(RNS) — Pastor Philip Thornton strode onto the platform of his Legacy Faith Church in Susquehanna Township, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 28 with an AR-15-style rifle strapped to his chest, an American flag emblazoned on the magazine.

“There’s nothing in it, praise the Lord,” Thornton told worshippers. “So, fear not, everybody. Praise the Lord if that was your concern.”

Thornton was using the unloaded weapon as a sermon illustration. At points, he hoisted it up and pointed it at his congregation.

Veteran reporter William J. Kole called the incident alarming, but not surprising. He’s spent the last year researching some Christians’ embrace of gun rights for his new book, “In Guns We Trust: The Unholy Trinity of White Evangelicals, Politics, and Firearms,” released Oct. 14 by Broadleaf Books.

RNS spoke with Kole about why he doesn’t think guns belong in church, why some evangelicals are so enthusiastic about gun ownership and what he believes is at stake in gun reform debates. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You wrote you were New England bureau chief for The Associated Press when the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened. How did that impact your view on faith and guns?

When that horrible massacre happened, it was traumatizing. Journalists are cynical, and we fancy ourselves as rather tough, and this broke a lot of us. Definitely there was an expectation nationally that it would be this transcendent moment where everything would change. And in fact, nothing changed. I was the first to show up for a service and a time of mourning and intercession for the people of Newtown, Connecticut. And I remember weeping in that service for Sandy Hook’s children and for our own kids. But it never really went beyond that stage, from the church’s perspective.

In your view, why is it such a problem for Christians to bring guns to church?

For me, it’s a sticking point because I feel like the historical Jesus is objectively nonviolent. I understand that evangelicals will cherry-pick Scripture to find a few verses to help them feel more comfortable with gun culture, but I find it completely unbiblical. The churches that are embracing gun culture now were almost entirely pacifist up until the late ’60s and early ’70s, when a shift began. Even the Assemblies of God, where I served as a lay missionary for three years in Europe, was officially pacifist in its constitution and bylaws. So, they’ve had to pivot, and it’s a perplexing pivot for me. I just don’t see how weapons have anything to do with a faith tradition that is rooted in nonviolence.

Can you give some examples of churches that have gone out of their way to promote gun use?

I write about a pastor in Kentucky who actively promoted a bring-your-gun-to-church day. It began as a celebration of Second Amendment rights and freedoms, and the church’s insurance company abruptly canceled the church’s policy because that’s not going to inspire confidence when you’ve got a few hundred people with guns coming into a building.

I also went to Alabama to a church that built a firing range on the church property. This was a way for people to have quality time firing their AR-15s together on the church property, and they even used it for outreach — come use our firing range, shoot guns with us and then come to church. Why settle for a potluck supper when you can fellowship over pistol practice?

While writing the book, what did you discover about why white evangelicals are so enthusiastic about gun ownership?

There’s this narrative that the world, quote-unquote, is out to get us as evangelicals. It’s been around for a long time. But it’s this idea that there’s a hostility toward evangelicals and that they are being actively pursued by this intangible entity — which, to my mind, doesn’t even exist — who’s conspiring to take away their guns, take away their Bibles, come for their children and ultimately threaten their very way of life. It’s a very persistent narrative that many evangelicals cling to, and that’s why you even have so many evangelicals overlapping into QAnon conspiracies. Fear is really driving this gun culture, and this evangelical ethos of protecting one’s family and children from harm. It’s laudable, but it breeds this unrealistic arming of whole communities, of families. And there’s a lot of mythology there, too, because as I painfully detail in the book, your home is less safe, not more safe, the moment you bring a gun inside.

A common refrain among some gun-owning evangelicals is that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” How do you respond when folks say that?

Sure, people kill people, but they would not be able to kill without the ready availability of these tools. And it’s not just about mass shootings or even homicides, which are top of mind when we think about our gun crisis. A huge number of gun deaths in the United States are suicides. If you’re part of a faith community that claims to respect the sanctity of life, then why would you argue for more guns, which people are using to take their own lives?

Accidental deaths by gun are the No. 1 killer of children in this country, more even than car crashes, which, to me, is incredible. So, we really have a problem here. I lived internationally for the better part of two decades, and you just don’t find this level of gun violence anywhere else in the world because you just don’t have the ready access to firearms. It’s not complicated.

Can you talk about some of the evangelical-owned gun manufacturers? 

A notable example is a company called Daniel Defense, which is based in Georgia. Its founder and former CEO, Marty Daniel, is a very vocal evangelical. He founded the company on three key values: faith, family and firearms. They claim to essentially make AR-15-style weapons for the glory of God. This is a company that manufactured the rifles used in the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, at Robb Elementary School a few years ago, and some of the rifles that were used in what is still the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, which was that horrible slaughter of music revelers on the Las Vegas Strip. This is a company that’s involved in numerous lawsuits, and they’ve incorporated some of the central imagery of Christianity into their gun making. A couple of Easters ago, they had a social media post with a photo of an open Bible, an AR-15-style military rifle across the Bible, a crucifix, and the post said, “He is risen.” White evangelicals play an outsized role in the gun manufacturing industry.

Did writing this book have any impact on how you’re thinking about your spirituality these days?

Oh, completely. I had to immerse myself into not just the gun culture, but Christian nationalism in the 12 or 14 months that I spent researching and writing the book. It has been a very dismaying time. It’s led me to question what I believe and what I don’t believe. I’m very much deconstructing my faith. I’m also trying to reconstruct it because faith remains important to me. I just can’t, in good conscience, continue in the evangelical tradition.

And it’s not just guns. It’s LGBTQ+ human beings. It’s migrants. Evangelicals seem determined to be on the wrong side of history. My early days experiencing evangelical Christianity were filled with joy and laughter, and now I find the tradition filled with complicity and hypocrisy. Still, as I say in the early pages of the book, these are my people. I really wanted to pull the curtain back to show everyone what’s going on here, but also to try and challenge my evangelical friends to take a second look at some of this.

It’s not just a question of evangelicals owning more weapons than any other subset of the U.S. population, which is true. It’s not even a question of white evangelicals running some of the major gun companies. The issue here is that there are somewhere between 45 million and 60 million people who identify as evangelical among white Americans, and they are consistently blocking progress toward common-sense gun restrictions, like universal background checks and a ban on these military-style assault rifles. Since Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, state legislatures have enacted more laws expanding access to guns than restricting access to guns. We’re going in the wrong direction here.