Last week the editor of Riforma, an Italian-language newspaper published by and for Baptists, Methodists and Waldensians in Italy, asked if I’d be willing to write a front-page article for this week’s edition sharing my perspective on events in the United States these days, in particular the accelerating arrests of undocumented immigrants, the protests in Los Angeles and how Christians are responding to these events. This is what I wrote, prior to its translation into Italian:
I am writing this dispatch from the United States on Trinity Sunday. The doctrine of the Trinity to which we give attention on this day is not an abstract concept, but an effort to express in human language the mystery of the communal life of God that draws humanity to participate more fully in God’s community-making work.
This Trinity Sunday followed a day on which many things that happened were in active opposition to God’s community-making work in the world. Yet it was also a day during which there were manifestations of the community the Triune God is working to make.
Steven Harmon
My experience of Saturday, June 14, began with reading news accounts of the predominantly peaceful protests in downtown Los Angeles that began after federal agents began arresting immigrants seeking work in the parking lot of a local home improvement supplies business. I also read firsthand perspectives from residents of Los Angeles who testified to the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of these protests against the federal government’s arrests of undocumented immigrants at workplaces, schools where they arrived to transport their children and required court hearings regarding their immigration status. Their personal accounts of what has been happening in Los Angeles contradicted some right-wing media reporting that greatly exaggerated the degree to which the protests had been violent or destructive.
The authors I read during breakfast who characterized these protests as mostly peaceful were Christians. But so were many people who on social media insisted the protesters were violent actors and defended the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration and use of the military in this connection.
Not long after breakfast, I heard televised reports of shootings in Minnesota targeting Democratic lawmakers and their spouses, killing a former state speaker of the House and her husband. By the end of the day, we learned the accused shooter is a Christian minister who had written out detailed plans for the intended attacks and listed multiple targets, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (the Democratic candidate for vice president in the U.S. election last November) and other Democratic lawmakers and obstetricians/gynecologists allegedly linked with abortion. There are indications he may have been influenced by a far-right independent charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation with direct links to the January 6 attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“On Saturday there were signs of hope that the church in America may yet participate more fully in the community-making work of the Triune God.”
Police found evidence the shooter planned to target the “No Kings” protests in Minnesota that were taking place across the country on Saturday, when Trump had scheduled a military parade not unlike those held in Russia and North Korea coinciding with both the Flag Day holiday and his own birthday.
This was on our minds when my wife and I participated in our local “No Kings” protest in Shelby, N.C., after lunch. While international news may have highlighted protests in Los Angeles and other major American cities, this one took place in a small rural town with about 22,000 residents. My wife and I, both ordained Baptist ministers, carried signs that read “No Fascist Police State!” as we joined about 200 protesters on the town square. There we saw many members of local churches and professors at the Baptist-related university where I teach. For the remainder of the day, my Facebook news feed was filled with posts from Christian friends throughout the U.S. sharing photos of the “No Kings” protests they had joined.
On a day marked by political violence, a parade showcasing military instruments of death, and ongoing implementation of the Trump administration’s deportation policies, many American Christians joined other members of their communities to oppose the forces that divide and destroy the community that God is making in the world — even while some other Americans who claim to be Christians denounced these acts of protest.
Also on Saturday, on the eve of Trinity Sunday, Pope Leo XIV, the first-ever pope from the U.S., delivered a video message to a Mass at Rate Field, home to the Chicago White Sox major league baseball team. He highlighted the Trinity as the revelation of God’s intention for community and gave hearers “an encouragement to continue to build up community.” Then in his homily, Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich said, “To the degree we value our connection to all of humanity we open ourselves to living as authentic persons in the image of the Divine Persons” before denouncing the demonizing and degrading of undocumented immigrants as “foreign to our calling” to be the image and likeness of the Triune God.
While it may seem the U.S. is on the verge of a season of internal political violence not unlike the “Troubles” of Northern Ireland, on Saturday there were signs of hope that the church in America may yet participate more fully in the community-making work of the Triune God and offer this community as a gift to a fractured country.
Steven R. Harmon serves as professor of historical theology at Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity in Boiling Springs, N.C. His most recent books are Baptists, Catholics, and the Whole Church: Partners in the Pilgrimage to Unityand Seeds of the Church: Towards an Ecumenical Baptist Ecclesiology (co-edited with Teun van der Leer, Henk Bakker and Elizabeth Newman).
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What participants saw at No Kings protests across the country