Last week Indiana’s lieutenant governor had something stupid to say and unburdened himself thusly:

Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith claims that every single one of the Founding Fathers "by today's standards, would be labeled a far-right Christian nationalist."

— Right Wing Watch (@rightwingwatch.bsky.social) 2026-01-09T16:49:24.410Z

Now he’s very wrong about this—the TL:DR response is that they were pretty much the opposite of Christian Nationalists in every way—but the thread generated some interesting responses, including someone asking when Christian clergy would speak up. So here are some of those examples, mainly centered on the ongoing ICE protests.

Back in October:

Pastor Jorge Bautista was telling a Border Patrol agent "we come in peace" when the agent fired toxic powder at him, leaving him struggling to breathe.“No one should be assaulted for being out there protesting,” he says.With @frontlinepbs.bsky.social

— ProPublica (@propublica.org) 2025-12-02T04:00:10.555824249Z

You may have been aware of what was going on in Chicago after Rev. David Black, a Presbyterian minister, was shot with a pepper ball in September:

Last month, an ICE agent shot Rev. David Black in the head with a pepper ball outside of the Broadview, IL ICE detention facility for protesting peacefully.(Video via Kelly Hayes on Bluesky)

— Heartland Signal (@heartlandsignal.bsky.social) 2025-10-08T16:00:05.690887649Z

but the Chicago response has been much broader:

The diverse support system means Wicker Park and the surrounding Hispanic and Latino neighborhoods can host “Know Your Rights” trainings for undocumented immigrants and their allies, set up accompaniment for tasks like grocery shopping and doctor’s visits, and organize neighborhood watches to warn others of the presence of ICE agents. One of Herrera’s favorite events is El Mercadito, a small event in Logan Square that seasonally hosts Mexican and Latina artisans selling handmade goods.

“We have representation from the full range of Christian denominations,” Aronson said. “Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopal, Unitarian Universalists, Catholics, and Jews and Muslims. Faith communities who represent all those targeted communities have been coming together in a shared voice to say no to ICE, no to militarization, no troops, and yes to faith, yes to love, yes to peace, yes to caring for our neighbors.”

Catholics near a detention center in Chicago organized a peaceful march to bring Holy Communion to detainees, where they were turned away. The video gives a great sense of how powerful the procession was to simply ask to be allowed to express their First Amendment rights:

Clergy turned out for the National Guard deployments—here’s an example from Los Angeles:

On Friday (June 6), the Rev. Brendan Busse, a Jesuit Catholic priest, had just finished a graduation ceremony for eighth graders at Dolores Mission School when he got news about an immigration raid happening in downtown Los Angeles. He abruptly stopped folding chairs, rushed past parents and grandparents leaving the celebration and drove to the city’s Fashion District.

What he found shocked even a veteran priest who has worked with vulnerable populations all over the globe.

“It was almost like every science fiction movie, where there’s an alien occupation from another planet that comes in with guns and flash grenades and pepper spray, in order to seek out and to hunt certain people who were there just trying to do their daily job,” he told Religion News Service in an interview this week.

The experience, he said, felt “like what it might feel like on the receiving side of an occupation.”

And clergy were active in the early days of the attacks on immigrants:

Before being taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Monday morning (Aug. 25), Kilmar Abrego García, the Maryland man who became a national flashpoint after he was illegally deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration, addressed a crowd gathered at ICE’s Baltimore field office in Spanish. Addressing other immigrants, he said, “God is with us, and God will never leave us.”

Abrego then added: “God will bring justice to all of the injustice that we are suffering.”

As he finished speaking, clergy from an array of religious traditions joined with U.S. Rep. Glen Ivey, of Maryland, to lay hands on Abrego, who bowed his head as the group prayed over him and a rabbi blew a shofar.

On Monday the Presbyterian Church (USA) remembered Renee Good (her professed denomination) with a statement which placed her in line with the martyrs of the church and which said in part:

In the coming week, we will remember the life and witness of the martyred Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who called this nation to a “radical revolution of values.” Values that demand divestment from racism, materialism and militarism. Ms. Good’s life and death echo this same moral call.

Her memory also stands in a sacred lineage of faithful witnesses who have risked and lost their lives in defense of human dignity. We remember the four Maryknoll Sisters — Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and Lay Missioner Jean Donovan — who were abducted, abused and murdered in El Salvador in 1980 for standing alongside the Salvadoran people.

We also remember the Rev. Elijah Lovejoy, who was murdered for his opposition to the evil of slavery and for whom the Presbytery of Giddings-Lovejoy is named. These are not isolated tragedies but part of a continuing story of costly discipleship.

We must remember her name: Renee Nicole Good. We remember her as a testament to Jesus’ teaching that God does not change the world through violence but through faithful presence amid struggle, and that love refuses to abandon the work of acceptance, justice and compassion.

I’ll leave you with this short speech from The Rt. Rev. Rob Hirschfed, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, which includes this:

We are now engaged in a horrible battle that is eternal, that has gone on for millennia. As soon as the Christian church became linked to the empire by Constantine in the year 325 or so, the church immediately became corrupt. And the message of Jesus’s love, compassion, and commitment to the poor, the outcast, was immediately compromised. And we have lost that voice, and we are now, I believe, entering a time, a new era of martyrdom.

Renee Good being the last of note of those martyrs.

New Hampshire’s own Jonathan Daniels, a man also of white privilege, stood in front of the blast of a sheriff in Haynesville, Alabama, to protect a young black teenager from a shotgun blast. He died and was martyred.

We know of the women, the Maryknoll sisters, who stood alongside the poor and the oppressed in El Salvador and were brutally raped and murdered in the name of Jesus.

Oscar Romero, in a mass called upon the death squads of El Salvador to lay down their arms or risk excommunication, was martyred the next Sunday at the altar.

 I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness. And I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order—to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.