On the afternoon of Good Friday in April, 2010, Shane Claiborne, a thirty-five-year-old evangelical activist sporting dreadlocks and homemade pants, followed a group of teen-agers carrying an eight-foot-tall wooden cross down a street in North Philadelphia. They marched to a gun store in Kensington called the Shooter Shop, which was notorious for allowing straw buyers to purchase guns illegally. Philadelphia has been hit hard by the heroin epidemic and its associated gun violence. In 2010, some two hundred and fifty people were killed with guns in the city, and more than a thousand people have been killed in the last four years—far more than in Los Angeles, though it has a much larger population. Claiborne—along with hundreds of members of Heeding God’s Call to End Gun Violence, a faith-based group that advocates for gun reform—was going to hold a vigil outside the shop to convince its owner to adopt a ten-point code of conduct to render the store more accountable for the weapons it sold.

When the protesters arrived, they found a group of counter-protesters lining the sidewalk and waving American flags. Claiborne led a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer while the counter-protesters loudly chanted the words to “God Bless America.” Then Claiborne told the crowd about a night, a month earlier, when he’d heard gunfire coming from outside his home and ran out the door to find a young man named Papito bleeding in the street. Claiborne held Papito’s hand until an ambulance arrived, but he died later that day. At the end of the rally, a woman approached Claiborne and told him that she was Papito’s mother. “I understand something I hadn’t understood before,” he recalled her saying. “God knows what it feels like to lose a son.”

Claiborne refers to himself as a “holy troublemaker,” and over the past decade he has become something of a celebrity in Christian circles, for challenging believers to scrutinize the difference between the Bible’s teachings and those espoused in conservative American culture. His first book, “The Irresistible Revolution,” about finding his calling in social-justice work, sold more than three hundred thousand copies. “As I crisscross the country, I can feel a new momentum and movement,” Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine, wrote in the foreword. “The monologue of the religious right is finally over, and a fresh dialogue has begun.”

Claiborne grew up in a conservative Christian household in East Tennessee. In 1993, he moved to Philadelphia, to attend a Christian college, and was shocked by the poverty and homelessness he saw in the city. He became involved with student activism and, in 1995, occupied an abandoned church where homeless families were squatting in order to help keep the church from being knocked down and the families from being displaced. In March, 2003, he travelled to Iraq, to protest the American bombing campaign, and was injured in a car accident during the visit. He has written, “It’s difficult to know where Christianity ends and America begins.”

Claiborne believes that conservative culture often conflates Christianity and nationalism, placing, as he puts it, “the American flag above the cross.” This has long involved aligning religion with American gun culture. Last year, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, said, in a speech, that the Second Amendment was not a right “bestowed by man, but granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright.” In 2017, after a shooting at a Southern Baptist church near San Antonio, Texas, left twenty-six people dead and twenty injured, some Christian leaders called for members of their church to arm themselves; Robertson Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, said, on “Fox and Friends,” that he felt more secure knowing that his congregants were carrying weapons. After the shooting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015, Jerry Falwell, Jr., the president of Liberty University, urged his students to procure gun permits. (Along with a year-round ski facility, Liberty’s campus is home to a sprawling firing range.) “I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in,” he told students. Claiborne said, “The irony is you can’t have a beer at Liberty, but you can have a gun.”

Some pro-gun Christians argue that scripture supports their claims; many rely on a passage from the Book of Luke in which Jesus says, “Let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.” This, they argue, is proof that Jesus believed in the use of deadly force. “Some folks would say he was calling on his followers to arm themselves, but that’s definitely misused,” Claiborne told me. He is part of a movement of millennial evangelicals who are trying to separate their faith from the Republican politics of their elders. Claiborne—along with the members of Heeding God’s Call and the Live Free Campaign, which tries to convince congregations to support gun control—believes that living as Jesus did requires renouncing violence. He often quotes a passage from the book of Matthew in which Peter, attempting to defend Jesus against the Romans, pulls out a sword and lops off the ear of a Roman servant. Jesus rebukes him, saying, “For all they who take the sword will perish by the sword.”

On a recent afternoon, Claiborne, who had cut off his dreads and now wears glasses that frame eyes perpetually widened in glee, took me on a walk to the Shooter Shop. Kensington is an impoverished neighborhood, but Claiborne has been trying to help the community. On our walk, we passed an aquaponic greenhouse that Claiborne had built with the help of a drummer who’d toured with Nine Inch Nails, and an empty lot where construction vehicles were digging the foundation for a recreation center that Claiborne had convinced the city to let a local nonprofit build. We passed under an El station and arrived at the store, which was now shuttered. “Now homeless veterans are living up there,” Claiborne said, pointing to the apartments above the storefront.

Soon after the vigil at the shop, Claiborne had decided to take on the issue of guns full-time. In March, with his friend Michael Martin, a bearded Mennonite and amateur blacksmith, Claiborne published a book called “Beating Guns,” which discusses the role that white evangelicals play in promoting gun culture. “Forty-one per cent of white evangelicals have guns,” he told me. “The same people who worship the Prince of Peace are packing heat.” Claiborne was planning to drive across the country, along with his wife, Katie Jo, and Martin, in a decommissioned school bus that Katie Jo has refitted into a tiny home with saffron curtains, a composting toilet, and solar panels. They would hold vigils in places riven by mass shootings or drug-related violence, during which they would collect guns and melt them down in a mobile forge. They would invite survivors to help beat the molten metal into hoes and spades—an enactment of a passage from the Book of Isaiah, which advises believers to “beat their swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks.”

A gun is sawed in half during the “Beating Guns” tour. Photograph by Rex Harsin

The afternoon before Claiborne left for the trip, I visited him at the pale yellow row house in Kensington where he lives. Outside his home is a large mural—a Banksy replica—of two children standing atop a mountain of defunct weapons. Inside, a purple tandem bike hangs from the ceiling near a painting of Mother Teresa. Katie Jo, who is thirty-six, with a blond braid down her back, had lain awake for the past few nights, trying to account for every square inch of the bus. Claiborne and Martin were now loading it under her watchful eye, shuttling backpacks and boxes from the house out to the porch. At one point, Claiborne disappeared into the basement to fetch some wooden signs that he had made by cutting up old gun advertisements and fashioning them into inspirational words, like “Hope,” “Faith,” and “Love.” He returned with a large stack, and Katie Jo glanced at him with the patience of one accustomed to trying to speak in practical terms to a self-styled visionary. “Oh, no, is all that coming?” she asked. “It ain’t gonna fit on the bus.”