Faith and Firearms: An Exploration of Religion’s Entanglement with Guns in America

Abstract

Numerous studies show that religion predicts an individual’s likelihood of owning a gun, but the role of religious tradition in shaping attitudes and outcomes about guns and gun policy in the United States is undertheorized. This dissertation explores the entanglement between religion and guns in America and the political consequences of this relationship. First, I examine the impact of religious tradition on gun owner identity. I find that Protestantism broadly does not matter in the formation of a gun owner identity, but evangelicalism does significantly predict the strength of gun owner identity. Moreover, gun owner identity mediates the relationship between evangelicalism and gun policy attitudes in the United States. Second, I utilize two original experiments to test the Theory of Dissonant Identity Priming in effort to ascertain if religious elites can move the gun-related attitudes of members of their in-group. My findings suggest that religious elite messaging can indeed move gun attitudes, but only for a member of the elite’s in-group and especially when those messages are unexpected. Lastly, I investigate if the number of evangelicals in a state matters for the adoption of gun related policy – specifically, Stand Your Ground legislation. Using an original dataset, I find that the number of evangelicals in a state significantly impacts the likelihood that the state adopts Stand Your Ground legislation. I conclude by addressing the significance of my findings for understanding American gun politics, the limitations of these chapters, and avenues for future research.