"Why I'm Renouncing My Second Amendment Rights," Dr. Kutter Callaway

In a recent Huffington Post article, Dr. Kutter Callaway made a bold (and perhaps unprecedented) statement: "Let the record show, I hereby renounce my constitutional right to bear arms as outlined in Amendment Two of the Constitution of the United States." Professor Callaway is Assistant Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, and he is no stranger to exploring the intersection of popular culture and religion. His most recent book, for example, is the cleverly titled, Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2013). When a friend sent me Callaway's article, I knew it needed to be featured here.

Callaway makes no secret of the fact that his own history informs his strong personal stance against guns. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, Callaway has not only lived life in gun country, but his father was also a "Texas lawman/rancher/cowboy." Guns are quite literally his "inheritance" and "legacy." But as a resident of Colorado, he also knows the pain of gun violence; such violence has, to use his words, "landed on my front door."

Out of this complicated history come forth the following points, which seem to drive Callaway's argument:

1. Faithfulness to Christ should trump faithfulness to any state or law. This means, to Callaway, that his identity in Christ "alone is what organizes, orients, and ultimately relativizes every other possible identity that would make a claim upon me." 
2. Having differentiated loyalty to state from loyalty to Christian identity, Callaway states that his Christian faith compels him to "stand in radical opposition to the forces of death and destruction that threaten to undo the very fabric of God's good creation, regardless of what the Constitution says I can or cannot do as an American citizen." This commitment to God, creation, and to life lead Callaway to renounce his right to bear firearms, which he presumably includes among "the forces of death and destruction." 
3. Although distinguishing Christian and American values earlier in the essay (see Point #1 above), Callaway does find a point of convergence in their respective emphases on liberty. In fact, he argues, "it is the very liberty we have both as Americans and as followers of Christ that allows us (and obliges us) to live differently." The liberty he finds in Christian faith and the liberty guaranteed him by the Constitution, give him the freedom of choice--and in this case, the freedom to set aside his right to bear arms. 

Callaway is a clear, thoughtful, and compelling writer, and I am already thinking about ways to integrate this article--or at least parts of it--into the next congregational conversation I host on guns and religion.

From an ethnographic perspective, Callaway's article also raises some questions for me, questions that (to my mind) have no easy answer.

Callaway has a very clear reason for why he is personally opposed to gun ownership. and it is the call to, "stand in radical opposition to the forces of death and destruction that threaten to undo the very fabric of God's good creation." The statement is potent, drawing on mythic images of chaos and cosmic conflict. Creation is under threat, and one way to take a stand against this onslaught is to lay down the implements of death, namely, guns.

As someone who is daily immersed in research on gun culture, I hear Callaway's rationale with some frequency. But more often than not, it is used by gun owners who support ownership for the defense of themselves or others. Why own a gun? Because they are responsible (or "called") to resist the forces of death and destruction, not only to preserve and value their own lives, but also to preserve and value the lives of others. (For a helpful study of these, "citizen protectors," see Jennifer Carlson, Citizen Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline). "There is real evil in the world" I often hear "and a gun allows me to confront it." The impulse to resist evil is similar to Callaway's, but how that impulse is actualized is quite different.

Let's take an example from Kyle Cassidy's fascinating photography project, Armed America. In this masterful work, Cassidy travels the US, asking people why they own firearms. He then photographs them at home with their guns, along with whatever other props they wish to include. A woman by the name of Gwen offered this reason for owning guns: "We each have the right to be the source of our own salvation from evil if we so choose. That right must not be usurped by those who would run our lives for us according to their own agendas, whether it be for the basest of self-interests, or for the noblest of altruisms" (See Kyle Cassidy, Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes [Krause Publications, 2007], 84).

I interviewed a white, male college student in an April 2015 who also has his permit to carry. He made the following comments: "I feel like it's my duty to, just as the Bible says to help the poor, lift up the downtrodden, everybody in society, it almost connects with my faith in that I'm there to protect, and just be there for my brothers and sisters in Christ . .. there is evil in the world and there are people out there trying to do bad things, and I pray that I never have to, but I want to be there, just as I was saying before, to help my neighbor and to help those people when they're in their hour of greatest need . . . I want to perform the actions of Christ . . . I want to be God's hand in the world at that point, protecting those who need his help." Clearly framing his ideas in the language of the Bible, this young man feels that it is his duty--better, his calling--to carry a gun for the sake of the neighbor, who may one day be confronted with a lethal form of evil. The gun is a way for him to resist evil.

Callaway's article has left me with a number of important ethnographic questions that I will take with me into the field: What factors explain how three people (Callaway, Gwen, and the college student) can, on the one hand, show such a strong willingness to confront evil, and then, on the other hand, choose to act on that willingness in such contradictory ways? For Callaway, guns seem to symbolize the creation-threatening powers he wishes to resist. For the other two, however, guns are a means of resisting those creation-threatening forces.

Juxtaposing these voices alongside one another makes one thing clear: human moral, theological, and religious reasoning never proceeds along straight lines. The path from moral value (e.g., creation and precious and should be protected from the forces of death) to moral decision making (e.g., to renounce guns or to own guns) meanders, and often around unexpected and even subterranean features of an individual's history, psychology, and even faith.