State legislators are weaponizing religious protection to insulate political enforcers from public dissent. Four states—Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Kansas—rushed laws this year to criminalize worship-service interruptions, a direct reaction to a January protest at the Cathedral of St. Paul where the pastor at the pulpit also directs U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enforcement and removal operations. When a sanctuary doubles as a political operations center, the impulse to criminalize protest is not about protecting worship; it is about insulating a captured operation from the accountability the text itself demands.
We all want our neighbors to sit in peace while they pray, and we will forgive the legislators for assuming that silencing dissent is the same thing as guarding the pew. Idaho Sen. Mark Harris told constituents the bills were about letting people worship without harassment. Kansas took a narrower path, with Democratic Governor Laura Kelly signing a bill that targets only intentional harassment and imposes fines rather than jail time. But the broader wave remains recklessly broad. As First Amendment specialist Kevin Goldberg has warned, these statutes are likely unconstitutional in many applications: by criminalizing “disruption,” the state hands itself a cudgel to selectively silence those who, like the Minnesota protesters, specifically target the pulpit. Existing trespassing ordinances and the federal FACE Act already cover genuine disruptions. This legislative rush is a calculated operation to grant government actors a form of ecclesiastical immunity—what happens when a lawmaker declares that if a government official occupies the pulpit, the sanctuary becomes a shielded bunker off-limits to the very prophets and protesters that the tradition itself once invited in.
When the pulpit is occupied by the enforcer, the sanctuary is no longer a neutral space; it is a point of direct political contact. This is the chasm we must name. Amos 5:21–24: “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me… Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river…” The verse is blunt. It does not separate worship from moral practice. The prophets do not offer a “right to sanctuary” exemption when the sanctuary itself becomes a fortress for the powerful. The captured reading, which the legalist machinery deploys every Sunday, insists that the text is a warning about empty ritual—a gentle nudge for believers to feel less performative. The plain-language reading is a structural indictment: when the religious assembly shields the machinery of state violence, God despises the gathering. You cannot hide behind “this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord” (Jeremiah 7:4) while your state legislatures pass laws that criminalize dissent. Jeremiah does not end with safety; he ends with the temple’s destruction.
We who served the apparatus for thirty years learned to read Amos as preachers of personal repentance rather than structural critics. We spiritualized the prophets until their indictments of empire could not touch the very pulpits that quoted Romans 13 to justify state power. We taught our Sunday-school classes that Matthew 25’s “least of these” referred to fellow believers rather than the undocumented neighbors the ICE director’s policies were dismantling. The historical pattern repeats with a gut-wrenching consistency: when the Christian Nationalist apparatus meets political pressure, it does not double down on the radical hospitality of the Sermon on the Mount; it reaches for the state’s criminal code, using the blunt instrument to protect the pulpit from its own moral scrutiny.
We recognize the performative piety—the cadence of an “emergency” whipped up for political theater. Protesters including Don Lemon now face federal charges under the FACE Act, which transforms the act of protest into a federal criminal liability. These are not tools to protect the pew; they are instruments to punish dissent.
We who have stepped out of that apparatus still remember how we used to frame such things: as a defense of the faith. But we must be plain. This is not a defense of the faith. It is the consolidation of power. If the church doors must be bolted to keep the protesters away from a pastor who also functions as an agent of state deportation, the church has not been protected; it has been colonized by the very state interests it once claimed to judge.
Let justice roll on like a river. If the laws require us to worship in silence while justice drowns, the Bible has already told us what God thinks of that assembly. A Christianity that relies on felony jail time to stop people from hearing a point of view is, by its own scriptural standard—in Matthew 23’s searing indictment of those who shut the door of the kingdom in faces—already admitting it has nothing left to say.