After tragedy hit close, how conservative Christians took a risk by supporting gun reform

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Dealing with the grief of losing close friends in The Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, Kathy White mustered her strength and that of fellow members at Christ Presbyterian Church to volunteer at prayer vigils and funerals.

White’s been part of the Christ Presbyterian community since the 1980s and serves as a deaconess who co-leads a bereavement ministry, so she’s accustomed to helping lead the church in prayer and mourning. But not as much political advocacy.

“When something like this happens, you wring your hands and cry out,” White said. “What this represented was moving beyond that to take a step on the road toward change.”

That step was helping her daughter gather support from members of Christ Presbyterian and Covenant Presbyterian Church, the church affiliated with The Covenant School, for a letter to send to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee on gun reform.

Christ Presbyterian is the parent church for a family of Nashville area congregations that includes Covenant Presbyterian and its school. Christ Presbyterian has close ties to Lee and his family, among other influential figures like U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, who is a member.

“There is more to be done, and we encourage you to support the development of a full policy response,” the letter to Lee states. “We stand with you as you make this important decision.”

More than 300 people signed the letter and 12 of them met with the governor. For White and others in the group, it was a big step. “(But) how could we resort to something other than the approach we took?” White said.

The Covenant shooting activated Christians in Middle Tennessee who for the first time are publicly joining calls for gun reform. Their churches are part of conservative traditions, and the membership is majority white, Republican-leaning, and supportive of Second Amendment rights.

The moment is a case study of the type of legislative middle ground that people of faith on different sides of the aisle can support. Meanwhile, it’s leaving local clergy long involved in this work wondering if these new voices will stick around.

“For them, it became a canary in the coal mine,” said the Rev. David Cassidy, lead pastor of Spanish River Church in Boca Raton, Florida, and former pastor of Christ Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee.

Christ Community Church is part of the same family tree of churches that grew from Christ Presbyterian, which is part of a conservative denomination called the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).

Cassidy has sought to elevate the conversation about gun reform in the PCA for decades ever since a 1997 school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky, where Cassidy was pastoring a church at the time.

To Cassidy, it’s surprising to see certain Christian pastors and lay leaders in Nashville come out for gun reform. Leaders and pastors in the PCA and the Southern Baptist Convention have signed letters and spoken at rallies.

Many have shown support for Lee’s proposal for an extreme risk protection order law, designed to keep firearms out of the hands of individuals who pose an immediate risk of harm to themselves or others. The legislature concluded the 2023 session before taking action on Lee’s proposal, so the governor recently called for a special legislative session focused on gun reform. No date has been set yet, as many Republicans in the legislature continue to express doubts about the proposal.

Cassidy, himself a gun owner, said he’s encountered pushback for supporting similar reform. Likewise, the Nashville PCA and SBC leaders who are speaking up “are cutting against the grain,” Cassidy said. “I think it could represent a tipping point on this issue.”

Stepping out, the consequences be as they may

Cassidy’s successor at Christ Community Church, the Rev. Randy Lovelace, has found himself continuing the tradition of speaking out on guns.

It started when members of Lovelace’s church asked him if he would say an opening prayer at a rally on gun reform in Franklin in early April, which the members were helping organize. Lovelace asked for 24 hours to think about it.

The weekend after the Covenant shooting: Cries for Covenant: Tennessee faith communities struggle to make sense of tragedy during Holy Week

For pastors in the PCA, it can be taboo to speak publicly on certain issues, Cassidy and Lovelace said.

“The lines of demarcation are not clear,” Lovelace said. “And then you find yourself standing in a mine field and are like ‘wait, what just happened?’”

Forty-four percent of people in the PCA own a gun or someone in their household does, according to data from the Cooperative Election Study, a Harvard University study that assesses political attitudes and demographic factors. That percentage is greater than many denominations in a survey of 36, but not as high as the SBC at 51%.

The PCA is split on certain gun-related issues, such as loosening restrictions on obtaining concealed carry permits, federal funding for red-flag laws, and arming teachers, according to an analysis by religion data expert Ryan Burge. By comparison, respondents in the SBC are far more supportive of those stances.

After weighing the risks, Lovelace ultimately agreed to pray at the Franklin event.

From there, he signed a letter with 131 other faith leaders, including five other PCA pastors, from Voices for Safer Tennessee. After that, he spoke at the Linking Arms for Change event in front of the state Capitol as part of an interfaith lineup of speakers.

“I am reminded to be an agent of renewal in this world,” Lovelace said at the event. “I stand here with you and with our voices to say the following: we can, and we must do something.”

National and state SBC leaders and pastors of the area’s largest SBC churches have also put themselves out there to support Lee’s proposal, saying the SBC passed resolutions in 2018 and 2022 calling for elected officials to find ways to reduce gun violence.

But more conservative factions have pushed back, saying the SBC leaders’ messaging gives a false impression about many Southern Baptists’ views on guns.

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When there have been mass shootings at SBC churches and theologically similar churches, the response has more been an emphasis on strengthening church security and less on gun reform, according to an analysis of news articles.

An extreme example of that, and probably the most well-known, is Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church in Texas, where a gunman killed 26 people and injured 20 others in 2017.

“They saw no need for any gun reform, and they didn’t blame anybody,” said Joe Holley, a longtime columnist for the Houston Chronicle and author of “Sutherland Springs: God, Guns, and Hope in a Texas Town.”

Religion played an important role in that, but so did other cultural and socioeconomic influences. “They believe in gun rights as strongly as they believe in God,” Holley said.

Crying out, over many years

As some Nashville area faith groups figure out how to talk about guns, others have been crying out for a long time.

The Rev. Aaron Marble, senior pastor of Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church, began speaking out about guns soon after starting his job in 2018, which was just months before the Waffle House shooting in Nashville. A customer who disarmed the gunman, James Shaw Jr., had close ties to Marble’s church.

“As a Black man and a pastor who shepherds people, gun violence has been an issue in urban and Black communities across the country,” Marble said. “Then we have this issue of mass shootings that do not evade us either.”

The Rev. Curtis Bryant, pastor of Greater Heights Missionary Baptist Church, has been dealing with the issue of gun violence ever since he planted his North Nashville church 32 years ago.

“I am of the persuasion that churches have to take ownership and leadership in their communities where their churches are planted,” Bryant said. “To know the people, to become active in the safety of their community.”

Bryant’s church has organized events as part of Nashville Night Out Against Crime. Currently, it’s partnering with Nashville police for a gun retrieval program.  

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On the legislative front, the African American Clergy Collective of Tennessee collaborated with state lawmakers to draft a bill that addresses gun violence as a public health issue. But Marble said there’s been little momentum for the bill, even while the issue of gun violence is receiving more attention partly at the urging of white faith leaders.

“What is offensive to me is that now this is coming from this particular person or group, it is now an accepted position,” Marble said.

On April 11, the clergy collective wrote to Lee asking “to meet as soon as possible to discuss how to advance this legislation.” But they were told the governor didn’t have availability.

Exactly a week later, Lee met with the group from Christ Presbyterian.

"Over the past month, the Governor has met with numerous faith leaders and communities across the state to discuss meaningful solutions that will ensure public safety while preserving the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens, and he looks forward to continuing conversations in the months ahead," Lee spokesperson Jade Byers said in a statement.

Branching out, bridging the divide

Ann-Haley White Poag, Kathy White’s daughter, grew up attending Christ Presbyterian and its K-12 academy but now as an adult belongs to a different church. Poag’s fellowship with her current faith community, while staying connected to her old one, in many ways inspired her to start the Christ Presbyterian petition to Lee.

“As people of faith to put our faith in action,” Poag said. “And build bridges even when it’s hard, even when we disagree.”

So Poag said she was disappointed to learn the Black clergy collective did not have the same opportunity to meet with Lee as the Christ Presbyterian group. It shows that even though local faith groups are coming together around certain gun reform, other disparities persist.

“Coming together is the only way true and lasting change will occur,” Poag said.

Marble hopes to see greater support for the collective’s bill, components of which he believes Second Amendment defenders can get behind. The bill’s proposals include strengthening public health data collection and improving access to recovery support services.

Meanwhile, Bryant is helping organize an event during Juneteenth called Operation Ceasefire and said he hopes to have the participation of faith communities all around Nashville.

Lovelace, though still treading carefully, is open to continue supporting efforts to address gun violence. “I want to walk in this humbly and sensitively but listening,” he said.

Would partnering with faith groups on a different side of the aisle create an optics problem?

“Not for me,” Lovelace said.

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at ladams@tennessean.com or on Twitter @liamsadams.