Killer theology
June 19, 2025
By Rev. Rick King
Last weekend, I was confronted with quite a split-screen experience: rage and violence on one side, grief and peaceful gatherings on the other.
Falcon Heights Church delegates Lynne Bradbury, Cor Wilson and I attended the Minnesota Conference United Church of Christ Annual Meeting, held online and at the College of Saint Benedict on Friday and Saturday.
At 8:58 on Saturday morning, I got a text from Cor—attending online because she had come down with a virus overnight—with breaking news from KSTP that State Sen. John Hoffman (DFL-Champlin) and Rep. Melissa Hortman (DFL-Brooklyn Park) had been shot by a man dressed as a police officer and wearing body armor.
I showed the text to Rev. Sara Morse, the Conference Moderator, as she prepared to call us to order. Her announcement immediately changed the energy and feel of the room where we were gathered.
The unthinkable had happened: political violence had come to Minnesota.
Unthinkable not because we can’t conceive it happening, but because we don’t want to think about it.
We’ve been seeing political violence on the rise at least as far back as the 2016 presidential election campaign, with rhetoric tinged with violent threats and echoing that of Benito Mussolini at his rallies. And of course, we well remember a candidate’s claim that he could shoot somebody dead on Fifth Avenue in New York and get away with it. Soon, his security detail was roughing up hecklers and non-compliant reporters at his rallies and throwing them out.
Since then, we’ve seen the rise of Christian Nationalism, a movement whose toxic evangelical theology legitimizes violence sanctioned for a supposedly holy purpose. Not much different from the Muslim jihadists we were so afraid of in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Killer theology. “A theology so malformed, so severed from the sacred, that it could justify murder in God’s name,” wrote Rev. Cameron Trimble in her blog on Monday. She says we’re not merely witnessing theological extremism, but “theological collapse.” And not just theological, but “cosmological—a collapse in how we understand God, self, earth, and other.”
Vance Boelter, the shooter, claimed to be an evangelical pastor and wanted to “sow fear” among elected officials of one party.
Cameron Trimble says that at its most extreme, toxic evangelical cosmology teaches that the earth is disposable, not sacred; that the body is shameful, not holy; that the Other is the enemy, not kin; and that God is authoritarian, not relational.
But this doesn’t have to be. All weekend, I saw people model an alternative theology that was life-giving, life-affirming, joyous and knowing how to grieve not only the political violence but the spiritual death that precedes it and makes it possible.
After lunch at Annual Meeting, a group of us carpooled over to St. Cloud to a No Kings protest that was officially canceled to join a crowd that lined both sides of Division Street, three-deep, for nearly a mile.
Rather than hating Vance Boelter or any other adherents to this toxic theology, Trimble says our response must go beyond condemnation, not merely calling out those held captive by this twisted cosmology, but “calling home those willing to reimagine the sacred.”
Where do YOU see this split-screen in your life? How does it move you to respond?