God, Guns and the Government: A Paper to Send Your Pastor, by Jason Jones, John Zmirak

Editor’s Note: This article is significantly longer than what is usually permitted on The Stream, but we encourage you to take time to read it in its entirely. The right to bear arms as stated in the Second Amendment has lost enthusiasm and support among many Christians in recent years. The primary cause for such decline is simply a lack of understanding of why it exists in the first place. Jones and Zmirak present here a remarkable case for how it developed out of a historical and biblical framework, how and why it has fallen out of favor, and why it is one of the most important issues at stake in the 2020 election.

Natural allies aren’t always bosom buddies. Sometimes people share much more in common than they realize, and they just need that pointed out to them. It took far too long for Evangelical Christians and Catholics to work together in the pro-life movement, for instance. But now they are a powerful force, which also defends religious liberty against hostile government initiatives.

Further back, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal assembled a powerful electoral coalition for the Democratic Party out of disparate social and ethnic groups with common interests. Likewise, in the 1850s, various groups opposed the dominance of the slave states for different reasons, and it required a conscious effort to bring them together and form the new Republican Party out of the fragments of the dying Whigs. Effective democracy requires such coalitions, which take on special importance when shared values come under urgent threat.