Inevitably, after the massacre at Emanuel AME Church, people start talking about arming congregants for self-defense. It is a sad image: 25 souls sitting around at Wednesday night prayer meeting, some packing heat in case the next church attacker should happen to be among them.

Some people consider it a ridiculous idea, or dangerous, or even sacrilegious: Guns don’t belong in the house of the Lord Jesus, who taught turning the other cheek and peacemaking.

Others have been in favor of guns in church for a long time. “Open carry” and/or “concealed carry” legislation has been passed in numerous states, with application to numerous public places, including churches.

In Georgia last year, local church leaders found themselves on opposite sides of the issue, breaking down pretty neatly along left/right lines – yet another reminder that political ideology almost always seems stronger than shared Christian commitment in our red/blue culture. In the end, opponents managed to get an opt-in rather than opt-out system, so that churches would have to declare “guns welcome here” rather than having to declare the opposite.

I could be shown to be wrong, but my reading of the Christian tradition is that the idea of heavily armed congregations hunkered down in self-defense in their houses of worship is a foreign concept.

But maybe that’s because for most of Christian history and in most places Christians did not need to feel afraid when they gathered in church. This, of course, has not always been the case for the historic black churches in the U.S., as Emanuel AME’s own history attests – though most white American Christians did not really notice until now.

As the center of African- American communal life, and often as the focal point of resistance to racist injustice, the black churches have been victimized periodically by violence. And yet I am not aware of any general pattern of African-American churches arming themselves in self-defense.

Perhaps that will change now. Certainly a general posture of open hospitality to the stranger could well be threatened.

I keep thinking about one stubborn fact of my own (limited) experience: I have never attended a Christian church that employed armed security, and I have never visited a Jewish synagogue that was not guarded by armed security.

I will never forget when my wife and I visited the historic Great Synagogue in Rome – where a 2-year-old boy had been murdered, and 34 children injured, in a horrific 1982 attack on a Shabbat service. A machine-gun-toting Italian police officer guarded that synagogue the day we were there.

People regularly victimized by violence, including in their holy places, will seek to protect themselves. I cannot fault them for it. I fault those whose crimes have evoked this response.

Bottom line: Mosques, synagogues, churches and other holy places should not require armed security. But sometimes, in our wicked world, they face real threats to the unthreatening people praying there. State officials bear primary responsibility to protect those who are vulnerable. If they won’t or can’t do their job, it is terribly sad but not inappropriate for houses of worship to pay for the level of security required to keep their children and senior citizens from being murdered. This is preferable to the other solution – arming lightly trained or untrained civilians whose weapons probably risk doing far more harm than good.

May none of us ever stop yearning and working for the day when all this killing will end.

A mother and son stand at a makeshift memorial for victims of a mass shooting, outside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, on June 22, 2015. Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Carlo Allegri *Editors: This photo may only be republished with RNS-GUSHEE-COLUMN, originally transmitted on June 24, 2015.

© Carlo Allegri / Reuters