This conservative American reverence for guns runs bone deep now, though. I don't understand it, and nothing like this existed when I was a boy and a young man.
In the tiny Michigan village where I live, the Baptist church pastored by my uncle sees usually fewer than 100 people for every Sunday service. Several of the men open-carry pistols to church. They walk into the sanctuary with pistols in holsters strapped to their hips.
How astonishing is that?
They talk about it proudly. "Nobody's coming in here and gunning us down," they say.
The congregation would be, pardon the pun, up in arms if anybody tried to force them to stop wearing their guns to church.
That they do is irrational. Crime around here is so non-existent that many people don't even lock their doors at night. The local newspaper's crime report rarely has anything in its column inches except misdemeanors (often as not committed by bored teenagers) in the largish town that's the county seat about 20 miles from here.
That people out here need guns for certain things is indisputable. You don't get much more rural than this except out west. Hunting is a way of life, and many people use it to significantly add to their diet. Animal pests are a big problem too, and not just for farmers. Lots of people raise chickens for meat and eggs, and when you've got packs of coyotes coming around you need to be able to do something about them.
But you don't need to be able to do something about threats in church, which is not a thing anywhere around here.
But the right to have a gun in the sanctuary has been elevated to something like religious fervor. People talk about the second amendment like it's in Leviticus.
And maybe that's part of the problem. Conservative Christians around here, like in most of the United States, consider themselves to be textualists, to revere the literal meaning of the Bible, which they say they must follow literally, even when they clearly don't do that.
That's their mindset, so it's not very surprising that they would transfer that kind of thinking to the Constitution and their way of interpreting it. Extremist textualism.
I don't know any answers to the problem, but I'll tell you this. Making the man in my village stop wearing guns to church would produce violent fury, and that's really sad.
Even a couple decades ago the idea of strapping a pistol to your hip before going to church would have seemed outlandish. It isn't outlandish anymore, it's normal now.
