The United States has the highest rate of firearm ownership and firearm-caused death among high-income nations in the world. Further, conservative Protestants are more likely to own firearms than other religious believers. As such, the place of the gun in American life constitutes a wound that calls out for sociological analysis and theological response.

In this dissertation, I respond to this wound in two ways. First, I contribute to the sociology of guns through a fourteen-month ethnographic study of the entanglement of guns and Christianity in the Triangle Region of North Carolina. Second, I develop a theological ethics of the gun in American life that emerges from this ethnographic starting point.

Against perspectives that would render Christian handgun owners “repugnant cultural others,” I draw from just war theory to give an account of my interlocutors as just warriors seeking to enact a mode of Christian masculine care. Yet, I explore how Christian handgun ownership and the militarization of the everyday it generates ultimately outstrips the intelligibility of just war criteria for advancing ethical reflection on the place of firearms in American life.

Finding a more promising framework in a just peace paradigm, I consider the work of the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham to explore how the practice of keeping vigil at sites of firearm-caused death constitutes a way of being in solidarity with the victims of gun violence. Drawing upon the doctrine of the mystical body of Christ, I argue that if Christian handgun owners, the bodies they seek to secure, and the victims of gun violence are all members of Christ’s body, then the place of the gun in American life tears and rends this body. If Christian handgun owners cannot give up their guns, they—and the church in North America more broadly—should engage in practices of solidarity with the victims of gun violence, the crucified members of Christ’s body in America’s story of the gun.