Why some Christians shoot people: “Lord, teach my hands to war” by Rachel Wagner
Rachel Wagner
Professor of Religion
Ithaca College
The killer of two Democratic lawmakers and their spouses in Minnesota has been connected to beliefs generally known as Christian dominionism. Shooter Vance Boelter claims to have attended the Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, where he seems to have accepted the Institute’s core beliefs: Christians should missionize around the world; the Bible is infallible; abortion is against God’s will; and God opposes the rights of trans and queer people. After quitting his food industry job a few years ago, Vance has been working at a 7/11 and a funeral home to pay the bills, so he can travel to do agricultural and church work in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Christ for the Nations Institute’s Christian beliefs are expressed, among other places, in The Voice, its regular magazine. In a 2013 article about the “Seven Mountains Mandate,” evangelical preacher Lance Wallnau talks about taking over the earth by conquering the “seven areas that the enemy seeks to establish mind control, because the devil’s goal is to disciple nations. It should be ours.” He explains there is a “remnant of people” who are “rulers and world authorities” with an outsized influence in the world. They should be addressed because:
I can’t think of a more stupid strategy for taking territory…It’s like (going to Las Vegas) and leaving the mafia in charge of the casinos, the gambling and everything else, but you take the prostitutes to church. No, what you have to do is to shut down the mob (to bring real change.) Make sense?
If the U.S. government is the satanic “mafia,” then targeting its leaders would be the righteous thing to do. This religious conviction may explain why Boelter had a hit list of 70 targets including Tim Walz and Ilhan Omar as well as doctors at abortion clinics. The seven “mountains” to be conquered include business, government, education, family, religion, media, and arts. Christians are to work to control them all. Such advice easily could be bent into a call for violent action against lawmakers perceived to be at odds with dominion theology. One wonders if such a call to action wasn’t on Boelter’s mind. Since we do not know much about Boelter yet, I offer here some contextual history on New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) beliefs, drawing on my own childhood in a region of the country where these beliefs flourished in the 1980s.
Dominion theology has roots in the twentieth century, but it was nurtured in the American South. A few hours from where I grew up in Arkansas, a white supremacist community called The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) set up a prepper compound in 1971 led by an elder named Kerry Noble. An FBI report from 1982 describes their apocalyptic beliefs: “[T]he United States will suffer a collapse of economy or nuclear war. As a result, there will be chaos, and the panicked masses will roam the country looking for food and protection. Those who are not prepared will be a threat to those who have been preparing. . . . But, if people come to loot, the CSA will kill them.” The group stockpiled weapons and supplies and offered military training to residents. They taught survivalism skills like foraging and territorial protection. They also taught “Christian martial arts” and “Christian military truths.” At least once a year, I piled on a school bus with other kids to go to high school football games near the CSA compound, where I’d march with the band at halftime. Less than an hour away at the compound, police found thirty gallons of cyanide, enough to poison an entire town.
In a jaw-dropping interview with Susan Ketchum in 1985 still viewable online, Kerry Noble explains the scriptural basis for his racist and antisemitic views. In his Southern drawl, Noble refers to George Hawtin, a twentieth-century prophet in the charismatic Latter Rain movement, a group that has deeply informed the NAR of today. NAR is a charismatic organization now frequently in the news for its connections to the Trump presidency and has already been cited in connection with Boelter. In a recent article for The Atlantic, Stephanie McCrummen describes NAR beliefs:
[T]hat God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active ‘army of God,’ one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.
In the interview, Noble justifies stockpiling guns at the compound by explaining that God has chosen the “white race” to dominate other races: “It's been the part of the heritage of our people for generations and centuries to be a warlike defense people. Our people have been a conquering people. We established new lands. We went through places where no other race could go, conquering whoever was there, whatever was there.” Noble turns selectively, and sometimes inaccurately, to the Bible to cherry pick verses in support of his views. In the Psalms he finds justification for firearms: “Lord, teach my hands to war, my fingers to fight.” In biblical battle accounts, he finds evidence that God loves violence. “That is God's nature,” Noble says, “to be defensive and warrior-like and to bear the sword, so to speak. And because we [white people only] are sons and daughters of God, that's just part of our genetic nature also.” While contemporary NAR proponents don’t tend to talk in such overtly racist terms, they do still openly embrace the idea of Christians dominating the earth; indeed, this is where the idea of “dominionism” comes from.
The racism embedded in Noble’s theology is breathtaking. He says Adam and Eve were white, as were their descendants. This means, for Noble, they were not Jewish. Jesus, as the descendant of a "ruddy" red-haired David, was white too, not Jewish. The Israelites were all white, and not Jewish at all. In fact, Nobles sees Jews as demonic throughout history. Instead of being descendants of Adam and Eve, he says they come from the serpent in Eden: “They are the race that has…from the time of Adam persecuted those who are of the spirit…we see Jews as the destroyer race, the Antichrist race upon the earth…who is out to destroy Christianity.”
The echoes of George Hawtin are reflected in Noble’s remarks, and in the racism flaring into the open by some of Hawtin’s theological descendants today. However, as Matthew Taylor notes, some groups are more nuanced and Christians are complicated. The Christ for the Nations Institute is aligned with Zionism, seeing Israel as having a “pivotal role in Biblical prophecy.” Boelter himself may be grounded in dominionist ideas, but he has also spent time in the Democratic Republic of Congo preaching in Black Christian churches. It is hard to tell what Boelter’s own views about race may be; though in Hawtin’s wake, it is certainly possible to be open to Black Christian churches and still have white supremacist views.
Kerry Noble claims he was misunderstood about race. He says in the 1985 interview: “If you’re a white supremacist…you think that you're better than all the races…that's not really what white supremacy is all about.” Instead, he says, white people should “have dominion on the earth…[T]he other races are good but that the government is given to us.” Noble then praises Hitler for cleaning up German cities of drugs and crime and denies that gas chambers killed any Jews. Noble agrees with Hawtin’s claim that Black people are not fully human but were decreed by God instead as “beasts of the fields” to be dominated by white people.
In a paper describing the “sacred purge” intended by contemporary NAR eschatology, Steve Montgomery writes:
[A]ll end-time events will be achieved through the actions of an elite group of Christians. This includes (1) taking dominion politically to establish the kingdom of God on earth (2) becoming perfected Christians often referred to as the “manifest sons of God” and (3) executing the “written judgments of God” through the human agency of the “army of the Lord” in a physical, literal removal of those deemed to be the ungodly.
Such reasoning makes gun owners potential vessels of God’s will, rooting out evil in the world at-large. NAR theology makes shooting people—when they oppose the NAR’s vision of the kingdom—interpretable as a manifestation of God’s will. The attempts at Christian control today aren’t new—though they are more frightening for the growing popularity behind them.
Noble calls Christians to use force against those who oppose God’s will as he interprets it:
As a Christian…if you see evil…or if you see sin in the world…you're commissioned to help judge those sins…and so you come to crossroads in your life…[if] I see problems in the educational system or the government or the religious systems or the financial systems of our country, what are my responsibilities as a Christian to see correction in those areas?
Montgomery explains how NAR theology leans on the work of seventeenth-century mystic Jane Lead to develop the idea that righteous humans can function as the “deified ‘corporate Body of Christ’ prior to the literal, physical, personal return of the individual Jesus Christ.” NAR Christians must judge the earth before Christ returns. In Cowboy Apocalypse, I talk about the gun as “a ritualized way of asserting dominance, and a means of imagining oneself tasked with saving the world.” To place oneself in a grand spiritual drama is to find ultimate meaning where meaning seems most threatened. For many Christians, sanctified bread and wine become a sign of the alignment of heaven and earth. For others, guns can function as an authentication of beliefs. To think of a gun sacramentally is to see it as a link between here and a desired world beyond. To shoot is, for some, to act as Christ before his triumphal return.
Hawtin, as one of the founding voices in Latter Rain, makes such expectations explicit in Treasures of Truth 34, when he calls for the righteous to go “through the city and smite.” They should “slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children and women.” Apocalyptic vengeance is required now, in this eschatological moment of anticipation. It would be reassuring to think that the views of someone like Hawtin—writing in the middle of the twentieth century—have faded in time. Instead, as McCrummen explains, such beliefs are rapidly growing, fueled by interpretive schemes that make Donald Trump a sign of the end times.
She quotes Lance Wallnau saying: “Buckle up, Buttercup. Because you’re going to be watching a whole new redefinition of what the reformation looks like as Christians engage every sector of society. Christ is not quarantined any longer. We’re going into all the world.” The ideas percolating quietly just a few miles away from where I marched at halftime have surfaced openly in a swell of rage. Guns have become one means to ritually express this self-authenticated righteousness. Wallnau’s advice to Christians? “Get out of church! It’s time to take nations!” He frets: “I don’t know how the church signed off on the idea that we do soul winning, and leave Planet Earth to the devil.”
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