On June Fourteenth, yet another heinous act of violence took place and staggered the nation. After allegedly taking months of planning, a shooter assassinated a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband and attempted as well to kill a second state elected politician. The murder spree unfolded over a roughly ninety-minute time span. The suspect, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, was arrested late Sunday night, June Fifteenth, near his farm in Green Isle, Minnesota, where a neighbor spotted him on a trail camera and called 911.
Boelter disguised himself as a law enforcement officer, even driving an unmarked black SUV fitted with police emergency lights, to allegedly conduct a deadly rampage that occurred in the early morning hours of Saturday in the suburbs of Minneapolis and prompted the "largest manhunt in Minnesota history." Of course, the investigation continues, but his biography includes the fact that Boelter is a devout Christian and an ordained Charismatic Christian minister and missionary. He emphasized “spiritual warfare” in his preaching. It should be no surprise that his spiritual warfare turned physically violent.
David French, who writes for the New York Times, published on June 19, 2025, an excellent op-ed titled: The Problem of the Christian Assassin. In it he makes the following helpful observations.
- Boelter wasn’t just a political assassin; he was a Christian assassin — and a person deeply connected to one of America’s most radical religious movements.
- Our nation is relearning a lesson that it never should have forgotten. Extremist Christian language and theology can lead to extreme Christian violence in the same way that extreme language can lead to extreme violence in other faith traditions and among people who have no faith at all.
Christians aren’t better than anyone else. We’re fashioned from the same human clay, and we’re susceptible to the same temptations and failures.
And right now — at a time when the Christian message of grace and mercy should shine the brightest — America’s Christian extremists are killing people, threatening and intimidating public servants and other public figures who oppose Trump and trying to drive their political opponents from the public square.
The Bible, after all, has much more to say about the way we treat people than it does about how we govern a nation. The New Testament is not a policy handbook, but its commands to love your enemy and to treat people with kindness are crystal clear.
- Last election cycleI helped create a Christian curriculum for political engagement. The short course was designed to reframe Christian political theology, with much greater emphasis on how we interact with our neighbors than on which policies or candidates we support.
As I talked about the curriculum in gatherings across the country, I was struck by the extent to which I was asked the same question time and again. “Sure,” people would say, “we need to be kind, but what if that doesn’t work?”
The implication was clear: Victory was the imperative, and while kindness was desirable, it was the contingent value, to be discarded when it failed to deliver the desired political results.
But that was the opposite of Christ’s message. Our kindness — much less our love or our humility — should be fixed, and no amount of political adversity should cause us to abandon those values.
When Christ and his apostles delivered that message to Christ’s early followers, they were speaking to people suffering persecution that the modern American church can scarcely comprehend. Yet even in the face of crucifixion — or even when they were confronting lions in the Colosseum — Christ’s commands to love our enemies still applied.
The world was rocked on Saturday night when President Trump announced that the United States military executed a bombing mission targeted at three Iranian nuclear sites. I understand that it was the first time in history that the United States dropped its 30,000- pound Massive Ordinance Penetrators (MOPS)-twelve of them- on another country. It appeared to be a triumphant moment for the President, but to my mind it was an utter moral failure. Moreover, in this announcement to the nation, he could only speak for less than four minutes, gave no coherent rationale for the bombing and his closing was astonishingly ineloquent and alarmingly uninformed theologically. I am embarrassed by the following:
"Tomorrow, Gen. Caine, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, will have a press conference at 8 a.m. at the Pentagon. And I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God.
"I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you."
Can you imagine that? Thanking God for our nation’s entering a war in the Middle East and saying to the nation: “We love you God.”
Heather Cox Richardson reported this morning the following tidbit of information about Trump and how he processes information:
At the end of May, Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Gordon Lubold, Dan De Luce, and Elyse Perlmutter-Gumbiner of NBC News reported that (Tulsi) Gabbard was considering turning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) into a video that looked like a broadcast from the Fox News Channel to try to capture Trump’s attention. At the time, he had taken only 14 PDBs, or fewer than one a week (in the same number of days, President Joe Biden took 90). One person with direct knowledge of the discussions said: “The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read.”
Even though he is grifting a personal Bible, it is clear that he has not read the Bible he is selling! I went to church on Sunday here in Coventry, and was moved by our singing of “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus,” (Parker/ Challinor), in particular, the second verse:
- Tell me the stories of Jesus I love to hear;
Things I would ask Him to tell me if He were here;
Scenes by the wayside, tales of the sea,
Stories of Jesus, tell them to me. - First let me hear how the children stood round His knee,
And I shall fancy His blessing resting on me;
Words full of kindness, deeds full of grace,
All in the love light of Jesus’ face.
While singing and pondering the events of the night, Tomahawk missiles and 30,000 lb. bunker busting bombs, I was thinking of those stories, most of which are profoundly antithetical to the political and military behavior of this administration and those who support it. How can we reconcile such actions with the words spoken on a hillside overlooking the Galilee? (Matthew 5: 1-11, NRSVU)
5 When Jesus[a] saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 And he began to speak and taught them, saying:
3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
5 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely[b] on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
And Mathew doesn’t let us leave the hillside without hearing these words as well:
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5: 43-48, NRSVU)
Is David French right? At a time when the Christian message of grace and generosity, of mercy and kindness, of the respected value of one’s neighbor and one’s enemy, should shine brightest, we seem to be okay with the darkness, behaving with cruelty, vindictiveness and violence, allowing a desperate little man to drop big bombs. When the times call for peacemakers, we have entered a war. Have we forgotten the stories of Jesus and the lessons he taught about how he wants us to live?
Apparently, we have, but hopefully, not for much longer! One week ago, while Trump watched pathetically at tanks in the streets of Washington, D.C., millions showed up across the country for the “No Kings Protests!” The Reverend William Barber II., whom I have mentioned in previous blog posts, recently declared that: ‘This Is Our Time to Stand’-our moral moment- and demand ‘No War!”