, he and a core of San Francisco-area clergy routinely walk the streets of Oakland and other Bay Area cities where gun violence is routine. They do not focus on gun legislation, but on actions they hope will "interrupt" the cycle of violence.

"Gun control is ane office of the chat, but too many people in the gun-control community want gun control to be the king of beasts'due south share of the conversation," he said. "I think at best information technology should exist 25 per centum of the conversation."

McBride, who grew upwardly in Hunter'southward Signal, a hot spot for gun crimes in the Bay Area, came to this work afterwards seeing the results of gun violence up close. "One time you exercise a dozen funerals … information technology changed me," he said. "I asked, 'Is this the nearly that I could exercise?'"

Now his group holds "call-ins" — mediated conversations between gun offenders, faith leaders, law-breaking victims, ER nurses and police — and organizes 12-month programs for gun offenders, or "peace cohorts," that focus on working them into their communities. Gun-command legislation, he said, rarely comes upward as a feasible solution to urban gun crimes, particularly when he is facing an anguished mother who wants to know why her son or daughter was shot.

The church, McBride said, should be an advocate for "common-sense gun legislation," but it cannot end at that place. People of faith must as well look at the causes of the violence — income inequality, mass incarceration, mental-health problems and trauma, among them.

The Rev. Michael McBride (with bullhorn) participates in a candlelight acuity for the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

"The church has to boldly proclaim the demand for healing and peacemaking in our communities," he said over a diner breakfast earlier heading to The Manner Christian Center, a Berkeley church he and his family unit accept led for three generations. "We have to use our pulpits and platforms to advocate for peace, for policies and programs. We have to scale upwards intervention to change lives."

That's a tall guild for anyone, clergy or layperson. Shani Buggs, a professor at Academy of California, Davis'due south Violence Prevention Research Plan, said while some clergy are involved in violence-interruption programs, very few actively promote gun-reform laws.

"It'south a complicated issue for them," she said. "It has become increasingly political." And politics is often considered taboo in houses of worship, which can lose their tax-exempt status if they engage in campaigning — not to mention lose members who may disagree.

No one knows this better than the Rev. Rob Schenck. Schenck spent twenty years every bit a very public activist for Operation Rescue, the conservative Christian anti-abortion-rights group known for their graphic protests at women'due south health clinics. He was too the president and founder of Faith and Action (now Organized religion & Freedom), a Washington, D.C., organization, which according to Schenck had 55,000 donors and a $2 one thousand thousand annual budget; the group'southward aim was to increment Christianity'south influence on the U.S. government.

But in the 2010s, Schenck had a alter of heart on abortion, same-sex activity marriage and guns — 3 issues fundamental to evangelical identity. In 2018, he resigned from Faith and Action over differences virtually his anti-gun mission. He so founded The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to the German cleric'southward theology and ideals, which Schenck says has four,000 donors and a $400,000 annual budget.

The Rev. Rob Schenck speaks at a press conference ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Columbine High Schoolhouse shootings to call on the Senate to pass gun-reform legislation.

MANDEL NGAN / AFP via Getty Images

Schenck is not daunted by the change. Instead, he uses his experience within the evangelical world to talk to conservative pastors and congregations about their affinity for guns. Drawing on his time in Operation Rescue, he frames his argument every bit an extension of the pro-life movement.

"I'm not the beginning one to take this idea, but the correct to life does non end when the baby is born," he said from his role in Washington, D.C. "That'due south the way to find common ground with Catholics, with Jews, with Muslims, with conservatives, with liberals, with conservative Christians, progressive Christians, mainline Christians."

Just it'southward withal a hard sell. Schenck was the main subject of the 2015 documentary "The Armor of Light," which shows him trying to convince a room full of white evangelical clergy to join his side of the gun issue. They stare back at him as if he had asked them to fly to the moon and back.

"When I look into the eyes of those folks, I think they really genuinely believe that God wants them to own a gun," he said.

Still, Schenck has hope.

Immature evangelicals like Claiborne are more open to questioning and reframing the church'south relationship with guns than their parents or grandparents were. "They're more skeptical about the Second Amendment and the pro-gun civilisation and more than serious about what Jesus literally said," said Schenck. "They think this question is worth looking at."

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Church building members in Westminster, Maryland, nourish preparedness training on how to arm themselves post-obit the shooting at Sutherland Springs.

Salwan Georges / The Washington Post via Getty Images

'The business of the church'

According to IBISWorld, an industry annotator, Americans spend $15 billion in gun stores annually. That includes everything from firearms and armament to cases, safes, clothes and accessories.

Many of these products link religion — most oft Christianity — to the 2d Subpoena's correct to bear arms. Go to Amazon, Etsy, Walmart or whatsoever major retail chain and you lot volition encounter clothes, flags, charm bracelets, wall plaques, license plate holders and only virtually everything else available with symbols and slogans declaring fidelity to God and guns. One company chosen Tactical Baby Gear sells a patch emblazoned with "God, Guns & Diapers" nether the outline of an AR-15-style assault rifle.

Schenck likes to bring out a black-leap, leather Bible comprehend that opens up to reveal not the usual tissue-thin pages but a 9mm Glock — a gun literally wrapped in the word of God.

"In our defense of the Second Amendment," Schenck asks in a video as he holds the Bible-equally-gun-case, "are nosotros in fact violating the 2d Commandment?" In Protestant faiths, that commandment is "Thousand shalt not brand any graven paradigm."

And dozens of companies, from small mom-and-pop outfits to national organizations, offering security and firearms preparation peculiarly tailored for pastors, ushers and greeters, and for teams of armed "guardians" or "gate keepers." Agape Tactical offers a "Warrior Women" class for armed women in the pews and quotes the biblical book of Proverbs on its website: "A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple go on going and endure for it." One pastor told The Circuit Magazine, "Church security is becoming the business organisation of the church."

A ​​Stockdale, Texas, congregant who has volunteered to protect her congregation carries a concealed weapon to church.

The Washington Mail service via Getty Images

Barry Young is the vice president of church security for Strategos International, a security-preparation company based in Missouri and Texas. In 2015 — the year of the Mother Emanuel shooting — he said Strategos did church preparation sessions in 30 houses of worship. Now they do 300 annually, a number that spiked dramatically after the Sutherland Springs massacre.

Strategos, which is Christian in its mission and has since conducted training at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, approaches its work like a ministry building. Instructors and trainees pray and sometimes worship together.

"We believe humility breeds capability," he said in a telephone interview from Kansas Metropolis, Missouri, where he is based. "I call back you can tell how powerful somebody is by how gentle they are."

In its 2-day church building grooming workshops, Strategos teaches that the use of guns is a sort of concluding resort, Young said. First, they focus on awareness and prevention — strategically placing greeters in the parking lot, training ushers to spot erratic beliefs, reconfiguring the church's locks and other existing condom measures and — about importantly, Immature said — verbal de-escalation methods.

"We choose who nosotros certify to carry, not the church building," Young said. "They must have a mindset for safety. If they don't showroom the right frame of heed" — for example, if they are likewise eager to shoot or too nervous to shoot — "then we won't certify them."

Immature said Strategos declines to certify 2 to v percent of trainees because they do non pass this kind of "spiritual gut cheque." And the bulk — 85 percent — of its church workshops do non include guns, Young said.

"We will do information technology [gun training] if they inquire," Young said. "But I would rather a church building have an unarmed security team that is trained than an armed security team that is untrained."

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A rosary hangs from the fence exterior the Showtime Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, one week after 26 people, including Pastor Frank Pomeroy's fourteen-twelvemonth-old daughter, died in that location in a mass shooting in 2017.

Carolyn Van Houten / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Guns in the pulpit and the pews

Like everyone else in this story, Frank Pomeroy of the Outset Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs looks at the relationship betwixt guns and religion through the prism of his own feel. And that extends to losing members of his own congregation, including his girl, to a disturbed man with a semi-automated rifle.

In the media frenzy that descended on his white-walled church building after the violence, Pomeroy feels he and other licensed, gun-carrying Christians have been unfairly portrayed as "ignorant hillbillies." The decision to acquit a gun in the pulpit, put nearly 20 of the church building's 187 members through security training and ensure x of them are armed every Sunday morning was made after prayer and reflection, he said.

He thinks it is a mistake to spiritualize a gun — an inanimate object — and likens his Kimber Micro ix handgun to the automatic external defibrillator that hangs on the church wall. The spiritual question isn't whether it should exist there, but how it should be used.

"The only spiritual aspect of this is the human condition," Pomeroy said. "A person who wrongfully uses firearms to take a life has deeper issues than the firearm. They take sin bug and bug that need to exist addressed on a spiritual level. The firearm itself is not the problem, information technology's the people holding those firearms."

Today, First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs meets in a brand-new building. The old church building was clapboard, and the shooter shot through its walls. The new building, which opened its doors in May 2019, is fortified limestone with sanctuary doors that can exist locked at the press of a button.

Pomeroy hopes he never has to use his gun inside his church (he was away in Oklahoma City on the day of the shooting). Today he speaks publicly in other churches and on panels about church building security. Sometimes people on the panel oppose him, which he welcomes as a means to de-escalate the political polarization in America.

When told near the Rev. Sharon Risher and how she came to a completely different understanding of guns through the lens of their shared Christianity, he said he would be open to talking to her about their shared experience as grieving survivors.

"If we don't take an open mind and come to the tabular array to have a conversation about it, then there'southward no way to ever win," he said. "And it isn't about winning. Information technology's about doing what is best for people."

"And I would pray for her," Pomeroy adds. "Not to change her mind and then much equally that hopefully myself or someone like me is there to protect her when nosotros're needed because she wouldn't be able to protect herself."

Art management by Emily Scherer. Chart by Simran Parwani. Copy editing past Jennifer Mason and Curtis Yee. Photo research past Jeremy Elvas. Story editing past Sarah Frostenson.

This story is part of "Rethinking Gun Violence," an ABC News series examining the level of gun violence in the U.Southward. — and what can be done about information technology.

CORRECTION (Nov. 5, 2021, 11:45 a.thousand.): An earlier version of this commodity incorrectly stated that according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, 88 per centum of gun owners said owning a gun was essential to their sense of religious liberty. This should accept said that 74 percent of all gun owners agreed with the statement that owning a gun was essential to their own sense of freedom. The text has been updated.

Footnotes

1. Figures are up-to-appointment as of May 12 and represent shootings where four or more people were killed and exclude shootings connected to robberies.

2. Defined by the FBI as a "criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias(es) confronting a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity."

3. These detest crimes decreased by 26 percent from 2019 to 2020, though many houses of worship did not meet in person due to the pandemic.

Kimberly Winston is a freelance religion reporter who lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

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