Midterm Elections In Danger

“The fascist Republican Party knows that in order to destroy democracy, it must destroy the free press.” – Mark Jacobs, former editor at the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

For a full year, religious leaders have been speaking out against Trump’s anti-biblical immigration policies. They have been tear-gassed and shot with “less lethal” weapons. The Pope has publicly rebuked Vice President Vance’s defense of the policies. Churches have lost their status as sensitive locations, safe from immigration raids. One year later, in the wake of the murder of Renee Good, more than 600 clergy of all faiths flocked to Minneapolis to bear witness, support and learn from local clergy, and even get arrested with them. “The gathering heralded the emergence of a vast, faith-based network set on resisting the administration’s mass deportation effort,” Jack Jenkins reported for Religion News Service.

But Cities Church in St. Paul is different. A pastor there leads a local ICE field office. So on Feb. 18, a group of protesters led by a Black minister and civil rights attorney, Nekima Levy Armstrong, showed up to challenge what they saw as a betrayal of the gospel.

Protests inside churches are rare, but not unheard of. Attacks on churches, mosques and synagogues are unfortunately far more common. But within hours, Trump misrepresented the protest as an attack and went even further, pledging to arrest independent Black journalist Don Lemon for covering the event. “It’s notable that I’ve been cast as the face of a protest I was covering as a journalist — especially since I wasn’t the only reporter there. That framing is telling,” Lemon told CNN.

Naturally, given MAGA’s white grievance core, the Black protesters and journalists were charged under the KKK Act, passed just after the Civil War to protect freed slaves and their allies from KKK violence. Also, naturally — as with Renee Good and Alex Pretti — no violence was involved. (Though one defendant allegedly punched his fist “in the air,” and Lemon was accused of standing “so close to the pastor that Lemon caused the pastor’s right hand to graze” him.)

The speed of the Trump administration’s reaction stood in sharp contrast to its foot-dragging and even refusal to investigate the Department of Homeland Security murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. So too, the shaky-at-best legal foundation. After judges twice rejected the effort, a grand jury was finally persuaded to go along.

And so squads of officers were sent out at night to arrest Lemon here in LA, while another charged reporter, Georgia Fort, live-streamed her arrest from her home in Minneapolis.

“This is all stemming from the fact that I filmed a protest as a member of the media,” Fort said in a livestream from her house, “I don’t feel that I have my First Amendment right as a member of the press because now federal agents are at my door, arresting me for filming the church protest a few weeks ago.”

“I won’t stop reporting the truth,” Lemon said on Bluesky following his release on bond. “The First Amendment is the bedrock of our democracy, and I’ll continue to fight to protect it.”

In an added irony, it was later revealed that the day before the journalists’ arrest, armed ICE agents invaded church property against church wishes at North Hills United Methodist Church in an incident church officials called “terror at a house of God,” saying, it was “a violation of our sacred right to worship and serve our Lord Jesus Christ freely and safely.”

“The government’s arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are naked attacks on freedom of the press,” the Freedom of the Press Foundation said in a statement. “These arrests, under bogus legal theories for obviously constitutionally protected reporting, are clear warning shots aimed at other journalists. … The answer to this outrageous attack is not fear or self-censorship. It’s an even stronger commitment to journalism, the truth, and the First Amendment.”

“The First Amendment protects acts of protest and acts of journalism equally,” said Jenna Ruddock, advocacy director of Free Press. “The criminalization of both journalists and protesters serves the same authoritarian project: shutting down dissenting voices or any content that deviates from the official narrative. These actions should outrage our leading media organizations, our elected officials, and the public alike.”

Two things were going on, Jason Stanly, author of How Fascism Works said on MS-NOW’s Velshi. First, he said, “We’re on the arresting journalists phase of fascism. And the second part is distinctively American. The whole MAGA project is about white supremacy and ethnic cleansing. So we are facing the beginning of a mass ethnic cleansing campaign. These are Black journalists. … It’s no accident that these are Black journalists.”

At the same time, Trump’s agents were seizing ballots in Georgia from the 2020 election, laying the predicate for stealing the midterms, attorney Marc Elias and others warned. “Trump has expressed regret that he did not seize voting machines in 2020. So this threat for 2026 (and 2028) is real,” UCLA law professor Rick Hasen wrote at Slate. “This is clearly a dry run for 2026,” Elias said on Bluesky.

While the attack on press freedom was straightforward, issues surrounding the protest itself were more complex, but both involve long-running right-wing efforts to redefine the First Amendment in ways that empower them at the expense of others. Equating covering an event with participating in it is one part of this redefining effort. And equating a church protest with an attack on religion is another.

While many church leaders were quick to condemn the protests, painting the church as victims of prejudice, progressive pastor and author Rodney Kennedy saw things differently. “MAGA churches are not being persecuted for righteousness but for not loving their neighbors. They are being persecuted by unexpected judgment like Jesus cleansing the temple,” he wrote at Baptist News Global.

In addition to the irony of charging Black activists and journalists under the KKK Act, they were also charged with violating the FACE Act, created to protect abortion clinics from violent, disruptive protests organized primarily by religious-based anti-abortion groups — groups that didn’t just momentarily disrupt abortion clinics providing services, but laid siege to them for weeks and even months at a time with the stated intent of shutting them down. When the act was passed, protections were added to churches as well, but those haven’t been the basis for legal action before Trump took office.

“Cities Church in Minneapolis is not being persecuted for faithfulness to the gospel, but for allegiance to the American empire,” Kennedy added. “I think God is using unexpected prophets to judge Cities Church.”

On Bluesky, retired journalist Mark Jacob put it like this:

2012: The Putin regime arrests members of the musical group Pussy Riot for a protest in a cathedral to highlight ties between the regime and the church.

2026: The Trump regime arrests protesters (and Don Lemon) over a demonstration at a Minnesota church to highlight ties between ICE and the church.

The resonance behind this comparison goes deep. Cities Church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which split from northern Baptists in 1845 to defend the “right” of ministers to own slaves. It did not apologize for this until 1995, 150 years later. While its official stance on race has softened, its hostility to women remains riddled with gender stereotypes, especially in the Minnesota branch that Cities Church is associated with. It’s seen as “unbiblical” for women to have control over men, as workplace bosses, according to some, though others make their arguments more nuanced.

One stereotype is that women’s greater tendency toward compassion makes them unfit for spiritual leadership. Along such lines, one of Cities Church’s founding pastors, Joe Rigney, authored The Sin of Empathy (a big hit with MAGA) and now serves as associate pastor at an Idaho church led by Doug Wilson, who has praised race relations under slavery and denounced women’s suffrage.

Religious scholar Julie Ingersoll, author of Building God’s Kingdom, explained the thinking behind “empathy is a sin” in multiple steps. “To understand how they get to this claim, it’s helpful to know that they use both the Old Testament and the New Testament in a way most Christians don’t, and they believe that what it means to be a Christian is to be obedient to the word of God in the form of biblical law,” she said. “Human behavior is governed by obedience to biblical law, not feelings such as empathy. Wilson says that empathy can lead us astray, such that we act according to feelings rather than obedience to biblical law.”

I noted that this seems jarringly at odds with what Jesus himself said — the red letter text in some Bibles — particularly when he says in Matthew 25:40, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” and one of the least of these specifically is “a stranger.”

“As for the red letter stuff, you’re right, they reject that,” Ingersoll said. “All of scripture is ‘God-breathed,’ So some specific thing attributed to Jesus is no different from the rest of the text.”

Evangelicals today actually aren’t that much divided on immigration. Just after Trump’s inauguration, a survey found that a large majority “do not want immigrants unlawfully in the country to be prioritized for deportation except if they have been convicted of violent crimes or pose a threat to national security,” according to evangelical pollster Scott McConnell, head of Lifeways Research.

This reflects basic biblical teaching, which led to the formation of the Evangelical Immigration Table in 2012 to advocate for immigration reform “based on biblical principles.” The SBC played a significant role in its founding.

Evangelicals have since grown more divided, driven by politics, despite claims to the contrary to be following the Bible. “Most evangelicals want reform that both secures the border and provides a path to citizenship — and want limited deportation,” Religion News Service summed up last September. “But few leaders want to clash with the MAGA movement.” However, that story was about the SBC breaking ties with the Evangelical Immigration Table.

The EIT has not changed its position on immigration, nor have most evangelicals, according to the polling referenced above. But MAGA leadership in SBC has justified its break by falsely claiming that the Bible is unclear, and accurately claiming that most evangelicals care more about other issues, such as abortion, which actually has a much more ambiguous biblical foundation. In short, it is very much a political battle being waged in the language of religion.

For MAGA evangelicals, a key part of that battle lies in denying that that’s what it is, which in turn is part of their broader control agenda. Another facet is interpreting “religious freedom” as a protection for them to impose their religion on others — an interpretation that conservatives on the Supreme Court have increasingly embraced, despite clear historical evidence to the contrary.

When challenged as they were by Rev. Armstrong, a Black female minister, they clearly did not feel that the same rights belonged to all. They’re about control — in the name of God, of course — not equality and dialogue. Which brings us back to free press issues again.

One particularly disturbing development was noted by Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates.

“There is an increasing tendency for MAGA and aligned religious groups to selectively bar the press from events,” Clarkson told Random Lengths. “In the case of NAR (the New Apostolic Reformation), they tend to view all media that is not explicitly aligned with their cause as the enemy,” he said.

“I encountered this when I sat in on the World Prayer Network’s weekly podcast, led by Apostle Jim Garlow. He opens every session with a request that members of the media ‘step off’ because the podcast is a worship service. That did not stop me from reporting on this public event sponsored by a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. They claim authority they do not actually have. But this episode offers a glimpse of their intentions should they ever get the power to enforce it.”

This perspective throws a different light on all that happened with the Cities Church protest. While it was clearly disruptive, and intended to be so, it was not a physical attack (as the KKK Act was meant to counter), nor was it intended to shut down the church (as the FACES Act was meant to counter). Disruption is a long-standing part of the civil rights tradition, along with the acceptance of appropriate punishment. Thousands upon thousands of civil rights activists willing went to jail in this spirit, as did hundreds of clergy in Minneapolis just last month. Local law enforcement began an investigation into civil disturbance charges, consistent with what occurred.

But even before that investigation could begin, top Trump officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, announced their intention to inappropriately make it a federal case — and a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment as well when they included Lemon and Fort.

It’s impossible to overstate how grave a threat to freedom the attack on journalists is. Without the information they provide, democratic self-government is impossible. But it’s seemingly all-to-easy to overlook how it’s also a grave threat to misrepresent protest as violence or terrorism, because if that is allowed to stand, then the state can justify anything in response. The Trump administration clearly intends to intensify both threats. It is determined to break our democracy.