Viral video of the protest shows activists standing up during the middle of a service at Cities Church and calling for the ousting of David Easterwood, a pastor at the Southern Baptist church who is also acting director of the St. Paul ICE field office.
During the first Christian worship service at the Pentagon in 2026 — and the first since the operation that resulted in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — the Secretary of War framed that U.S. military action as a godly mission.
Brian Kaylor, a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship-affiliated minister and leader of the Christian media organization Word&Way, called having an ICE official serve as a pastor ‘a serious moral failure.’
‘Jesus — who they claim to worship — went into the so-called houses of God, he flipped over tables. … So that’s what we did today,’ said minister and organizer Nekima Levy Armstrong.
Amid an internal investigation into Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the Department of Labor held its second monthly worship service featuring the rightwing anti-abortion activist niece of MLK.
The question of offering pastoral care to immigrant detainees has become a theological and legal flashpoint since President Donald Trump launched his mass deportation effort last year.
The faith-based networks, which developed organizing infrastructure and relationships during the Floyd era, are joined by newcomers as resistance efforts have intensified since Good’s shooting.
With the growth of worship services by leaders in a Christian Nationalist administration, it’s worth revisiting the most significant previous effort to craft religion within the federal government: the church of Nixon.
‘There was a request for clergy to show up’ at the scene, said one Minneapolis minister. ‘I was out the door.’
A mile apart, supporters of the Jan. 6 rioters and clergy whose churches were assaulted five years ago, commemorated the historic events at the U.S. Capitol.