04/02/2026
The Humanities Institute Summer Writing Grant Profile:
Dr. Michael Grigoni
Interview by Madison Burba (WFU ’28)
“I hope to open space for a more nuanced conversation about guns and religion in American life.”
A faculty member in Wake Forest University’s Department for the Study of Religions, Grigoni is using his Summer 2025 Humanities Institute Writing Grant to complete The Gun in American Christian Life: An Ethnographic Ethics, a book that examines how Christian belief shapes the lived realities of gun ownership in the United States.
His project sits at the intersection of religion, ethics, and everyday practice—but what sets it apart is how deeply embedded his research is in the lives of the people he studies.
“I entered doctoral studies wanting to do ethnographically grounded ethics,” Grigoni explained, emphasizing his desire to move beyond abstract theory and instead focus on lived experience.
That commitment led him to spend over a year conducting fieldwork with Christian handgun owners in central North Carolina. Rather than simply observing from afar, Grigoni immersed himself in the community: “I spent a year conducting participant-observation with Christian handgun owners, hanging out, interviewing, and learning to shoot with them.”
As part of this process, he even became a gun owner himself; an act he describes as necessary to doing ethnographic work “as immersively as possible.”
This level of participation allowed Grigoni to see beyond assumptions he initially carried into the project. One of the most surprising moments came when he encountered a concealed carry instructor who framed firearm use through a Christian lens.
Grigoni took the course twice and found an approach that challenged common stereotypes. Rather than encourage aggression, the instructor emphasized restraint: his approach was “very disciplined, and he drew on scripture to critique bravado and machismo.” More broadly, Grigoni observed that “among my interlocutors, Christianity seemed to play a restraining role in their gun carry,” complicating the idea that religion simply reinforces pro-gun attitudes.
Grigoni’s interest in this topic grew out of both personal and national contexts. During his PhD at Duke University, conversations about race and policing following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown prompted him to consider the role of guns in American life.
At the same time, his move from the Pacific Northwest to the South exposed him to a different cultural landscape. As he began researching, he realized that “not much had been written about guns from a Christian ethical perspective,” motivating him to pursue the project.
Later in his fieldwork, Grigoni encountered a second community that would become central to his book: the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham. After attending a vigil for a victim of gun violence, he began studying the group, which hosts public vigils to “memorialize the loss of Durham residents to gun homicide.”
This experience introduced what he describes as “a different orientation to guns and gun violence by persons of Christian commitment.” His book ultimately places the two groups, the handgun owners and the vigil participants, in conversation, asking what one can reveal about the other.
Grigoni describes his project as “thoroughly interdisciplinary,” bringing together ethnography, social theory, and Christian ethics that “follows a recent turn to qualitative methods among Christian ethicists.”
Now under contract with Fordham University Press, the manuscript is nearing completion, and the Summer Writing Grant has played a key role in that progress, allowing Grigoni to “carve out space and time” during the long process of revising a dissertation into a book.
Ultimately, Grigoni’s work is grounded in a simple but demanding practice: listening. Whether in shooting ranges or at vigils, his research depends on careful attention to people whose perspectives may differ sharply from one another, and from his own.
“I hope to open space for a more nuanced conversation about guns and religion in American life,” said Grigoni.
