Speaking at a San Francisco fundraising event in April of 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama ignited a firestorm of criticism by saying the following about middle-American Rust Belt attitudes towards faith, foreigners, and firearms:
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Obama’s remarks, captured on tape, immediately provoked criticism from across the political spectrum. His opponent in the Democratic Primaries, Hillary Clinton, then also a Senator, described his comments as “elitist and out-of-touch”; a spokesman for the leading Republican candidate, John McCain, blasted Obama as displaying “an elitism and condescension toward hard-working Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking.” A year later, from an altogether different corner entirely, the reconstituted Southern Rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd released an album entitled God and Guns. Striking a very different chord than Skynyrd’s 1974 single “Saturday Night Special” (‘Got a barrel that’s blue and cold / Ain’t no good for nothin’ / But put a man six feet in a hole’) God and Guns’s title track didn’t hold back: “God and guns / Keep us strong / That’s what this country / Was founded on / Well we might as well give up and run / If we let them take our God and guns.”
Setting aside both its lyrical merits and ideological upshot, of all responses to Obama’s remarks, Skynyrd’s song had the distinction of being perhaps the most honest – and, as a matter of simple description, the most analytically accurate. For the bare fact of the matter is that whatever you may think of God, or of guns, American history would be unrecognizable without the influence of both. God and machine, ever-in-tandem, producing a nation “strong” not just in the narrow sense of being powerful, but also in the etymological sense of resolute violence, of an abiding legacy of wreckage unparalleled by any other nation on Earth.
This essay is an attempt to sound that legacy, to trace the consistent themes and surprising reversals in the relationship between religion and guns in the North American continent. It is not an attempt to judge that history – God and guns have been levied to render more than enough judgments already. Because to the extent to which the colonization of the Americas was an enterprise founded upon genocidal violence and the wholesale exploitation of natural resources, both religiously sanctioned, guns have formed an inextricable part of the American story. Likewise, insofar as America is a nation where various religious and ethnic groups have arrived carrying raw memories of historical conflicts with them, those tensions have played out, time and again, on new shores, with new weapons. Finally, since America has also been the birthplace of three centuries of new religious movements, guns have at once been used to persecute and to protect from persecution, real and imagined.