“None of the people inside that church knew the intentions of those encircling them. They didn’t know how far it would go.”
There is a lot happening in Minneapolis right now. Death and destruction, outrage and grief layered so densely it’s hard to tell what deserves sustained attention anymore. Two people were shot and killed by federal agents. Protests followed. Schools closed. Statements were issued. At some point, someone’s fingertip was apparently bitten off. It all blends together in a city that feels permanently braced—not for resolution, but for the next politically charged rupture.
I don’t lack compassion for any of it. I pray for the children whose faces flash across the news. For families living in fear of violence, of instability, of systems that feel distant and unaccountable. I pray that God grants wisdom and restraint to anyone who finds themselves in a position of power over our communities and our nation.
And yet, for me, I keep coming back to the same thing.
A church service in Minnesota was disrupted. Worshippers were quietly surrounded. Congregants were blocked in. A pastor was confronted mid-service. A group of activists traveled to a church—not a business, not a government office—but a place of worship. And a recognizable media figure was there, livestreaming it.
What has unsettled me isn’t only the event itself. It’s the aftermath.
There has been remarkably little public outrage. Yes, some arrests have now been made, and I think that is appropriate. But enforcement is not the same as moral leadership. There has been no unified condemnation, few clear statements from religious leaders, and no serious reckoning from Minnesota political figures who otherwise speak often and forcefully about safety, trauma, and the sanctity of vulnerable spaces. State and city leaders offered careful, minimal responses—acknowledging the sensitivity of churches while stopping short of plainly saying what many people felt instinctively: that this crossed a line.
And that silence doesn’t stay abstract. It settles somewhere quieter, more personal.
Last week, I was sitting in a church basement listening to a speaker with a couple dozen people. It was bitterly cold outside, the kind of cold that makes old buildings creak and groan. At one point, there was a loud, repeating noise along the side of the building. I don’t know what it was—maybe the structure bracing against subzero temperatures, maybe something mechanical.
But my reaction surprised me.
I suddenly became tense. My palms started sweating. My thoughts raced ahead of reason: Is someone here to hurt us? We are trapped.
And then I remembered that my child had been in the basement of Annunciation Church on the day someone came there to murder children.
That moment made something painfully clear. I don’t just carry these events as information. I carry them in my body. Even in a warm room, among familiar faces, logic was no match for the reflexive sense that something could go wrong very quickly.
And that’s exactly how I felt when I watched that video.
The slow, quiet surrounding of the congregants.
The fact that it wasn’t chaotic at first.
The uncertainty.
None of the people inside that church knew the intentions of those encircling them. They didn’t know how far it would go. That’s the part people seem most determined to minimize—not the politics, not the slogans, but the not knowing.
Fear doesn’t need shouting to announce itself. It doesn’t need violence to be legitimate. Sometimes it arrives quietly, almost politely, in a way that leaves no time to decide how you’re supposed to feel.
That is what made it terrifying.
And this is where moral prioritization becomes unavoidable.
Institutions choose what to name and what to bypass. They choose which events warrant statements and which are quietly absorbed into the background noise of modern life. They choose when to speak with moral authority, and when to remain carefully neutral.
This isn’t the first time that silence has followed violence close to home.
To this day, no one in my life is willing to even mention the specific struggles the Annunciation school shooter faced, or to ask whether there are broader patterns worth examining. We grieve. We pray. We light candles. But we do not analyze. We do not name uncomfortable realities. Inquiry itself has come to feel taboo, as though asking hard questions is a moral failure rather than a responsibility.
I’m not asking for cruelty or blame. I’m asking why truth has become so selective.
And what worries me most is what this teaches our children.
Watching the footage of Don Lemon receiving a standing ovation at the Grammy Awards made me feel sick, and for the first time, genuinely worried for the future of our society.
Like many, I’ve endured moments in recent years that probably should’ve shaken my faith in humanity more than they did. I watched from my living room window as my city burned. I faced the choice between unemployment and vaccination. I raised my first baby during a years-long stretch of government-mandated isolation. And most recently, I watched my preschooler survive a school shooting.
And yet none of those moments unsettled me quite like this.
Because applause is not neutral. It tells us what is admirable. It tells us what is forgivable. And, unmistakably, it tells us what will be protected—socially, culturally, and morally.
Our children are watching which violations are treated as intolerable and which are quietly endured. They are learning when institutions speak and when they stay silent. They are absorbing the lesson that some sanctity is worth defending publicly—and some, apparently, is not.
I can hold compassion for many things at once. But I can’t force myself to forget the feeling that something crossed a line, and that we collectively decided not to say so out loud.
That’s why I can’t let go of this.
Not because it matters more than everything else, but because the refusal to name it might.
Excerpt from the New York Times/ Pioneer Press today..
“Don Lemon hires federal prosecutor who quit over immigration crackdown”
“Lemon, who has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s deportation push, has called the charges against him “an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and a transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration.”
The aggressiveness with which the Justice Department has pursued the church protest case has unsettled career prosecutors, according to several people familiar with events at the U.S. attorney’s office in recent days. Several of them, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, have noted that the indictment does not include the names of any career prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota as would be common in a civil rights criminal case.
Thompson, who had been the second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, resigned Jan. 13 along with several colleagues after clashing with leaders at the Justice Department over its handling of the investigation into the killing of a Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, by an ICE agent.
Thompson and other career prosecutors sought to investigate the legality of the shooting of Good. But senior department leaders overruled him and instead sought to investigate Good’s partner, examining her possible links to groups protesting ICE operations in the state.
Thompson, who kept a low profile since resigning, this week started a law firm with Harry Jacobs, a fellow former federal prosecutor who also resigned in protest.
Thompson’s move to represent a defendant prosecuted by his former office reflects the wider tumult at the Justice Department, which has seen an exodus of career prosecutors as they said they found themselves pressured to investigate and prosecute President Donald Trump’s perceived enemies.
Other surprising partnerships have emerged. Last summer, Rascoe Dean, the deputy chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville, Tennessee, joined the legal team representing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who has come to symbolize Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda. Dean quit his job as a prosecutor after Abrego Garcia was indicted
Cally, Thank You. Even though you did not use the word itself, thanks for pointing out the utter hypocrisy of both our local ministerial community, and of much of the nation’s news media. As to the former, we can assemble a hundred or so concerned ministers to block access to the airport terminal – a choice of location which serves no conceivable purpose other that to make the lives of totally random travelers unpleasant for a little while – But no one organizes to speak up against the unthinkable horror of having one’s church sanctuary invaded by hostile strangers. It’s mind-boggling. Every congregant in every church, regardless of denomination, should be asking their minister not only “What are we doing to ensure our safety here?” but also “What have YOU done to protest what happened to the congregation in St. Paul?” As for the news media – One is not a “reporter” if one is part of the protest itself, and has been “embedded” with the protesters from the planning process onward. Just because one has worked as a reporter, it does not follow that one is ACTING as one at any given moment. If that were so, we should all write something for publication somewhere (just as I am, here), declare ourselves “journalists”, and proceed to do whatever-the-hell-we’d-like-to, claiming First Amendment protections at all times. Recording and sharing video in the manner Lemon did is not “journalism”, it is “propagandizing”. If Don Lemon is a “journalist”, then Germany’s Leni Riefenstahl was just another movie maker.
Expect Lemon to stick to his story to the bitter end. If he was just there covering the event he’s off scot free, if he was in contact with the group prior to the demonstration he could be charged with conspiracy.
You said it better than I did. Thanks for sharing.
I agree w/ Ms Proctor. Particularly in the context of recent violent attacks on churches, synagogues, and mosques, the City Church stunt was reckless to the point of being dangerous.
I think the bigger concern these days is why Pam Bondi and the administration tried to make this occurrence the focus of their investigations meanwhile unwilling to investigate any of the actions/murders by Ice Agents. When the fabric of democracy starts to collapse as it did in Mpls in Jan, protesting at a church seems like small potatoes….
I’m with JSALITS. No one is denying these transgressions—it’s just small potatoes. This escalation was unnecessary, but compared to ballot box seizures and ICE trampling rights, it doesn’t merit the focus. Levy and Lemon were arrested; let it shake out. This was about the attention economy, and the silence now is appropriate. If anything, they should’ve stayed outside and informed parishioners of the clergy’s ICE ties with bullhorns and flyers. Instead, it became performance. I don’t support harassing churches—even when the clergy are awful. It was a stupid overreach. Stay focused.
How much facisism does a religious congregation or its leaders need to support and participate before it becomes fair to protest against them? The First Amendment does not exempt people from criticism or protest just because they organizing in a place of worship. It also does not protect people from emotional discomfort and irrational fear. You are cheering federal felony charges for peaceful protest. Hopefully this semi-rightwing publication does not support the Trump regime’s attack authoritarian police state tactics.
A couple of points:
1. This statement made me go back and reread the article: All I found was this: “Yes, some arrests have now been made, and I think that is appropriate.” Out of the 1,000-word essay, this is the only reference to any aspect of the legal system. Does that 1 sentence really equate to “You are cheering federal felony charges for peaceful protest.”?
2. Semi-rightwing? Maybe if the definition of that is not-leftwing. Here’s a challenge: Find one example, of any writer who’s contributed to Minneapolis Times, of supporting “the Trump regime’s attack authoritarian police state tactics.”
You won’t, so let’s broaden the scope of the challenge: Find one example of any article on our website, in any of the 659 articles we’ve published, going back to our launch in September 2025, that supports “the Trump regime’s” actions or policies on immigration, Trans Rights, civil rights, or ANY of the hot button topics in the news this year or last.
One rule: Disagreeing with a specific leftwing strategy, policy or position on an issue is NOT evidence of us being a “semi-right wing publication.” It means simply not-leftwing.
If you take up this challenge, please come back and post the links to the receipts, and we’ll dig into them.
*If you meant “semi-rightwing” in comparison to your own personal political perspective, fair enough. No need for a challenge.
Thanks for bringing things back to reality. ❤️
Tinjum, you found the quote that makes my case. Welcoming the arrests is indeed cheering the weaponisation of the criminal injustice system against peaceful protesters and the actions of the Trump regime. It was the author who chose to take these positions in her 1000 word essay regardingless of whether there was a lot more irrational fear taking up most of the space
Sorry Cally. Your bias is clear. Don Lemon was there as a journalist and if you did watch the tape you would see his role was to cover the event as a reporter. And yes, the Annunciation shooters’ life appears isolated and clearly mental illness and neglect by others to not see is a story to understand how such things can be prevented. And why bring up vaccines? Except to indicate your bias. Is your child getting inoculated?
Thank you for sharing your experience with us through this article. I am sorry your family has had to endure such difficult circumstances, and hope life can improve for us all.
“Nick” is a well-known Democratic Socialist online bully.
The lone comment by Nick is telling and is a great example of exactly what Cally is talking about in her excellent piece. We are being morally blinded by our bipolar political binary. Willing to overlook and even deny transgressions if they originate from our team. Willing to condemn morally sound arguments if they originate from the opposing team. It is lonely here in the middle although I suspect there are many quietly residing here amidst the din.
No. 🙂
“ I faced the choice between unemployment and vaccination.”
Oh, you are an anti-vaxxer?