Joseph P. Slaughter is Assistant Professor of the Practice in Religion and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Guns and Society at Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut).
The Arena caught up with him to pose some questions…
What is the focus of your research projects right now?
Well, my current book project is just wrapping up – Faith In Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic (Columbia University Press) will be out in November. But, as that book about Christian businesses of the early nineteenth century enters production, I’ve turned to researching the subject of my course this semester: the history of how Christianity and gun culture became intertwined in the U. S. Last spring, I was assembling a panel on this subject for a conference we hosted last fall at Wesleyan on the history of firearms in America and I realized there were almost no historians working on this subject.
At about the same time, I visited a fascinating church in Hartford, CT that was built to memorialize Samuel Colt after his death in 1862. One of the leading gun manufactures of the nineteenth century memorialized by a church – that just struck me as really bizarre, and as I saw people (including politicians) on social media trumpeting their identities as Christian gun owners, I wondered what the history was behind this sort of thing. So, I decided to start with Sam Colt and try to learn more about the decision to connect his tools of violence to Christianity through the construction of a Gothic Episcopal church. I’m just now to the stage of presenting my first bit of Colt research at the Business History Conference this month.
Can you give us a taste of something surprising that you have found in your work on this project so far?
There are no academic biographies of Sam Colt! Sure, there are plenty of books on Colt, but they are mostly poplar histories or books sponsored by his family or company. There are also some fine works of visual history that address Colt’s products, but no scholarly treatments. Don’t get me wrong, some popular histories, such as the recent work, Revolver by Jim Rasenberger are quite good, but there is definitively a need for scholars to reexamine the Connecticut River Valley “gun barons” such as Oliver Winchester, Simeon North, and Daniel Wesson.
What are the broader questions that fascinate you in your reading, thinking, and writing?
I grew up in northern Ohio and Indiana and I remember going to a college basketball game at Goshen College not long after the start of the first Gulf War in January 1991. At the time, high schools and colleges in the Midwest were playing patriotic tunes like Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A” in addition to the national anthem before sporting events. But not Goshen College. When I turned to one of my high school buddies with a puzzled look on my face, clearly confused at this unforeseen turn of events, he responded matter-of-factly, “they are Mennonite and don’t do that.” This answer just didn’t compute for a kid who grew up in mainstream white evangelicalism, but I’ve been thinking a lot more about it lately. Why did the peace church tradition carry much less weight in shaping Christian attitudes about firearms in America? Why do Christians in other countries have markedly different attitudes about firearms? What did Christians in the Connecticut River Valley think about the expanding gun industry in their region – especially products like the revolver which were not primarily made for hunting.
More broadly, I am fascinated by how people’s religious identities inform their decisions as consumers. To what degree do people adapt their religious identities to the needs of the marketplace versus how much do people reshape the market to conform to their religious commitments? I ponder some version of this intractable question all the time.