When church is no longer sanctuary
The scene that unfolded this past Sunday at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, should disturb every American regardless of their political stripes or their position on immigration policy. When a mob of protesters bursts into a house of worship — screaming slogans, disrupting prayer, and intimidating congregants — they have crossed a line that civilized society cannot allow to be blurred.
For centuries, the concept of “sanctuary” has been central to the Western tradition. Churches are spaces where the secular world is meant to recede, allowing individuals to commune with the divine. Yet, for the activists who stormed Cities Church, these norms were apparently just another barrier to be smashed in the name of political expediency.
Let’s be clear about what happened here: This was not a peaceful protest outside a government building. It was an invasion of a private religious service. The protesters’ goal was not dialogue, but disruption. Their tactic was not persuasion, but intimidation.
This infuriating spectacle forces us to ask a fundamental question: Who is the audience for this egregious action?
Does anyone truly believe that screaming at families in pews wins converts to the cause of immigration reform? Whose minds are changed by this display? The mother shielding her child from the noise? The elderly congregant trying to pray? Who sympathizes with these aggressors? The answer is no one — except perhaps the radical fringe that views disruption as a virtue in itself.
The activists claim justification in their opposition to the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge.” They cite the tragic death of Renee Good and allegations of overreach by federal agents. But none of that justifies the desecration of a church service. When political grievances, no matter how deeply felt, are used as a license to trample the First Amendment rights of others to worship in peace, we are treading on dangerous ground.
Yet, rather than clear moral condemnation, we see the familiar, moronic posturing from the media establishment — the kind of “mostly peaceful” equivocation perfected by the likes of Don Lemon and his ilk. In their coverage of the event, CNN’s legal analyst Carrie Cordero actually framed this invasion as a balancing act, musing on how police can “protect the rights of protesters to engage in their First Amendment-protected activit” while preventing intimidation.
This is absurd. There is no First Amendment right to trespass into a private church service and scream at worshippers. To suggest that law enforcement’s job is to protect the “rights” of a mob in the middle of a sanctuary is the height of journalistic malpractice. It attempts to sanitize lawlessness by dressing it up in the language of civil liberties.
For years, conservatives have warned about the slippery slope of “direct action” tactics that prioritize disruption over discourse. We saw it when public officials were hounded out of restaurants and mobbed at their private homes. Now, that same mob mentality has breached the church doors. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon is entirely correct to cite the FACE Act and launch an investigation. That federal law prohibits the use of force or obstruction to injure, intimidate, or interfere with a person seeking to exercise their religious freedom. If the law is to mean anything, it must be applied neutrally and forcefully to protect all worshippers.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, a former NAACP chapter president, dismissed the federal investigation as a “sham,” suggesting that disrupting a church service is trivial compared to community grievances. This is a false choice and a dangerous deflection. We can have a robust debate about immigration enforcement and simultaneously agree that churches should be off-limits. To suggest otherwise is to argue that the ends always justify the means, a philosophy that erodes the very foundations of a free society.
The Trump administration’s response, characterized by Attorney General Pam Bondi as meeting these attacks with “the full force of federal law,” is a necessary corrective to a culture that has grown too tolerant of performative lawlessness. Civil disobedience has a storied history in this country, but there is nothing civil about screaming down a pastor in the middle of a service.
When the sanctuary of the church is violated for political theater, we lose something far more precious than a Sunday morning service: We lose our shared commitment to basic decency.
Publius Pax is a tenth-generation Bucks Countian, political consultant, and author.
