On Sunday protestors brought their concerns about the ICE abuses to the feet of the Acting Director of Ice in St. Paul, Minnesota at Cities Church in St. Paul. Protestors filed in, chanted, talked with the minister leading the service, and then left. They were unarmed, peaceful, and nonviolent.

The right wing universe lost its shit. The idea that Black people walked into their church and started criticizing their precious hatemonger pastor was pretty much their last straw after no one would believe their lies about the murder of Renee Good or the various attacks on ICE goons that were quickly shown to also be lies.

And let me make this clear:  the main reason the right is going nuts is because Black people went into a church that has clear ties to Christian Nationalism, was founded by an extremist, and which is shepherded by an ICE thug.

The minister who was presiding over the service, Jonathan Parnell, is a trustee at Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, where one of its faculty members had a predictable response to the murder of Renee Good:

Since an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis last week, clergy in the Twin Cities have been at the forefront of efforts to protest ICE and Good’s murder. But at least one Calvinist pastor on Sunday (Jan. 11) instead offered a blessing for ICE and asked God to “break the teeth” of those who oppose ICE.

Andy Naselli is a systematic theology and New Testament professor at Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, a school founded by Baptist Calvinist preacher John Piper and his church. In 2024, Naselli also started Christ the King Church in Stillwater, a community northwest of the Twin Cities. The phrase “Christ the King” has been popular in recent years among far-right Christian Nationalists.

Naselli published his prayer for ICE on Monday on the site of the Center for Baptist Leadership, a group seeking to push the Southern Baptist Convention further rightwa rd. It’s led by William Wolfe, an official in the first Trump administration. On Friday — two days after Good’s murder — the CBL urged pastors to publicly pray for ICE officers on Sunday, insisting ICE agents are “heroic servants.” They followed that up by publishing Naselli’s prayer as an example of what they want in churches.

In his prayer, Naselli asked God to help ICE “accomplish their lawful and moral mission.”

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Having cast those who oppose ICE as “wicked,” Naselli then recited part of Psalm 58, an imprecatory Psalm. In 2010, Piper argued that Psalm 58 may not sound loving but is okay to pray against those whose “violence destroys the poor and the weak.” He further cast such violent “wicked” ones as “slaughterers” who go from town to town with their weapons. Psalm 58 would therefore much more likely describe ICE agents than people in their own communities armed with just cellphones and whistles. Yet, Piper’s professor read the same Psalm to instead side with the masked men who came into town with their weapons and again killed someone — after previously killing people in other cities. But theologians of the empire systematically misread the Bible in ways that glorify the principalities and powers of darkness.

“Break the teeth [of the wicked] in their mouths, O God,” Naselli recited in his prayer. “May they be like a slug that melts away as it moves along, like a stillborn child that never sees the sun.”

Are you starting to understand why this church would welcome an ICE officer in a leadership role?

The church itself was founded by Joe Rigney, who wrote a weird book called “The Sin of Empathy”. Here’s his defense of it:

Can you give me an example of where an excess of empathy would be destructive?

If someone throws a pity party, starts to sulk, and then we capitulate and give in then we’re coddling, enabling and indulging them. We’d be focused more on their short-term feelings rather than their long-term good.

Another, more political example is the way the trans movement has weaponised society’s compassion. “Here’s people who feel themselves to be in the wrong body. They are very distressed by this mismatch between their biology and their felt sense of [identity], and we need to do whatever we can to enable them to align those, including surgeries.” When we tell the parent who has a boy who thinks he’s a girl, “would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?” that’s a twisting of compassion. When asked, “Do you want to avoid your child [taking their own life]?” then to give in at that moment feels compassionate. You’re trying to keep them from being harmed in some way, but in doing so, you’re actually causing harm, because they’re going to take the puberty blockers or be castrated. That would be a more extreme political example.

Yep, he’s full of shit. And this is his church. So when you see hand wringing about how the church was “attacked” or “terrorized” or “invaded” you know that they’re a bunch of liars and they’re lying about that part of it too. In reality they are angry that anyone would dare to criticize them, and especially people of color.

One of the truly shocking things I have read over and over on social media is the determination of right wing Christians to hurt or kill people who come into their churches and disagree with them. So many of them openly fantasized about the violence or even death that would result from any protesting their church in a similar way and I honestly worry what might happen this Sunday at these far right places of worship.

These weirdos feel justified because they say that their First Amendment rights are under attack (they’re not) and that such behavior is not Christlike. When people bring up the story of Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple courtyard because they are taking advantage of the vulnerable, the poor, and widows, they are told that Jesus literally whipped the money changers so it is OK to attack people inside your church if you perceive that they are a threat to you.

The problem is that the text doesn’t support that reading. And this is important because it takes away the second leg of the stool that these Christian Nationalists are trying to balance on. The whip that is referenced would have been a soft whip, not suitable for inflicting injury and thus not used on people. And then there is the question of the actual words used, which support the nonviolent teachings of Christ.

And the third part of all of this is the image of Black people in an essentially segregated church, here by ideology instead of strictly by race. The fact is that in America, churches have been the sites of political protest by people committed to justice and equality.

One example is during the process where the current Methodist Church began the process of integrating the racially separated churches. This honestly deserves an in-depth look at another time, but it is a direct correlation to what we saw on Sunday:

King first met Medgar Evers at Millsaps while Evers was the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi. When King returned to Jackson, they worked together on trying to desegregate the downtown businesses in Jackson, which proved to be an exercise in futility. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. suggested kneel-ins in other cities, Evers and King jumped on the idea. King said he felt that kneel-ins would “bring the segregation issue to the conscience of white Christians.” At the front doors of the church, it would be hard to ignore.[1]

Interracial church visits were designed not simply to cause “good trouble” but also to push the theological envelope and jump-start conversations and questions, like: Were we reconciled to each other, Black and White, by Jesus or not? Was the Methodist Church genuinely committed to open doors and open communion? Is the church a private social club or the body of Christ?

This entire piece is worth your time, but here’s a crucial point that resonates today:

How did Methodists justify closing their doors to these interracial teams? According to King, they fell back on an all-too-familiar excuse: that the church visits were spearheaded by outside agitators and communists who had no interest in worship.

Le plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I’ll leave you with this: