There’s a line in the prophets that feels almost too beautiful for our brutal moment:
“They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.”
—Isaiah 2:4 / Micah 4:3
Most of us have seen that verse engraved on plaques or etched into windows. A few have noticed the statue outside the United Nations that tries to capture the image in bronze. But for Shane Claiborne and the RawTools movement, this isn’t poetic language. It’s shop practice.
On this week’s episode, we met a man who is literally taking weapons and turning them into garden tools, art, and instruments. In a North Philly neighborhood saturated with gunfire, Shane and his team are doing something that looks small and symbolic—until you sit with the stories, and the theology behind them.
This isn’t a quirky hobby. It’s a deliberate, prophetic act. And it raises three questions that could not be more relevant in a culture where Christians are, statistically, the most heavily armed demographic in the country.
- What does it really mean to beat swords into plowshares today?
- What does it mean to take the words of Jesus—the red letters—seriously in a trigger-happy society?
- And if we claim to be “pro‑life,” what kind of life are we actually pro?
Let’s take these in turn.
1. Beating Guns into Garden Tools in North Philly
Shane grew up in East Tennessee around guns, hunting, and the sort of Southern culture where firearms are almost assumed. Then he moved into one of Philadelphia’s most wounded neighborhoods, where guns show up in very different scenes: kids killed on corners, mothers burying sons, sirens at 2 a.m.
You can hear the tension right there: same technology, radically different experiences of it.
After Sandy Hook, Shane hit his own breaking point. “Never again,” the country said—and then we let it happen again, and again, and again. At some point, prayer alone felt inadequate. To quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “After you’ve lifted so many people out of the ditch, you start asking what’s wrong with the road to Jericho.”
So he and others connected with RawTools, a small but growing national effort that does something very simple and very subversive:
- They receive donated guns—sometimes from police, sometimes from individuals, sometimes from families of victims.
- They disassemble and destroy them, lawfully.
- Then, under heat and hammer, they transform those hunks of metal into hoes, trowels, pruning hooks, jewelry, sculptures—even a working saxophone.
War flipped backward becomes RAW. That’s their name and their theology.
One story from the show stayed with me. At one of their first public “gun-shredding” events in Philly, a handgun was chopped and laid on the anvil. Shane invited people to take the hammer. A line formed. One mother, whose child had been shot, stepped forward. With each blow she said, “This is for my boy.” Strike. “This is for my boy.” Strike.
It’s easy to dismiss that as theater—until you realize what’s really going on. Grief is being given a job. Rage is being given a direction. And a culture that has made peace with tools of death is confronted, visually and viscerally, with another possibility: that the same metal can be made to nurture life.
“Transforming the metal is the easy part,” Shane said. “We’re also trying to transform hearts.”
Theologically, that’s the point. Every time a gun is beaten into a garden tool, RawTools is making a public declaration:
- Nothing is beyond redemption.
- What was used to harm can be re-purposed for healing.
- What’s true of metal can be true of systems—and of people.
Which brings us to the question that animates Shane’s other project: RedLetterChristians.
2. Living as if Jesus Meant the Red Letters
RedLetterChristians gets its name from an old publishing gimmick: Bibles that put the words of Jesus in red. A non‑religious observer once told a friend of Shane’s, “There are parts of the Bible I like and parts I find confusing, but I’ve always liked the stuff in red.” His suggestion: “You should call yourselves Red Letter Christians, because you seem to take those parts seriously.”
That’s the experiment: What if we lived as if Jesus meant the stuff he said?
Not just the comforting parts. The hard parts, too:
- “Love your enemies.”
- “Put away your sword, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
- “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
- “Sell everything you have and give to the poor.”
- “Whatever you did for one of the least of these… you did for me.”
If you start from those commands, America’s gun obsession looks very different. Shane cited research showing that Christians—especially white evangelicals—are the most heavily armed group in the country. The same people who worship the Prince of Peace often trust most deeply in the power of the Glock.
That’s not just a political data point; it’s a theological crisis.
If we really believe that Jesus reveals what God is like—if, as John’s Gospel insists, he is the Word of God made flesh—then we have to ask some difficult questions:
- How do you love your enemy and simultaneously prepare to kill him?
- How do you tell people to trust God and also tell them the only way to be safe is to keep a small arsenal in the closet?
- How do you read, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword,” and then build an identity around weapons designed for rapid killing?
Shane is blunt: when we put our faith in guns rather than in God, we’ve crossed the line from prudence into idolatry. Idols, biblically speaking, are anything to which we grant ultimate trust and loyalty—anything we are willing to kill for, die for, and sacrifice our children for.
If that description makes you uncomfortable applied to firearms, it’s worth sitting with why.
RedLetterChristians isn’t about hating gun owners. Shane himself grew up around guns. Many of the folks in his movement are hunters or veterans or people who started from a very different place. The question isn’t: “Are you a good or bad person for owning a weapon?” The question is:
- What does allegiance to Jesus actually look like here?
- What do the red letters demand of us when the number one cause of death for children in America is now firearms, not car accidents or cancer?
Which leads naturally to the third issue: what we mean by “pro‑life.”
3. Pro‑Life or Pro‑Birth? Expanding Our Ethic of Life
Shane told a story from his evangelical upbringing: people around him talked a lot about being “pro‑life,” but what they mostly meant was “anti‑abortion.” “If we’re honest,” he said, “we were more pro‑birth. Our concern often stopped at the delivery room.”
It’s a provocative line, but the critique runs deeper than slogans. The early church, he points out, had a far more robust ethic of life:
- They did speak against abortion in a culture where exposure and infanticide were common.
- They also spoke strongly against war and military service.
- They opposed the gladiatorial games, which normalized public killing for entertainment.
- They rejected the death penalty in a Roman system that wielded crosses and beheadings as tools of state terror.
In other words, the first Christians didn’t carve up “life issues” into camps. They saw every human being—born or unborn, friend or enemy, prisoner or emperor—as made in the image of God. To crush a human being was to crush that image.
Fast forward 2,000 years, and we find ourselves in a strange place:
- Some who call themselves “pro‑life” fight ferociously for unborn children, yet support policies that take life quickly and casually after birth—from easy access to weapons of war, to trigger-happy policing, to uncritical support for bombing campaigns that kill thousands of children in places like Gaza.
- Others, reacting against that narrowness, downplay any concern for the unborn at all, treating abortion as a morally neutral event rather than a profound tragedy, especially for the mother.
If imago Dei—the image of God—is our guiding principle, neither posture will do. A genuinely Christian ethic of life can’t be selectively applied.
In practice, that would mean at least three things:
- We grieve every preventable death.
Whether it’s a fetus in the womb, a schoolchild in Uvalde, a bystander in North Philly, or a ten‑year‑old in Gaza, we refuse to rank their worth. If every human life is sacred, no one is “collateral damage.” - We refuse to baptize our weapons.
We can debate policy specifics in good faith. But we cannot pretend that a high‑capacity semi‑automatic rifle is morally equivalent to a kitchen knife or a hoe. Tools exist on a spectrum of lethality and intent. Wisdom means making it harder, not easier, to kill large numbers of people quickly. - We act, not just mourn.
Genuine pro‑life conviction can’t end with “thoughts and prayers.” It must lead to policy, to prevention, to transformed systems—as well as to transformed hearts. That’s where RawTools is such a vivid metaphor: it takes the abstract conviction “we should value life” and gives it steel, fire, and sweat.
Where This Leaves Us
Shane is under no illusion that turning a few thousand guns into garden tools will, by itself, solve America’s violence. But he understands something deeply biblical: prophetic acts are not about scale; they’re about truth.
Every time a weapon is beaten into a plow, the world sees—if only for a moment—what could be different:
- A mother whose son was killed is given a tangible way to say “no more.”
- A community traumatized by gunfire is shown a different image: not muzzle flashes in the night, but hands in the soil.
- A church tempted to talk only about heaven is pulled back into the call to seek God’s kingdom “on earth as it is in heaven.”
And, perhaps most importantly, Christians who have learned to compartmentalize “pro‑life” into a single issue are confronted with a wider, more demanding vision:
- that being pro‑life means being pro‑every‑life,
- that the red letters of Jesus cut across our political lines,
- and that the hardest work of all is not hammering metal, but allowing our own imaginations, habits, and allegiances to be re‑forged.
Beating guns into garden tools won’t fix everything. But it’s a start. It’s a parable enacted in steel. It’s a dare to live as if Jesus actually meant what he said.
And if the prophets are to be believed, it’s also a preview of where history is headed: toward a world where we no longer train our hands for war, because we’ve finally learned what to do with them instead.
