A recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution headline read, “Voters: jobs yes, guns no.”
The accompanying article reported on a statewide poll that found that 72 percent of Georgians oppose changing current law to allow people to carry guns into churches, synagogues and mosques; and 78 percent oppose allowing students to carry guns on college campuses in our state.
The issue of gun safety requires the attention of all of us. But for people of faith, it demands that we address the particular question of carrying guns into religious spaces.
In many of our faith communities, the familiar term for the room where we gather for worship is “sanctuary.” Sanctuary means a holy place, or sacred space. In sanctuaries, we acknowledge the power and presence of God.
Worshipers come there praying for lives of peace and fellowship. Sanctuaries are meant to enhance peace, not conflict, and to enhance safety. A dangerous sanctuary is a contradiction in terms.
In Psalm 100, the Psalmist sings of going to the sanctuary: “Enter into God’s gates with thanksgiving/And into his courts with praise.” When we come to places of worship carrying thanksgiving and praise, we are carrying enough.
When we use sanctuaries for purposes other than the worship of God, we desecrate them; we deprive them of their holiness. When we diminish safety in our sanctuaries, we desecrate them, depriving them of their role as dwelling places for mercy and peace.
In sanctuaries, we attend to a rule that precedes and surpasses the rules our legislators may invent: “You shall not kill.” When we allow people to carry guns into places of worship, we violate the meaning of worship itself. We bring instruments of death to a safe haven meant to nurture life.
Nurturing life extends beyond our places of worship. Schools, particularly, represent inviolable spaces within the secular life of the community. People of faith must oppose any attempt to permit students to carry guns on our college and university campuses.
The familiar line — that the way to stop bad people with guns is to provide good people with guns — fails to recognize the number of times the very presence of a weapon in the hands of a college student increases the danger of death or injury for everyone, “good” people and “bad” people alike. The statistics on the frequency of gun-related suicides among teenagers and young adults remind us that for people under enormous stress, the last thing we want is to provide easy access to deadly escape.
We are bound to wonder why it is even imaginable that in the light of the overwhelming opposition of Georgians to expanding the carrying of guns, members of our Legislature would forge ahead with a bill so obviously unpopular and so patently dangerous.
We can only suspect that they are in debt to some interests other than the interests of the people who elect them, and directly in conflict with the interests of schools, temples, churches, synagogues and mosques in our state.
The Rev. David Bartlett is theologian in residence at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Atlanta.
