Protests against Cities Church on St. Paul’s Summit Avenue are back in the headlines, as another protester was arrested recently as part of civil rights activists anti-ICE protests. Although the judge quickly dropped the charges for lack of probable cause, the charges remain against the civil rights activists who broke up the church’s services during a Sunday in January to draw attention to a pastor’s role as an ICE senior officer.
In January, Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the main organizers of the protest, explained, “We thought congregants would want to know they have a pastor in their church doubling as the director for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Minnesota. The core of the gospel message is to love thy neighbor as you love yourself. And ICE has been doing the opposite of that.”
Regardless of whether or not you support the tactics of the activists that disrupt a religious service, or use a bullhorn on a public street, upon closer inspection, Cities Church deserves to be scrutinized.
Cities Church is not your run-of-the-mill Jesus-loving Christian church. Its leadership and its theological underpinnings are tied directly to what was happening outside the church’s doors during the federal government’s immigration enforcement crackdown. David Easterwood, the pastor who works for ICE, was deeply involved in the harm ICE agents caused across the region.
Cities Church’s distortion of the teachings of Jesus goes much deeper than Easterwood’s hypocrisy in claiming to be a follower of Jesus while ignoring his teaching. Indeed, it reaches all the way to the most powerful people in the country. The St. Paul church was planted by Joe Rigney, a leader in the White Christian Nationalist movement. He became one of the main voices attacking the protesters for disrupting the service.
His book, “The Sin of Empathy” argues against what many Christians believe is a foundational underpinning of their faith: Love your neighbor as yourself.
After establishing Cities Church, Rigney moved to Moscow, Idaho, where he sermonizes alongside Douglas Wilson, who Politico called “The New Right’s favorite pastor.” Wilson supports repealing women’s right to vote and claims that homosexuality should be a crime. He once wrote in a 1996 book, “Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity.” He is now stationed in Washington, leading prayer services at the Pentagon at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s invitation.
Hegseth has shown the danger of the White Christian Nationalist ideology held by Cities Church’s founder when applied to national policy, including asking God to give the United States military “overwhelming violence… against those who deserve no mercy.”
Hegseth’s penchant for firing Black flag officers, and the Department of Homeland Security’s explicitly nativist and racist memes and advertising campaigns make clear that this Christian nationalism is also imbued with white supremacy. Then of course there’s the “troubling and compelling evidence” of racial profiling by Easterwood’s agency in Minnesota, as a Trump-appointed federal judge put it.
It is a very different flavor of Christianity than practiced by those who showed up to defend immigrants in the face of ICE during the surge. Churches were centers for mutual aid, food drives and other support for families too afraid to leave their homes. Clergy from several Christian denominations were on the front line of protests and solidarity marches, and were leaders in a multifaith coalition calling on Minnesota companies to stand up for the rule of law inside and outside of their businesses.
We non- and squishy Christians can’t just ignore this “love your neighbor” vs “empathy is a sin” theological battle as simply one between Christian denominations that need not concern us, for theology just as often shapes politics as vice versa.
The federal government under Trump 2.0 is buttressed by “empathy is sin” Christians, and they are quickly remaking America in its image. This includes removing rights of women and trans people to access health care; adopting a federal budget that makes ICE larger than the FBI, DEA and Bureau of Prisons combined; and shuttering programs that mention diversity, equity or inclusion.
And they’re using the Department of Justice to go after protesters of churches aligned with the White Christian Nationalist ideology, while doing nothing to protect the worship services at churches that serve immigrants and other marginalized communities.
In fact, Operation Metro Surge did more to disrupt church services in Minneapolis and St. Paul than any single protest at Cities Church. For years, ICE was restricted from conducting enforcement actions at places of worship, along with other “sensitive” locations. The Trump administration removed that guidance, making churches no longer protected spaces. This led to a dramatic drop in attendance at local Catholic churches with significant Latino congregations.
The pastor of the bilingual congregation Dios Habla Hoy reported that about 80% of his Latino congregation stayed away from church out of fear. Throughout the surge, including around Christmas services, local Spanish-speaking churches in south Minneapolis asked white community members to help patrol for ICE around service times. Minnesota clergy even filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration for blocking their ability to provide pastoral care to detainees at the Whipple building.
With the drawdown of federal anti-immigration agents in Minnesota, Team “Love Your Neighbor” won this round. But the civil rights activists who protested Cities Church — now numbering 38 — are still being processed through the Trump administration’s justice system.
Whether determined legal or not, the protestors’ actions to confront Cities Church and its ideology is in the vein of non-violent civil rights protests of the 1950s and 60s. That movement — which also used confrontational tactics to bring attention to injustices — helped expand the number of Americans who could access the rights granted by the U.S. Constitution.
Now, the Cities Church protestors are employing similar tactics to draw attention to the dangers of White Christian Nationalism, based on the long-standing ideals of America as a place where all are created equal with a right to liberty and justice for all.
When the Trump era ends, the country will face a reckoning for the harm that has been done to our shared values and institutions. The Cities Church protestors should be viewed as part of the movement to turn back Trumpism in defense of those values and institutions.
