A minister in Kentucky is inviting his congregation to bring guns to church because he wants to “celebrate our rights as Americans” on the night before the Fourth of July. Most of us find this profoundly wrong-headed, but the pastor sees no contradictions.

“When someone from within the church tells me that being a Christian and having firearms are contradictions, that they are incompatible with the Gospel — baloney,” he said. “As soon as you start saying that it’s not something that Christians do, well, guns are just the foil. The issue now is the Gospel. So, in a sense, it does become a crusade. Now the Gospel is at stake.”

His logic is convoluted and his understanding of the thrust of the Christian proclamation is obscure. But let’s, for a moment, cut him some slack.

If a Christian community wants to thank God for the nation in which they live, they should do so unashamedly. The historical fact that guns were a large part of this nation’s formation is not to be denied either; the National Anthem proclaims guns (rockets glaring and bombs bursting) as central to our survival. Today guns are still viable instruments of protection, and the desire to protect one’s own is the fruit of a very lofty and godly love that can and often does lead to the forgetting of self-interest for the sake of those for whom one cares. People die for their country and for their families.

Nevertheless, there is a warning. William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury in the early 1940s, admonished that although such familial and patriotic love can “attain to very great heights,” nevertheless it is also “compatible with antagonism and even hatred towards other persons or communities.” It can even intensify such hatred. Protecting one’s own — a natural and loving instinct — can lead even to the fabrication of an enemy and a mind-set that perpetrates violence and evil. Even a good impulse can become ultimately destructive and ungodly. Rather, says Temple, on the simplest level we need to be widening “the area within which obligation and loyalty are recognized as holding sway.”

This resounds much more straightforwardly with the person and the teachings of Jesus and can never be accomplished by guns. The Gospel, as one biblical scholar wrote, “is an ever-widening sphere of an ever deepening reconciliation.” Bringing guns to church celebrates something, but that something certainly isn’t the Christian message.

What can we then bring to church to celebrate our freedom? Temple suggests we really only have one thing: “All is of God; the only thing of my very own which I can contribute to my own redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.” The congregation whose members bring their sins to church will obtain freedom and genuine peace much more quickly and much more deeply than a congregation bringing guns.