Opinion: When daily violent prayer morphs into homegrown Christian terrorism

^{A picture taken at Christ for the Nations Institute in March 2024 by author Jeff Sharlet, who recently featured it in an excellent column for Religion Dispatches, which also discusses Vance Luther Boelter and his connections to CFNI.}

Around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, June 14, a man dressed as a police officer knocked on the door of a home in New Hope, Minnesota. When the inhabitants, a married couple in their 50s, opened the door, he shot them to death. His target was the woman, Democratic Speaker Emerita of the state House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman. An hour earlier, the killer had shot another couple, that time targeting the man, Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman. In the killer’s car, police later found a target list including information on other Democratic lawmakers, abortion rights activists, and a Planned Parenthood clinic.

The gunman’s name is Vance Luther Boelter, and he was on a mission from God – or at least that’s the picture we have been able to glean from media reports, biographical information, and Boelter’s own statements. Friends described him as deeply religious. Boelter was also a conservative, a registered Republican, and a “follower” of Donald Trump.

The mainstream media will not use the term which fits Boelter, though they would have no trouble using the proper terms for a man with a different faith, a different skin tone. Vance Boelter is a radical Christian extremist. He is a Christian terrorist, whose warped faith seems to have been every bit as instrumental to his bloody suburban rampage as his politics. And, despite the media’s stalwart refusal to connect any inconvenient dots, Boelter is not an anomaly; he is a murderous avatar of Christian nationalism in the Trump era. His violence was born out of a specific moment and a specific movement, and he will not be the last.

This is not to say that Boelter is not responsible for his actions. He is. But he is also a warning: the assembly lines which produced his violent mentality did not stop running after making him. They’re churning out new models every day.

Emboldened by Trump’s return to the White House, steeped in a constant flow of propaganda and lies about Christians being persecuted in the United States, held in the grip of a theology which views political opponents as literal demons, there are millions who share Vance Boelter’s exact beliefs. 

Years before the cold-blooded killings which made his name known to the public, Vance Luther Boelter was educated at Christ for the Nations Institute (CFNI), a Dallas-based Bible college with deep ties to the modern Christian nationalist movement. Dutch Sheets – a prominent Christian nationalist advocate of “spiritual warfare” and the man credited with popularizing the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which has become de rigeur in Christian nationalist circles since peppering the crowd at the January 6 insurrection – was a teacher at the school at the same time Boelter attended as a student. Sheets later served as the institute’s executive director. In between his first stint as a professor at the school and his tenure as executive director, Sheets ran a Colorado Springs-based ministry.

At CFNI, Boelter would have been taught the most famous maxim of the school’s founder, Gordon Lindsay. “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.”

Lindsay did not originate the concept of “violent prayer.” In more scholarly circles, the term is “imprecatory prayer,” and is often understood as praying for God to rain curses down on his enemies. Imprecatory prayers are found in the Bible, particularly in the book of Psalms, but do not show up much in mainstream American Christianity. Or at least, they didn’t, until the modern Christian nationalist movement seized on imprecation as a way to baptize a more extreme interpretation of spiritual warfare than most Christians embrace.

Like Boelter, that extreme view of spiritual warfare is in no small part a product of the Christ for the Nations Institute. In the years before Dutch Sheets founded Freedom Church in Colorado Springs, before he returned to Christ for the Nations as a professor and later as executive director, he studied under Gordon Lindsay at the school. In the years since his graduation from Lindsay’s pedagogy, Sheets has arguably become the nation’s most prominent advocate of a very literal kind of spiritual warfare. 

One week before Boelter’s killing spree, Dutch Sheets posted a video in which he made it clear that he does not view spiritual warfare as something relegated to prayer or worship. 

“Controversial though it may be, the Bible does clearly instruct us to resist the Devil,” Sheets said. “It is often not enough to ask our Heavenly Father to do or give us something, although this is most Christians’ only concept of prayer. Many times, it’s necessary to use our authority and enforce Christ’s victory.” 

The picture Sheets paints takes on a darker tone when combined with the understanding that Sheets – and many other prominent pastors in the same vein – believe that Democratic politics are a literal manifestation of demonic influence, and that Christians face endless persecution in the United States (a nation where more than 60% of the population identifies as Christian). The implication is clear: that his followers should view their political opponents as enemies of the Lord.

We do not know if Boelter continued to follow Sheets’ preaching up to the time of his murders, though we do know that he maintained a belief in modern-day prophets and apostles, which is a hallmark of the New Apostolic Reformation movement Sheets is associated with. My point is not that Dutch Sheets is somehow responsible for Boelter’s crimes. My point is that Boelter’s crimes cannot be separated from the beliefs that he, Sheets, and millions of others shared. 

Christian nationalism has never been an entirely spiritual movement, though. It is the fusion of the sacred and the profane, the heavenly and the earthly, which makes the movement so dangerous. And while those of us who do not live inside the movement’s media ecosystem might puzzle over how someone could believe that Christians are under threat in the United States – much less how they could believe it with such fervor that they felt compelled to take up arms, and take lives, in response – we are asking the wrong question. 

The right question, the one we should be asking, is how someone living life in the MAGA-Christian-nationalist-Fox-News-Newsmax media bubble could possibly avoid believing it. After all, convincing the audience to believe falsehoods which will redound to conservatives’ political benefit is the entire reason the right-wing media bubble exists in the first place. Creating people like Vance Boelter isn’t an example of that system failing. It’s an example of the system working too well. 

Two days after Boelter’s faith-fueled murders – a rampage which was mercifully cut short before he could make his way to the pro-choice activists, Planned Parenthood, and homes of other Democratic lawmakers he had targeted – the alternate reality inhabited by millions of Christian nationalists was in full force, with the backing of the federal government.

That Monday morning marked the inaugural meeting of President Trump’s “Religious Liberty Commission,” held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The commission is chaired by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and includes members like former HUD Secretary Dr. Ben Carson, televangelist and Trump spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain, and for some reason, Dr. Phil. According to some attendees at that inaugural meeting, it was clear from the outset that the commission would not be focused on “religious liberty” in any ecumenical sense, but would instead focus its efforts on creating a venue for imagined tales of anti-Christian persecution.

Alessandro Terenzoni of Americans United described the meeting as having “a focus on Christianity so specific that you’d barely know other faiths existed in the U.S.,” and creating ample space for the “rhetoric of victimization that certain American Christians have spouted for years.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi opened the meeting by proclaiming that Christians had “come under attack,” and implicating the Biden administration in those imagined attacks. Patrick claimed that “the Declaration of Independence is consistent with the Bible, and the Bible is consistent with the Declaration of Independence.” A former Miss California, Carrie Prejean Boller, insisted that the nation’s Founders “wanted exclusively Christian ‘rulers.’” All of this in one meeting.

The conservative Daily Wire reported the commission meeting as straight news, assuring its readers that the administration is seriously focused on the very real persecution of Christians in the United States.

The commission’s foray into unreality was not new or unexpected: it was just the latest in an exercise undertaken by the Trump administration and its Christian nationalist allies to build a narrative of Christians being under attack in one of the world’s most heavily Christian nations. A narrative which gives people like Vance Boelter permission to act.

The narrative was propagated by Trump’s February executive order on “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,” which said it aimed to “protect the religious freedoms of Americans and end the anti-Christian weaponization of government.” The order accused the Biden administration of an “egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses.” None of this is true or based in reality.

The narrative was pushed even further in April, when the State Department urged its 77,000 employees to report “anti-Christian bias” by way of an anonymous form. “It’s very ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-esque,” one department employee told Politico.

Meanwhile, 62% of Americans still identify as Christian, and Christian missionary organizations like Open Doors still report no persecution of Christians in the United States. 

These false beliefs in demonic Democrats and persecuted Christians are not ancillary to the modern Christian nationalist movement. They are not the unfortunate but unintentional byproduct of a belief system with much to commend it. These false beliefs – these lies and attempts at incitement – are the movement. They are central to it. They are its fuel. They are what keep the clicks coming, the tithes rolling in, the people turning out. These beliefs are the essence and end goal of Christian nationalism, and it does not take any outside force to make them dangerous. 

They are already dangerous – based in lies, feeding on imagined persecution, fermenting into a desire for revenge disguised as justice – and if you teach them to enough people, more will end up receiving them like Boelter did: murderously.

Vance Boelter was a Christian extremist. He was a terrorist produced by a radical, homegrown Christian movement. And he will not be the last.

Editor’s note: This opinion column first appeared on the Colorado Times Recorder website. Logan M. Davis is a progressive researcher and writer based in Denver, specializing in the threat posed by right-wing extremism. He is also a political communications consultant. He is a proud member of Denver NewsGuild and co-founder of the Political Workers Guild of Colorado.