Teens, Guns, Youth Group, and January 6
I remember a specific Wednesday night at my church youth group, sometime back in the early 1990s. At 16, I was probably the oldest of the eight or so teens present. Some were as young as 12.
Our 30-something youth group leader Dave was with us along with two other guys from our church. We were going to do something a bit different that night.
Instead of going to the social hall where we usually held our weekly youth group meetings, we walked over to an adjoining wing of the building and into a quiet unused classroom. The room was an unremarkable 12’ x 12’ish square. Two tables stood along the back wall, draped with a folded heavy quilt that I hadn’t seen before.
Standing in front of the table Dave presented us with a thought experiment:
Imagine the government has just made an announcement: Christianity is now against the law. What will you do?
Will you comply?
Will you go into hiding?
Or will you fight?”
With that final word as punctuation, the other two men unfolded the quilt on the table to reveal a small arsenal of guns — shotguns, hunting rifles, a military carbine, four or five handguns.
The room was dead silent. The two young brothers standing next to me, 12 and 14, were agog, eyes bugging out of their heads. They’d probably never been that close to unsecured firearms in their lives.
“Are those real?” one girl murmured,
I was less surprised than the others — I’d already been to the gun range with these men several times. They had taught me how to shoot and I recognized most of the guns on the table as ones that I had fired under their guidance.
I already knew what my answer to the question was.
I was ready to fight.
At that point in my life I’d been nurturing fantasies of noble resistance for several years already. Initially the expected scenario had been invasion by godless Christian-hating Soviet hordes, but the unexpected collapse of the USSR threw off our eschatological endgame. However, the recent election of Bill Clinton to the highest office in the land revealed that our true foe was even more insidious and much closer to home than we had ever suspected. The Clinton-led government was quite certainly on the verge of instituting far-reaching gun laws as a precursor to their inevitable ruthless persecution of God’s holy people (i.e. Christians and the handful of Jews who believed in Jesus).
Our lives, and indeed our very eternal souls were on the line. We were facing down wicked powers and principalities, and if prayer couldn’t stop them then bullets would. Violence was inevitable, and we were ready to deliver.
On January 6, 2021, I flashed back to that Wednesday night youth group as I was watching the angry mobs rushing through the Capitol building. The paramilitary gear, the signs invoking holy war, the Jericho march, the comically large shofars, the messianic iconography. It was all so familiar.
I knew these people.
I didn’t recognize any of the faces on the news, but I grew up with them. Hell, when I was 16 I was one of them.
I spent many years of my life among the same white conservative evangelical communities that produced the good Christian men who were there beating cops with fire extinguishers and American flagpoles, the nice dads from the suburbs who were threatening to hang journalists and congressmen, the kind grandmothers screaming for blood, and the noble military veterans who were smashing windows and pursuing insurrection.
For the first half of my life, I listened to them speak freely about what they would someday do — to the Muslims and the communists who wanted to conquer us, to the liberal atheists who were stripping God away from our schools and our money, to the gays who were waiting to sodomize our children, and to the satanic conspiracy of elites who were behind it all with the devil whispering in their ears.
January 6 was the natural extension of everything I was raised to believe.
Sure, there were white nationalists, and craven GOP opportunists, and crazy conspiracy theorists there as well, but the bulk of those in attendance were simply run of the mill authoritarian Christian nationalists, who support the police, and believe in democracy, and affirm the rule of law, unless they feel that those things are encroaching on their vision for America.
In which case they will always be ready to show up with guns and do violence to get what they want — cops, democracy, and rule of law be damned.
Epilogue: Years later I spent a good bit of time with anarcho-socialist communities that are as far to the left as the January 6 folks are to the right. Some of these people were proponents of direct action up to and including black bloc tactics (the type of behavior that most people are referring to when they talk about “Antifa violence”). Nothing I saw or heard among those folks ever approached the casually eager and sincere embrace of ruthless and lethal violence towards their political opponents that I regularly encountered among members of the conservative Christian community where I grew up.
Further reading, if you have the appetite:
I Was Trained for the Culture Wars in Home School, Awaiting Someone Like Mike Pence as a Messiah
