On Saturday I was honoured to be a guest on Moody Radio's Up for Debate programme. It was an unexpected privilege, because of the subject: should churches hire armed guards? I live in the UK, where it's not an issue: we couldn't even if we wanted to.
But I was asked because of a column I'd written for Christian Today last year. It had the title: Armed guards at US churches: Why it's tempting, and why it's wrong. In the wake of the Charleston shooting, there had been reports that more and more churches were hiring guards or training gun-carrying members of their congregations to be able to deal with trouble.
Anyone who comments on affairs on the other side of the Atlantic – in either direction – needs to do with considerable humility, and I hope I did both in the column and on the show. What I tried to do was say that while there might be genuine threats, from terrorists or from criminals, they didn't justify a wholesale policy of having guns in church. It normalises and sanctifies violence. There are non-lethal alternatives.
In the debate – expertly moderated by Julie Roys – I found myself up against two other contributors with a very different point of view. Chuck Chadwick is the founder and president of the National Organization for Church Security and Safety Management, which has helped thousands of churches throughout America with security and safety issues. He is the licensed security manager and president of Gatekeepers Security Services, which has put hundreds of armed 'gatekeepers' in churches across Texas. He is also the president of the Christian Security Institute, which trains, certifies and licenses church security operators. Carl Chinn is the author of Evil Invades Sanctuary: The Case for Security in Faith-Based Organizations. He was involved in a shooting incident at New Life Church in Colorado Springs in 2007, which saw an armed intruder who had killed two people at a YWAM centre shot by church responders.
I don't mind saying I was outgunned. These, after all, are people who have lived what they believe and experienced it for themselves. Furthermore, it was clear from the callers to the show that theirs was the majority view. From memory, only a couple of people said guns in church were a bad idea, and that was because God would protect them. I don't agree with that; it comes too close to an unbiblical fatalism, and I believe Christians are entitled to use lethal force to protect themselves or their loved ones. And I'm not a pacifist: I think anyone who wants to choose martyrdom for themselves is free to do so, but I don't think they can stand by and let others die if they can stop it.
But there are still strong arguments against having armed security in churches. I haven't read Chinn's book, but a (favourable) review here is sobering. It implies the line between a good outcome (a dead attacker and no more church victims) and a really bad one is pretty thin. When rumours of a second attacker spread, an adrenaline-infused stranger yelled at Chinn, tried to intervene and was shot in the arm (not by Chinn). He was nearly shot by church security team members when he ran to the killer's body and seized his handgun. Chinn also writes about how when police arrived the atmosphere became "super-charged" – the potential for even more killing was there too.
On the other hand – if Chinn and his team hadn't been there, what was to stop the killer? That's the point the callers – including a grandmother who routinely carries a gun to church because it makes her feel safe – made repeatedly. Bad people have guns, so good people should too.
And that – as I admitted in my original column – is a very compelling argument. And at the end of the show, I was left thinking several things.
1. The culture gap between the US and the UK is just vast. That's not to say everyone in the US is comfortable around guns – Julie isn't – or that everyone in the UK is nervous around them – I'm not, except in the healthy sense that everyone should be. But there seems to be a general acceptance that the answer to guns is more guns, which I struggle with.
2. These people are not irresponsible. They don't want to kill people. Neither are they – at least, the ones on the show – motivated by fear of Islamic State or Muslims in general. That barely figured; it was crazies and criminals they worried about.
3. But, but. We didn't talk about what could go wrong. Someone comes into a church waving a toy gun and gets shot by an over-eager Second Amendment supporter. As a minister, I've faced a member of my congregation who was on the point of becoming physically aggressive over a disputed point of doctrine. I don't think he'd have shot me if he had a gun, but who knows? That's the risk of a gun culture in church. And the fog of war is a danger too. It takes training and a cool head to distinguish friend from foe. Not many people have it, and even they can make mistakes. If the only people who carried guns were trained security personnel, I'd feel a little easier, but that's not how it works.
4. At the end of the show we had only just started to talk about the elephant in the room – the sheer number of guns in the US, and the appalling number of deaths – nearly 14,000 last year. The trouble is that the people on Up for Debate knew perfectly well that they weren't going to shoot anyone. They were responsible gun owners and so were all their friends. They weren't part of the problem, they were part of the solution. And this is true, too: individually, these people are OK. But having said all that: I just don't believe it's possible to argue that having so many guns in circulation is healthy for a society. I don't believe that, statistically, they make people safer – they just make people feel safer, at the expense of making other people feel less safe. I think America is in a domestic arms race, and I don't like to see the churches colluding with it.
So yes: I remain outgunned, and I don't think I'd win an argument – but I'd still say, in all humility, that I'm unconvinced.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
