In 20 Years, Americans Of All Faiths Have Never Been More Supportive Of Gun Rights

(OPINION) The United States has gone through a turbulent few weeks. The death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer kicked off hundreds of protests around the United States demanding accountability and reforms in not just American policing but also American society to create centuries of systemic racism.

What is often lost to history is that one of the first major pieces of gun control legislation in the United States was signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan after 30 Black Panthers stood on the steps of the California capitol building armed with an array of firearms in 1967.

The relationship between race, guns, and power have been a mainstay of American politics since its founding, but given the current state of the country would it be a prudent time to propose gun reforms? Would people of faith be open to curtailing gun ownership in the United States? While religiously devout Americans often declare that their faith guides their politics, when it comes to guns, it seems clear that party identification leads the way. Most American religious traditions do not speak with one voice when it comes to gun ownership - instead many parishioners rely on politicians instead of priests to guide their views of gun control in the United States. 

And the data tells a compelling story — Americans of all religious faiths are less supportive of gun control now than at any point in the last two decades. 

For instance, survey data that goes back to 1972 shows a fascinating shift in the public’s view of gun control. In the 1970’s and early 80’s there was a fair amount of skepticism surrounding police having the power to issue gun permits. However, that began to shift rapidly through the 1990’s, peaking around 1998 when large shares of every religious tradition were in favor of police issuing permits. Even 80% of evangelicals supported this specific policy toward gun control. Then, that enthusiasm waned - in most cases support has dropped twenty percentage points in the last twenty years. Although, it’s worthwhile to point out that there are differences in support level in 2018. While just 60% of evangelicals support gun permits, it’s three quarters of Catholics.

But, what is even more fascinating is that while the share of firearms manufactured has absolutely skyrocketed in the last decade, that has not been accompanied by more households owning a gun. For instance, three in five evangelical households owned a gun in the 1970s, but that’s dropped to 45.6% in the last decade. For black Protestants, the gun ownership rate has dropped nearly in half since the 1970’s. How can manufacturing keep going up while ownership is on the decline? A recent study found that 3% of gun owners possess half the firearms in the United States.

So, this reluctance to give police the power to issue gun permits is not because more and more households want to own a gun - they just want to make sure that anyone who buy a firearm will not be hindered by the government in their pursuit.

However, there have been a number of proposals recently to modify the way that guns are purchased and used in the United States. In a 2018 poll, respondents were asked how they felt about a policy that would require background checks for all gun purposes. Overwhelmingly numbers of every religious group were in favor, even the more right-leaning traditions like white evangelicals and Latter-Day Saints.

Other policy options don’t receive so much support. For instance, large shares of moderate and liberal religious traditions like black Protestants support banning assault rifles, but white evangelicals are evenly divided. A question about making it easier to obtain a concealed carry permit does not also receive strong support. For instance, just 39.4% of white Catholics favor the idea and it’s an even smaller share of the religious nones, with just 18.5% of atheists in favor.

Gun control is a fascinating issue in American faith, because the data points to a clear conclusion: religious leaders are, by and large, not guiding the views of their congregations on this topic. Instead, political partisanship seems to be a much stronger driver of public opinion. 

What is unmistakable is that the political environment today is much less supportive of gun control in general than they were just 20 years ago. In 1994, Congress was able to pass the Federal Assault Weapons Ban -  in 2013, the Senate rejected a bill that would require mandatory background checks on gun purchases. As the author of Ecclesiastes once wrote: “To every thing there is a season.” Clearly this is not a season of gun control.

Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanburge.