During the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Saturday, Cole Allen breached a Secret Service checkpoint and fired shots at agents in an attempt to assassinate the president of the United States and other high-ranking officials. About 10 minutes prior, from his room at the Washington Hilton 10 floors above the ballroom where the dinner was taking place, he sent his family his manifesto.
He began with an apology to his parents, colleagues, students and others who would be affected by his actions. Then, “On to why I did any of this …”
And it’s not the ramblings of a madman or an incoherent screed. Allen’s tone is somber and desperate, broken yet resolved. These are the words of a man who has given long and hard thought to his actions. Cole Tomas Allen was not searching for fame. He does not hate America. He is not mentally unstable. Rather, he is the natural and inevitable byproduct of our political system — a system whose primary solution is violence.
“He is the natural and inevitable byproduct of our political system — a system whose primary solution is violence.”
Over the course of a page, Allen justifies his violent assault as something personal, patriotic and righteous. Divorced from the context of his violence, his words come across as quite reasonable. His primary purpose for his attempt to kill the president and other high-ranking government officials was because “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me.”
The burden of belonging
Cole Allen identified as an American. He believed himself to be implicated in the moral life of the nation. For him, politics is not something happening far away in the halls and ballrooms of the elite, but something that affects him personally. He felt the burden of belonging to America.
Despite being a nation of rugged individualism, when we elect leaders, we elect them to represent us. We trust they will make the decisions we would make were we in their place. We lobby for our leaders to do the things we want, to hold the priorities we hold, to enact and enforce the laws we believe will improve the quality of our lives. Even when those elected leaders don’t do these things, we still find ourselves reflected in what they actually do — whether we like it or not.
Allen is not wrong to feel the weight of American power. He is not wrong to feel the desperation of being inexorably linked to an empire engaging in so much harm at home and abroad. Allen is represented by leaders who are incompetently and immorally waging an unjust war in Iran; who are cruelly and illegally detaining and deporting immigrant children; who have used their political power to enrich themselves personally and are presiding over one of the largest transfers of wealth from the working class to the elites in history; and who continue to deny involvement or cover up evidence that may show their complicity in sex crimes. He is right to feel the discomfort of our tax dollars funding the bombing of elementary schools or when our leaders use cruelty as policy and mockery as rhetoric.
The religion of redemptive violence
The problem is not that he felt implicated but what he believed that implication required in response. Allen wrote, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
“Like most Americans, Allen has been discipled in a religion of redemptive violence.”
Like most Americans, Allen has been discipled in a religion of redemptive violence — the belief that inflicting enough force against the right people will bring about genuine change. If injustice is maintained through violence, then justice can be achieved only through a greater violence. Power is the language of empire and in this mindset, those who set out to challenge it must learn to speak that language fluently. Meet force with force. Fight, fight fight! Strike before being struck.
This is not a fringe belief or an extremist ideology. It is a foundational assumption of American political life and a core tenet of American ideology. Violence leads to freedom. We teach it in our history books. We celebrate it in our entertainment. We reward it in our politics. It is the emphasis in our foreign policy with every bomb framed as the liberation of an oppressed people. It is the emphasis in our domestic policy with every social issue demanding a “War Against ______” — Drugs, Poverty, Crime, even Christmas. It is in our national songs and it coats our religious language.
From left, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Darren B. Cox, deputy assistant director of the FBI Criminal Investigative Division, conduct a news conference at the Department of Justice about Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shooting, on Monday, April 27, 2026. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
When a society teaches that violence is justified when the goal is safety, prosperity and liberation against tyranny, it should not be surprised when someone decides the innocent need defending from the government itself.
Trump himself ordered the violent overthrow of the heads of state of two nations in just the past four months using this very justification. When our leaders model this violence as moral and just, sanctioned by God, they cannot be shocked when that some logic is used against them.
Cole Allen’s primary justification for his actions was that it was righteous: “Turning the other cheek when ‘someone else’ is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”
Allen felt that continuing to ignore the immorality and criminality of Trump and his administration when he felt he could do something about it was un-Christian.
The Cross draped in a flag
This theology isn’t unique to Allen but is rooted in an Americanized Christianity that utilizes politics and violence to achieve its own ends. In this Christianity, pulpits are shadowed by the American flag, children sing songs like “I’m in the Lord’s Army,” adults croon the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and hellfire and brimstone preachers envision the imminent and glorious return of Jesus as one that is violent and bloody as he slaughters his enemies and sends them to eternal torment.
Spiritual warfare becomes reimagined as physical warfare when viewed through the lens of Christian nationalism and the culture wars. Turning the other cheek is seen as impractical, unliveable, and — in the words of Donald Trump Jr. — “has gotten us nothing.”
Instead, this theology calls Christians to fight for the world it wants. It is this ideology driving the worship services within the Pentagon and leading Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to pray imprecatory prayers from Pulp Fiction. It is this theology that led hordes of people — some carrying Christian flags — to invade the Capitol and attempt an insurrection. It is this theology that places nearly one in five white Americans who regularly attend religious services in the most likely group to support political violence.
“It is this theology of a cross draped in a flag that has formed American civil religion.”
It is this theology of a cross draped in a flag that has formed American civil religion. Cole Allen’s Christianness and Americanness built his philosophy and theology of violence — and he’s not alone.
Cole Tomas Allen and Donald John Trump may stand on opposite sides of the political stadium, but they inhabit the same crumbling architecture. Both imagine law as subordinate to power. Both imagine violence as a political and personal tool. Both view their enemy as someone to be destroyed rather than loved. Both have been baptized in the religion of American violence. Their differences are real and substantial, but their methods and logic are shockingly similar. And they are antichrist.
(Bigstockphoto)
We cannot dismiss Cole Allen as unstable or monstrous, an aberration or an extremist. His actions were wrong and they should be condemned — full stop — without any sort of hesitation. But we must realize he is the product of a nation that has spent generations teaching its people that violence is how serious people solve serious problems.
He was raised in a culture where the violence of those in power is not only excused but praised, where vigilante justice is celebrated by both the left and the right. He was theologically formed in a religious milieu awash in violent imagery that often condoned violent actions. He began by writing that the purpose for his violence was that what his representatives do reflects on him, but the reverse is also true — he reflects and represents the culture in which he was formed.
Another way
Followers of Jesus are meant to represent a different way of being. In the words of Stanley Hauerwas, “Christian participation in violence, even for seemingly just causes, betrays the gospel’s fundamental call.”
Christians are not called to indifference in the face of injustice. Turning the other cheek does not mean looking away from evil, but neither does it mean confronting evil with violence.
“Turning the other cheek does not mean looking away from evil, but neither does it mean confronting evil with violence.”
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus revolutionizes the idea of biblical justice. Instead of fighting for our rights, Jesus suggests we lay them down. Instead of confronting the oppressor with the sword, he advocates a path of creative nonviolent resistance: “You heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you: don’t use violence to resist evil!’”
Turning the other cheek is not weak passivity. It is defiant dignity. It refuses both domination and revenge. It will not look away from evil, nor will it use evil to combat it. Christians are called to defend the vulnerable, to resist injustice and confront systems of death and destruction, but we do so by refusing the lie that violence can save us.
Jesus did not defeat the empire by becoming better at crucifixion. Rather, he laid down his life and modelled for us a costly resistance, a different way of being, that challenges the violence of the world’s systems.
Cole Allen framed his attack as Christian resistance. He framed it as an American duty. It may have been the latter — sic semper tyrannis, after all. It is not the former.
Cole Allen is wrong. But dismissing him as an outlier would be too easy. His manifesto exposes something within American Christianity. He believes a story many American Christians believe — that violence is a necessary force in the pursuit of justice. Some preach that gospel from pulpits draped in flags, some enforce it from the halls of political power, some write it into manifestos.
Christians must tell a better story. If we believe violence can make us righteous, we will only become disciples of the empire we are trying to defeat. And that is why the church must keep insisting, even if the world calls it weakness, that another way is possible.
Josh Olds
Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.