Is that a gun in your pocket or do you just love Jesus?
by Tom Sullivan
This week, via the Texas Observer: It’s the Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Heckler & Koch. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition:
That, in a nutshell, is what Liberty University students heard from Jerry Falwell Jr., in the wake of the shootings in San Bernardino in December. Falwell — president of the evangelical Christian college and son of the late Moral Majority founder — told students, “If more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them.” Adding that he was carrying a weapon in his pocket, he encouraged students to take Liberty’s concealed-carry training course.
Liberty University is in Virginia. It didn’t take long for the gospel to reach there from Texas (emphasis mine):
One pastor’s message to attendees of a 2012 Keller church conference went well beyond the suggestion that Christians consider gun ownership. “You can’t be a Christian if you don’t own a gun,” pastor Dr. Gary Cass told attendees at the Deliver Us From Evil Conference. “How can you protect yourself, your family, or your neighbor if you don’t have a gun? If I’m supposed to love my neighbor, and I can’t protect him, what good am I?” While Cass told me recently that there is some hyperbole in these statements — in that gun ownership alone is not sufficient to guarantee salvation — he does believe that self-defense “is a God-given right and duty.”
Literally not sufficient (#gunfail), which is surely not what he meant. But the idea of needing a gun as one prerequisite for salvation gives a whole new meaning to “baptism by fire.”