The Sanctuary as Stage
On the morning of January 18, in a stone church on a St. Paul boulevard, the sermon stopped. Dozens of demonstrators walked into Cities Church during Sunday service and made the sanctuary their press conference. They chanted “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.” Some went toward the pulpit. Children were in the room. The service ended early.
The political pretext was specific. David Easterwood, a pastor and elder at the church, was also the acting ICE field director in St. Paul. Eleven days earlier, an ICE officer had shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. The activists who entered the nave—among them members of Black Lives Matter Minnesota—had a target and a grievance. What they did not have, and did not appear to want, was a protest that left other people’s worship intact. They could have stood on the sidewalk. They chose the pews.
That choice is the story. American politics is loud; houses of worship are not supposed to be conscripted into it. For a slice of the contemporary left, that old etiquette has collapsed. Conservative Christianity is no longer a faith one disagrees with. It is an occupation of public space that may be interrupted, shouted down, or physically crowded until the believers leave.
You could see the same logic in Seattle in May 2025. Mayday USA held a permitted prayer gathering in Cal Anderson Park. Counterprotesters arrived to denounce “fascist family values.” Bottles were thrown. Officers were assaulted. Twenty-three people were arrested. The city’s mayor did not begin with the fact of a worship service under siege. He began with the idea that the Christians had provoked the neighborhood by existing in it.
This is not the whole left, and it is not most church crime. The FBI still records far more anti-Jewish hate crimes than anti-Christian ones. Arsonists and vandals are often lonely, drunk, or mad. The Family Research Council’s count of hostile acts against U.S. churches—415 in 2024—mixes ideology with chaos. Honesty requires saying so.
What does travel under a left-wing banner is a theory of legitimacy. If a congregation’s politics are wrong—on immigration, sex, gender, abortion—then the congregation itself becomes fair game. Jane’s Revenge said as much after Dobbs, when pregnancy centers and churches were hit with paint and fire. The Minnesota raid said it again, with a microphone. By late spring, several states were writing new penalties for disrupting worship, which is how you know a norm has already failed.
The tell is linguistic. The protesters in St. Paul did not describe themselves as barging into church. They described the church as a cover. “Wolf in sheep’s clothing,” one leader called the pastor. Once worship is recoded as camouflage, the First Amendment starts to look like a loophole.
Christians will keep gathering on Sunday. The question for 2026 is whether their critics still believe that a sanctuary is a sanctuary—or only a stage that has not yet been claimed.