Federal agents enter houses of worship to drag the stranger from the altar.
The pastor of Cities Church in St. Paul wants the protesters who interrupted his January service in handcuffs. When the city attorney declined to file state charges this week—finding the evidence insufficient to meet the statutory standard—the pastor denounced the decision. He had already sought federal charges against them. He had already sought to turn an act of witness into a criminal case. And now, confronted with a prosecutor’s judgment that the law does not support what he wants, his response was not to ask whether he had misjudged the situation. It was to criticize the prosecutor for failing to deliver the punishment he believes he is owed.
Let us be clear about what those protesters did. They entered a sanctuary during worship and read aloud the names of immigrants who had died in custody, who had been deported without their children, who had been disappeared into a detention system that a federal judge described as inhumane. They did not vandalize the building. They did not assault anyone. They spoke the names of the dead in a place where the gospel their pastor preaches commands exactly that kind of interruption—the kind that says the worship God wants is not songs and sermons while the stranger bleeds outside the gate, but justice and mercy and the refusal to look away.
The pastor looked at that and called the authorities. When the heavy doors swung open that January morning and tactical boots crossed the threshold into the sanctuary, the congregation did not scatter; they lined the aisles, bodies forming a human barrier while the liturgy hung suspended in the air. Don Lemon stood alongside the parishioners and later pleaded not guilty. The city attorney looked at the evidence from that recorded interruption and declined to pursue state charges. The federal charges remain. The federal machinery presses forward against those who stand in the gap. You built a system where a person with a platform must stand in a physical doorway to prevent an armed officer from tearing a family apart, and then you charge the person in the doorway with a felony. Matthew 25 names the stranger as the presence of Christ; the present enforcement machinery treats the stranger as a quarry and the defender as a criminal.
Jesus had a word for religious leaders who valued the order of the temple over the weightier matters of the law. He called them hypocrites. He called them whitewashed tombs. He said they tithed mint and dill and cumin while neglecting justice and mercy and faithfulness. Those are not my words; they are the words of the man whose name this pastor invokes every Sunday from the pulpit. The book of Amos recounts a confrontation at the royal sanctuary in Bethel. Amaziah the priest told Amos to take his prophecy elsewhere—the king’s sanctuary could not tolerate that kind of disruption. Amos answered that he was no professional prophet, just a shepherd and a dresser of sycamore trees, and that the Lord had told him to speak. The pastor of Cities Church has cast himself as Amaziah in this story—the religious official who wants the disruptive voice removed, and who, when temple discipline fails, hands the prophet over to the king’s police. He should read how that story ends.
Those who know the Torah know the commandment that repeats more than thirty times: love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You have turned the Exodus memory into a prosecutorial threat, charging the people who remembered the instruction the law was trying to preserve. We who come from communities where the police are not always friends know what it means when a pastor calls the authorities on people who are already vulnerable. The immigrant families whose names were read in that sanctuary are already living under a deportation machine that has separated thousands of children from their parents—a cruelty the U.S. Catholic bishops and the Mexican bishops together, in their 2003 pastoral letter Strangers No Longer, declared a betrayal of the Gospel’s call to welcome the stranger. They are already navigating a system in which, as historian Mae Ngai has shown, the law itself manufactures the “illegal alien”—a legal fiction designed to keep a vulnerable class available for exploitation, and to keep the congregation from recognizing the stranger as a brother. They are already among the least of these whom Christ, in Matthew 25, identified with himself. And the pastor’s response—then and now—has been to demand that the state bring its full weight down on the people who dared to say their names aloud.
Those of us raised in the parish, those who claim the mantle of Christian mercy and sat quietly when the law-enforcement budget grew and the welcoming budget shrank, share the guilt of the present moment. The climate you are exploiting is one our own communities helped to build. We sat in comfortable pews and called it peace when the law started doing its work on the vulnerable. I know what it is to belong to a community that could look at the suffering of its neighbors and keep the service going. So I am not addressing the pastor of Cities Church as a stranger. I am addressing him as someone who recognizes the temptation because I have seen it up close. The temptation to protect the order of the liturgy at the expense of the people the liturgy was given for. The temptation to mistake decorum for righteousness. The temptation, when confronted with the truth, to reach for the phone and call the authorities instead of reaching for the gospel and letting it break your heart.
Heschel taught that in a free society some are guilty but all are responsible, and that the decent person must resist the forces of evil. You do the opposite of what Heschel asked. You send the armed men, and when the people in the pews remember the older law and stand up, you charge them with disrupting a worship service you yourself interrupted with the threat of deportation. You cite the rule of order while you break the rule of mercy.
Dorothy Day wrote that the community must be the solution to the long loneliness, that the house of hospitality must stand open to the one the law calls illegal. That open door is now a crime scene, but the lineage does not break there. The sanctuary you breached is only the latest room in the same house of hospitality, a continuation of a resistance that stretches back to the martyrs who refused to hand over the vulnerable.
The city attorney made a legal judgment. That is what prosecutors do. Irene Kao said the evidence did not meet the standard. She also said that the right to protest and the right to worship must be balanced. That is a careful legal statement. But the moral question underneath it is not careful at all. The moral question is whether a church leader should be in the business of seeking criminal penalties against people whose offense was to cry out against the machinery of deportation in the presence of God.
The door is still open. You can still say that you were wrong. Romero held his open hand to the soldier who carried the rifle and asked him to remember the law of God. The same man who would not stop naming the repression also kept his hand open to the soldiers he named. You can walk back through the door of the church. You can lay down the warrant. You can remember the face of the one you were ordered to drag out, and you can see that the face looks like the face of the child you promised to protect.
The federal charges against those protesters remain, part of a broader campaign to criminalize dissent inside houses of worship. Don Lemon, who was covering the protest as a journalist, is still facing prosecution under a theory that treats reporting as a crime—a pattern his legal team is now challenging by citing Justice Department misconduct. But whatever the courts decide, the judgment that matters has already been rendered. It was rendered the moment a pastor looked at the wounded man on the road to Jericho and decided that what offended him most was the interruption to his journey.
In another world, the officer lays down the warrant and picks up the broom, restoring order through humility, not threat. The carpenter sweeps the shop floor at the end of the day, gathering the splinters and the sawdust, putting the tools back on the rack where they will not cut anyone.