Pro-ICE churches should be shamed

The Christian right will never turn down an opportunity to make false accusations of religious persecution. These days, they’re especially eager to play the victim. Doing so allows them to distract from the ugly reality that they, in voting for Donald Trump, have helped to unleash in Minnesota: A woman killed in front of her wife, children ripped from their parents, a baby nearly killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents firing tear gas at a family driving home from a basketball game. On Saturday, there was another unjustifiable shooting. Video appears to show 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive-care unit nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, helping a woman to her feet when Border Patrol agents swarm and pepper-spray him — and then shoot him in the head.

All this, though, apparently pales in comparison to a more serious form of oppression: right-wing Christians being told it’s immoral to support a brutal, racist assault on their neighbors.

On Sunday, Jan. 18, a group of anti-racism activists disrupted services at the far-right Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, because one of the church pastors, David Easterwood, acts as a field director for ICE as it rains terror on the Twin Cities. The protesters denounced the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE agent, as well as other ICE offenses, such as charging into people’s homes without warrants, threatening violence against protesters, and detaining and beating non-white people — including citizens, many of whom are elderly or children.

“We will protect Americans of faith,” Attorney Pam Bondi declared in a statement defending the arrest of three non-violent protesters for interrupting the service. Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem falsely described the peaceful demonstration as “Church Riots,” and continued to lie by saying the protesters prevented “someone from practicing their religion.” Turning Point USA head Erika Kirk called anti-ICE protesters “demonic.” Far-right Baptist leader William Wolfe — who is closely connected to leadership at Cities Church — declared, “Christians are the most persecuted religious group in America, and it’s not even close!” Jonathan Parnell, the pastor who was leading services at Cities Church that day, wrote in a statement that the protesters “accosted members of our congregation, frightened children, and created a scene marked by intimidation and threat.”

Parnell is being dishonest. Anyone who watches the video can see that no one is being accosted or threatened, though it was no doubt painful for these Christians to face, even for a moment, someone speaking the truth that they are rejecting the plain teachings of Jesus Christ. At the time of the protest, Parnell described the demonstration as merely “interrupting,” so his escalation in rhetoric is likely intentional. Cities Church has a reputation for being not just conservative, but extremist. Instead of being the persecuted, the congregation’s leadership and its allies appear to be the persecutors — of women and minorities.

“[T]hey are insecure little sexist and racist power-mongers who desire to be God,” wrote Rick Pidcock, a former fundamentalist and worship music expert, in a lengthy exposé for Baptist News Global. According to Pidcock, Cities Church is rooted in a network of far-right churches that teach “male headship and female submission” so extreme that their thought leader, John Piper, has argued that women shouldn’t even occupy management positions where men might have to answer to them.

Parnell himself has written extensively about how men “are given a charge to lead.” Under his leadership, female parishioners teach courses on learning to submit to your husband even when it’s “overwhelming, frustrating, or maybe even impossible,” as it seemed to be for a former church member who told Pidcock that the pastors pressured her to stay in a marriage with an emotionally abusive man who bankrupted his family by spending money on online sex workers.

Among Cities Church’s pastors is Joe Rigney, who has recently become a MAGA media darling because he, along with podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, has been pushing the idea that empathy is a sin. Rigney has partnered with Doug Wilson, a pastor who has praised race relations under slavery and denounced women’s suffrage, to argue that people are “being manipulated by empathy.” Rigney’s misogyny is never far from the surface, including when he denounced empathy as evidence that “feminism is a cancer” because it allows women to move beyond just being “life-givers and nurturers” and into public spaces, where their allegedly toxic compassion is a “curse.”

“Cities Church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845 over the right to own slaves,” Tim Whitaker, a former Christian nationalist who now works to expose the movement on his YouTube channel, told Salon. “This church should be disrupted. As far as I’m concerned, Jesus would’ve been right with those protesters.”

Whitaker’s view illuminates what the MAGA freakout over this protest is ignoring: that freedom of religion is not a shield against criticism of a church’s teachings, especially when those teachings are impacting the lives of other people. Cities Church, he said, “is home to a pastor that works for a federal agency kidnapping brown-skinned immigrants and killing unarmed citizens.” The anti-empathy and bigoted views taught inside the church are directly affecting people outside of it.

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As Jill Filipovic wrote in her Throughline newsletter, “ICE recruitment is aimed at men who want to feel powerful, who want to bond with other men by committing social acts of violence.” She also noted that “the Trumpian right” is “very much obsessed with forcing all women into obedience.” This messaging connects directly with the teachings of places like Cities Church, who put a “God commands it” justification on the pathetic desire of small men to feel big by dominating women and vulnerable people of color. 

One of the protesters who was arrested for disrupting the service at Cities Church is herself an ordained minister. “How can you serve as a pastor of the gospel of Jesus Christ while overseeing the brutal conduct of ICE agents who are literally terrorizing communities in the Twin Cities of Minnesota?” Nekima Levy Armstrong, who is also an attorney and civil rights activist, pointed out in an interview with Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now!” Armstrong’s faith and status as a minister put further lie to the idea that the church was targeted for being Christian, as opposed to being rooted in faith-based, non-violent action against bigoted and immoral teachings and behavior that are corruptions of Christ’s teachings.

Parnell claims to “welcome respectful dialogue about present issues” — but the MAGA-wide freakout over a peaceful demonstration shows that isn’t true. On the contrary, the reaction reveals how much Parnell and the rest of the Trumpian coalition will do anything to avoid genuine discourse with people who haven’t been already bullied into submission. Instead, they redefine “religious freedom” not to mean the right to worship, but to be shielded from criticism — a freedom that is only enjoyed by right-wing Christians. These are people who are so brittle that, rather than attempt the impossible task of persuading outsiders that Jesus would condone what ICE is doing, they demand that the government arrest people for telling them a truth that they don’t want to hear.

Unfortunately, the right’s histrionic language about “religious freedom” has cowed many centrists and even liberals into thinking the protesters who interrupted a single church service are in the wrong. Instead, they should be applauded as following the tradition of Jesus himself confronting the money-changers in the temple.

Religious freedom means the right to worship as you see fit. By the same token, it also allows everyone else the right to question what churches are teaching — especially when they impact people and communities outside the church doors. In an era when Christian churches are condoning outright evil actions such as ICE’s deadly rampage through Minnesota, it’s more important than ever to not allow this dishonest definition of “religious freedom” browbeat the rest of us into silence over spiritual oppression.