The Maine Council of Churches, the Episcopal Diocese of Maine, and the Maine Gun Safety Coalition are encouraging houses of worship in Maine from all faith traditions to participate in a “Gun Safety Awareness Sabbath” the weekend of February 16-18. During their regularly scheduled worship services, faith communities across the state are urged to include prayers for gun safety awareness and prevention of gun violence, and to share information with their congregations about how they can take positive action to reduce the risk of gun violence and increase safety for families and communities throughout Maine.

“We realize that gun violence not only damages lives, but also the relational and spiritual wellbeing of our communities,” said the Right Rev. Thomas J. Brown, Tenth Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine, in a Maine Council of Churches news release. “When our communities hurt because of gun violence, we are compelled to heal the hurt and seek transformation. We need to address the idolatry of guns, the violence that permeates our culture, and our obsession with personal rights over public responsibility.”

According to the release, this initiative comes in the wake of the mass shooting in Lewiston last October, and in response to the stark reality that in the last decade, the rate of gun deaths in Maine grew by 20% and the rate of suicide by gun grew 27%. In an average year, guns kill nearly 150 Mainers, 8 of them children. Every 67 hours in Maine, someone kills themselves using a gun. [Source: Maine Gun Safety Coalition and Everytown for Gun Safety]

Most religious Americans support common sense policies aimed at gun violence prevention, according to the release. For example, one study found that 84 percent of Buddhist, Roman Catholic, evangelical and mainline Protestant Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim Americans want background checks for all gun sales.

“All seven of the mainline Protestant denominations who are members of the Maine Council of Churches (and who have over 400 congregations in Maine with more than 50,000 parishioners in their care) take a strong, faith-based stance for reducing the risk of gun violence through measures such as universal background checks, red flag laws, mandatory waiting periods after gun purchases, and bans on civilian ownership of high-capacity ammunition magazines and military assault weapons capable of inflicting mass casualties,”  said Rev. Jane Field, Executive Director of the Maine Council of Churches.

She went on to say, “For example, my own denomination, Presbyterian Church (USA), has, for more than five decades, challenged Americans’ fatalism and numbness in accepting the highest gun death rates in the world. We counter the undercurrents of fear and desperation with proactive, constructive non-violence that honors the value of human life and renews social solidarity to overcome the distrust and disconnection that gun violence exploits.”

Organizers of the Gun Safety Awareness Sabbath in Maine state that their objectives for the event include unifying people of faith in prayer and inspiring them to take action to ensure that Mainers who own guns do so safely and responsibly, that those who sell firearms are empowered and required to protect Maine’s communities from those who are unable to practice safe and responsible gun ownership, and that the capacity of guns to inflict mass casualties is limited.