Guns and Their Cultured Despisers

I may be referring more in the future to the bane of my existence as someone trying to offer a more complex view of guns and gun culture in America:

Even worse, gatekeeping liberal cultured despisers of guns.

So just a word about the origin of this language in case you see me using it and wonder where it comes from.

Before my academic midlife crisis drew me into the field of gun studies, I studied the sociology of religion for about 20 years. Both of my mentors, Robert Bellah and Richard Schoenherr, emphasized understandings of religion that take as central the enduring direct human experience of the supernatural. This experience-centered understanding of religion can be traced in Western thought back to the work of theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, as I noted in my first-ever scholarly publication.

Schleiermacher’s experience-centered understanding of religion was connected to his desire to defend religion against its “cultured despisers” — a term I loved then and now.

Religion’s cultured despisers, according to Schleiermacher, were not just people who had negative views of religion. They were people who, owing to their Enlightenment rationalism and civilization, saw themselves as above religion.

There are many parallels in the field of gun studies, from progenitors like Richard Hofstadter to contemporary flag bearers like Andrew McKevitt, just to name two.

Schleiermacher’s response to these cultured despisers of religion was to challenge their preconceptions and offer a more nuanced understanding that highlighted the centrality of religion to human life.

Here again I see a parallel in the field of gun studies in my own work.