The time when a church gathers on Sunday morning is sacred. A congregation turns its attention toward God amidst the chaos of the week.
It's a rare multigenerational moment of community. We may see parents wrangling toddlers or hushing babes, and grandparents settling into a pew. It has been a core, foundational staple of life in our country since Plymouth Rock.
But in St. Paul, Minnesota on Sunday, that sacred peace was shattered when violent protesters stormed a worship service and began to violate a place of sanctuary.
Police say roughly 30 to 40 activists burst into Cities Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, and disrupted worship. The mob shouted at worshipers and rushed toward the pulpit, intimidating and seeking to provoke those who simply came to worship and rest in Christian fellowship. The alleged leader of the anarchist mob is now facing federal charges.
Make no mistake – revolutionaries since at least 1793 have fixated on attacking Christianity. This international and increasingly American tradition appears to have continued right into recent years. The Center for Religious Liberty tracked 1,384 acts of hostility against churches from 2018 to 2024. This includes many acts of arson, physical destruction, and acts of vile desecration. We have now seen church shootings become commonplace enough for churches, such as mine, to normalize volunteers to be ready to confront gunmen.
This group of leftist agitators, supported by members of the media and state government, opened up a new front in their escalation against Christians. They shut down worship and terrorized children and families to advance their agenda.
Now, if you have never been responsible for children in a chaotic room, it is easy to miss what that moment of explosive disruption feels like. Your mind does not go to political debate; it goes to exits; to your daughter’s hand in yours; to whether the elderly couple two pews behind you can even stand up quickly enough to avoid unpredictable and hostile interlocutors.
Crashing a worship service while screaming and seeking to provoke a violent reaction is a way of applying deeply sinister pressure in the one place people expect to be safe. It is designed to intimidate and force a reaction. Quite simply, Sunday’s angry agitators hoped to embarrass the church and frighten Bible-believing congregations into either violence or silence.
Their stated grievance was opposition to the recent enforcement of Federal immigration statutes passed by previously elected congresses and signed into law by a previously elected president. One can certainly oppose and protest those lawful actions, but a Baptist congregation in worship has no means of redressing that grievance.
People can protest laws and lawmakers. They can litigate in court. They can vote leaders in or out. But violating the sacredness of Sunday worship is as wrongheaded as flash-mobbing a hospital operating room because the doctor is suspected of being supportive of Federal immigration policy.
If radical anarchists can desecrate the holiness of worship for social media clicks and political shock value, they will not just disrupt one Sunday service. They will fuel copycat agitation across our nation.
They may well succeed in fomenting the violent responses they crave. Agitators will destroy our nation’s first liberty of religious freedom by fueling fear in children’s hearts. Parents will worry about whether they should go back next week. Does one sit near the exit? Should we leave the kids at home?
In this 250th anniversary year of our nation’s founding, we ought to recall that Americans have a God-given right to gather and worship peacefully according to conscience. Freedom of speech is listed chronologically after religious freedom in the First Amendment. Free speech does not give anyone the right to violate private property and another citizen’s religious freedom.
Religious liberty is a core pillar of self-governing American life and culture. We received this right from our Creator. It is affirmed by the Bill of Rights and is not subject to the whims of an angry, politically charged mob. When radical agitators claim a right to invade a sanctuary, they communicate what they believe: nothing sacred occurs there. Indeed, these revolutionaries show they reject all sacred order.
If anything, this episode is a reminder of why government exists at all. Not to referee theology. Not to settle every political dispute. But to protect citizens who are exercising fundamental rights, and to bring justice when those rights are trampled.
Despite what we are likely to hear from the usual parade of left-leaning pundits and influencers, this week’s swift action by the Department of Justice is absolutely appropriate and should be supported by Americans on both sides of the aisle and of all our variety of religious expression. This was the barbarians breaching a new gate in a calculated assault on a constitutional right.
If activists learn they can storm into churches, hijack worship, frighten children, and walk away with a smile for the cameras, they will do it again. Tactics spread. They always do. What begins as a ‘one off’ quickly becomes a template, and a new page of the revolutionaries’ playbook.
Protest on the public sidewalk if you must. Debate hard in the public square. Argue your case and politically organize for the change you want.
But do not storm a church. Because a sanctuary is not a stage. A Sunday service is sacred. And mob behavior does not erase the God-given rights of law-abiding people to worship in peace.
J.P. De Gance is the founder and president of Communio, a nonprofit ministry that trains and equips churches to share the Gospel and impact culture through the renewal of healthy relationships, marriages, and the family. He is the co-author of "Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America."