When Protests Reach the Church

I don’t want this Substack to turn into a newsletter or a place for quick opinions. Still, there are moments when we need to pause and reflect, and something happened recently that deserves our attention.

I: The Moment That Caused Me Pause

I grew up in southern Ohio. Whether I was with family, friends, or people from church, the reaction was always the same whenever there was a mass or school shooting.

We need the Second Amendment in case the government ever becomes tyrannical.

Any talk about gun reform or safety was quickly dismissed. People insisted we couldn’t give up our guns because we might need them to defend ourselves from the government someday.

When I was involved in church groups, the rhetoric was almost identical. If the government ever tried to make Christianity illegal, people said they needed to be armed to protect themselves. Guns weren’t framed as a hobby or a personal interest. They were framed as a safeguard. A last line of defense.

Hardly anyone said they owned guns just for enjoyment. It was almost always about preparing for the supposed threat of government tyranny.

And now, here we are.

The government has now acted in the way that matches the warnings I’ve heard all my life—the scenario that was supposed to be the reason for defending our rights has arrived.

And the same people who told me my entire life that we needed guns to resist tyranny are either silent about it or actively supporting it.

II: When Theory Met Reality

Then it stopped being theoretical.

Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. A real person. A real death. And yes, he was armed.

I want to be very clear about why that matters in this conversation. I am not trying to litigate legality here. I am not interested in arguing technicalities or policy language. That is not what caused me to pause.

What caused me to pause is that this was the moment I had been told my entire life to prepare for.

An armed citizen. Federal agents. A government using force. This was the exact scenario that was always used to justify keeping the Second Amendment untouched. This was the nightmare future I was warned about over and over again.

And yet, when it happened, the response shifted immediately.

Suddenly, the questions weren’t about tyranny. They weren’t about resistance. They weren’t about protecting oneself from an overreaching state. The questions grew much smaller and much quieter.

Why did he have a gun?

Why didn’t he comply?

Why didn’t he just do what they told him?

The moment that was supposed to validate decades of rhetoric instead exposed how conditional that rhetoric actually was. If the narrative shifts so swiftly when faced with real events, where do we truly stand? What would it take for the rhetoric to be consistent? If this doesn’t count as tyranny, what does? And that awareness sat heavily with me.

And that awareness sat heavily with me.

III: The Pause I Didn’t Expect

I was originally going to write this essay as a response to Renee Good.

She was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. I won’t go into all the details here, but in my opinion, there is no version of that story that ends in justification. A woman was killed in broad daylight by an arm of the federal government, followed by an administration that immediately started lying about what happened, even while video evidence circulated.

I felt anger, fear, and exhaustion.ted.

And I started writing.

I was going to talk about how dangerous protests have become. About how our current administration lies openly to protect narratives that only their most loyal supporters believe. About how I’ve been warning people for years that this rhetoric would eventually turn into real violence, and how strange it felt to watch it finally happen while knowing nothing meaningful was going to change.

If anything, it felt like things were going to get worse.

And then I paused.

On January 24th, 2026, Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents.

I saw the news. I saw the original video that started circulating. Honestly, I couldn’t even form a clean thought. Not because I didn’t care, but because it seemed that the emotional ground had already collapsed beneath us. Another name. Another death. Another cycle of justification is already loading in real time.

And that’s when it clicked for me that this wasn’t just about guns.

It wasn’t even just about ICE.

It revolved around the rhetoric we’ve been swimming in for decades.

The slow dehumanization of “illegals.”

The casual flattening of “all lives matter.”

The reflexive “he should’ve complied.”

The way evangelical language has been used to demand grace for power while denying it to victims.

This isn’t new. It’s rehearsed. Consider the Red Scare in the mid-20th century, where fear was stoked, and governmental actions were justified against supposed communist threats. The pattern of using fear to promote specific agendas and incite division has been a well-trodden path throughout history.

When people stop being people and start being problems, obstacles, threats, or sins, the moral math changes. Violence becomes easier to excuse. Accountability turns optional. Empathy becomes conditional.

These shootings didn’t come out of nowhere.

They are the logical endpoint of a culture that has been taught, over and over again, who deserves protection and who doesn’t.

And that’s when I realized I needed to start this essay over.

Because the issue we’re dealing with is much bigger than internal contradictions, it’s that language, faith, and power have been deployed for years to condition us to accept harm. At their core, these forces intertwine to create a narrative that normalizes and excuses violence. Language manipulates our perceptions, faith provides moral cover, and power enforces silence or complicity. The central argument here is that the ideas we repeat set the stage for violence, and we must recognize when our culture excuses that progression.

By the time the violence shows up, the moral groundwork has already been laid.

But then something else happened very soon after Alex Pretti was killed. There had been protests in Minneapolis since ICE first set foot in the city. But once Alex was killed, there was a protest specifically aimed at a church in the city.

Why? Well, that church’s pastor is the head of the city’s field office. The protest was attempting to talk about how this pastor, more than likely, had a direct or indirect hand in those two killings, the illegal detainment of both legal and undocumented people, the circulation of misinformation regarding the “Somali Daycare scandal” (quotations because it’s not a real thing)…. And this is a pastor?

During the protest inside the church, the pastor, David Easterwood, said things like “we just want to worship in peace” and similar sentiments. But it is odd that he wanted to worship peacefully while he has a direct hand in disrupting peace for countless other individuals.

It is fascinating to me how easy it is for some individuals to separate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Every police officer I have ever talked to has had some sort of anxiety that they may run into that ONE person they had a hand in locking up randomly out and about. Evangelicals seem to have the ability (privilege) to vote for and say some awful things about groups of people throughout the week and then outwardly praise a Jesus that they would execute if he were alive today.

Why do we allow the church and its members to attempt to stay neutral during these moments in history?

IV: When Protest Hit the Sanctuary

But then something else happened soon after Alex Pretti was killed.

Minneapolis had already been seeing protests since ICE first set foot into the city. Tensions were already high. But once Alex was killed, one of the protesters shifted focus and aimed directly at a church.

Why? Because the pastor of that church is also the head of the ICE field office in the city.

The protest inside the church wasn’t random. It wasn’t just noise for the sake of disruption. It was meant to draw a direct line between someone preaching morality on Sundays and someone overseeing detentions, raids, misinformation, and federal violence during the week. People were asking a very uncomfortable question: how does someone reconcile spiritual leadership with direct involvement in systems that are actively harming people?

When the protest disrupted the service, the pulpit response was predictable. Statements like “we just want to worship in peace” were repeated. And that line stuck with me.

Because it’s a strange thing to ask for peace inside a place of refuge while having a hand in disrupting peace everywhere else. It’s strange to want quiet, reverence, and safety for yourself while being professionally tied to fear, displacement, and death for others.

What fascinates me is how easily some people can separate themselves from the consequences of their actions. I’ve talked to police officers who admit they worry about running into the one person they helped lock up years later. That anxiety exists because, on some level, they understand cause and effect.

Evangelicals, on the other hand, often seem insulated from that discomfort. They can vote concerning policies that dehumanize immigrants, excuse violence with “he should’ve complied,” reduce entire groups of people to political talking points throughout the week, and then sing songs about mercy, love, and justice on Sunday.

And we let it happen.

We allow churches and their leaders to claim neutrality at important times. We let them frame protest as disrespect and accountability as hostility. But the main argument is that neutrality in these situations supports harm, and we need to question why institutions are allowed to remove themselves from responsibility as lives are at stake.

That question doesn’t go away just because it’s uncomfortable:

Why are we so willing to let institutions that claim moral authority step aside when real people are being hurt?

V: When Neutrality Becomes Complicity

There’s a term that gets thrown around online a lot called “crybully.” I’m sure there’s a more formal definition somewhere, but the simplest way to describe it is this: someone causes harm, faces pushback, and then centers themselves as the victim because they don’t like the consequences.

Think about a bully on a playground.

This kid spends the entire year harassing people. Pushing them. Hitting them. Making recess miserable for everyone else. Teachers shrug. Nothing really changes. Everyone just learns to deal with it.

Then one day, someone finally stands up to them. The bully gets knocked down. The kid who fought back calmly accepts the punishment and walks back into the school building because rules are rules.

And then the bully gets up crying.

Not because they were wrong. Not because they’re reflecting. But because they were finally treated the way they’ve been treating everyone else. Suddenly, there’s a campaign. The bully says the beating was unfair. How cruel everyone is being. How they’re the real victim now. They want sympathy. They want protection. They want the school to crack down, not on their behavior, but on the person who stood up to them.

That’s cry bullying.

To be honest, that’s what we’ve allowed large segments of the American evangelical church to become.

This is a group that has spent decades making life harder for people who already have less power. Women’s healthcare stripped away. “All Lives Matter” used to shut down conversations about police violence. Conversion therapy camps justified in the name of love. Laws passed that target queer people while being framed as religious freedom. The list is long, and none of this is new.

So when protestors walk into a church service and disrupt it, I’m supposed to feel bad?

Why?

Why is the disruption suddenly the moral crisis, but the harm that led to it isn’t? Why is worship treated as a sacred space that must never be interrupted, while people’s lives are treated as collateral damage? Why is peace demanded only when discomfort finally reaches the people who helped create the conditions for it?

Would you feel bad for the playground bully?

I wouldn’t either.

And that’s the part that makes these instances so uncomfortable. Not because they’re unfair, but because they expose how quickly power wants sympathy the moment it’s challenged.

VI: Who Gets to Ask For Peace

What stood out to me most in all of this was how quickly the conversation evolved from harm to tone.

The protests were called disrespectful. Disruptive. Inappropriate. People said things like “there’s a time and place for this,” “why interrupt worship,” and “why can’t we just let people pray in peace.”

And I get why that language feels compelling. On the surface, it sounds reasonable. Calm. Civil. Mature.

But I keep coming back to this question: peace for who?

Because the people asking for peace were not the ones being detained. They were not the ones being surveilled. They were not the ones being shot in broad daylight. They were not the ones whose lives had been made more dangerous by the systems being defended from behind pulpits and policies.

Peace, in this context, did not mean safety. It meant comfort. It meant an uninterrupted routine. It meant the ability to worship without facing the consequences of one’s actions or silence.

What makes this harder to swallow is how often this demand for peace comes from the same spaces that tell others to accept suffering quietly. The same rhetoric that says “this world is not your home” or “God uses suffering for good” suddenly has no patience for inconvenience or disruption when it reaches their own doorstep.

There is something extremely troubling about invoking peace while gaining from harm. About asking for calm while chaos is outsourced to someone else’s body, someone else’s family, someone else’s community.

At some point, demanding peace without accountability turns unvirtuous. It becomes a shield.

And that is where I find myself stuck. Because when peace is only ever requested by those insulated from the damage, it stops sounding like a moral appeal and starts sounding like a refusal to see.

Which makes me wonder what kind of peace we are really talking about. And whether it is the kind worth preserving at all.

VII: What Happens When Harm Breaks Out

What keeps bothering me about all of this is how predictable the reactions are.

When harm happens, when people finally interrupt systems that have been hurting others for a long time, the response is almost never about the harm itself. It’s about tone. About respect. About decorum. About how things should have been done differently. Quieter. More politely. Somewhere else.

We are told to wait.

To vote harder next time.

To trust institutions that have already failed people repeatedly.

To keep things orderly.

And yet, when order itself is the thing causing harm, what does waiting actually accomplish?

I keep thinking about how often Christianity is invoked in moments like this. How quickly people appeal to peace and unity while ignoring who has been denied both. How easy it is to quote Jesus on obedience, but how uncomfortable it becomes when his actions disrupt the exact systems people want to protect.

Because there are moments in the Gospel narratives where things get tense. Where fear and chaos take over. Where violence feels justified. Where loyalty turns aggressive. Where someone believes they are doing the right thing for the right reasons.

At those moments, Jesus does something unexpected.

He does not reward certainty.

He does not praise loyalty that causes harm.

He does doesn’t align himself with power, even when that power claims to be acting on his behalf.

He intervenes on behalf of the one who is hurt.

That understanding has been sitting with me for a while now. And I think it deserves more than a passing reference. It deserves to be slowed down. Looked at carefully. Taken seriously on its own terms.

In a couple of days, I want to do exactly that. I want to sit with one specific moment. A garden. An arrest. A betrayal. A violent act committed in defense of Jesus himself.

Because if Jesus did not need to be defended that way, I think we need to ask why so many people still believe he does.

And what it says about who we think he is.