Actually, instead of owning a gun to “defend against a baddie”, you should welcome anyone who holds a gun to your head, because they’re about to bring you to God.
Actually, instead of owning a gun to “defend against a baddie”, you should welcome anyone who holds a gun to your head, because they’re about to bring you to God.
Christian tradition teaches that we are the hands of God; that God gets things done in the world through the instrumentality of human action. When you do an act of kindness for your neighbor, you are instantiating God’s kindness; when you defend your neighbor from harm or oppression, you are instantiating God’s protection.
One of the big differences between Martin Luther King Jr.'s ideology of nonviolence and Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology of nonviolence is that King accepted self-defense while Gandhi rejected it. Dr. King carried a pistol in his early career, and was later defended by armed bodyguards; while Gandhi rejected armed protection and called for oppressed people to surrender to their oppressors. So empirically, rejection of self-defense is less Christian and more Hindu.
Your “empirical” sample size of one may be too small to get an accurate reading on the views of contemporary Christianity.