On Jan. 6, as our family watched in real time, thousands of insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol, and the words of two 17th century Colonial Americans raced across my memory. Governor John Winthrop, arriving at Massachusetts Bay on the Arbella in 1630, invoked early American exceptionalism: “We shall be as a city set on a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”
Roger Williams, the quintessential Colonial dissenter, offered a different vision in his 1643 volume, A Key into the Language of America, the first English lexicon on Native American tongues:
When Indians heare the horrid filths,
Of Irish, English men
The horrid Oaths, and Murthers late
Thus say these Indians then.
We weare no Cloathes, have many Gods,
And yet our sinnes are lesse:
You are Barbarians, Pagans wild,
Your land’s the wilderness
On Jan. 6, 2021, Winthrop’s city on a hill looked more like Williams’ wilderness. Ironically, the eyes of all people remained upon us — live, globally and by satellite.
Bill Leonard
Egged on by unscrupulous politicians perpetuating lies of a “stolen” presidential election, thousands of American “protesters” morphed into “barbarians,” crashing through the Capitol’s doors and windows, overwhelming ill-prepared Capitol police. Armed with an assortment of guns and knives, baseball bats and pepper sprays, they wielded cell phones to document their misdeeds and Christian epithets to excuse their lawlessness.
On Jan. 6, the church’s feast of Epiphany, Jesus got co-opted into Capitol onslaught. On that unholy day, both government and gospel alike needed respirators in COVID-devastated America.
It started with a prayer. Writing for Religion News Service, reporter Jack Jenkins noted that a group of the neo-fascist, male-only “Proud Boys who appeared in Washington that Wednesday insisted they drew strength from God: As they approached the Capitol, Proud Boys — some donned in camouflage or military-style helmets, others gripping weapons such as baseball bats — paused for a moment of prayer. As they knelt, a man with a bullhorn — his words captured on a livestream — prayed that God would “soften the hearts” of government officials who have “turned harshly away” from God, asking for “reformation and revival.” The prayer ended with, “We pray that you provide all of us with courage and strength to both represent you and represent our culture.”
Warriors of such flawed “culture” forced legislators and staff into “safe rooms” to escape certain harm, produced looting and destruction within a historic symbol of American democracy, instigated physical abuse, death threats and deaths, installed a gallows (complete with noose) on Capitol grounds, and smeared human excrement on floors and walls.
“Insurrectionist confessions of faith show up on multiple videos declaring: ‘Jesus is my Savior. Trump is my president.’”
Some even tried to enlist Jesus in their invasion. Insurrectionist confessions of faith show up on multiple videos declaring: “Jesus is my Savior. Trump is my president,” “Proud to be an American Christian,” and “Jesus saves.”
The New Yorker released a dramatic visual record produced by reporter Luke Mogelson and accompanied by an investigative essay on his experiences with various groups prominent at the Capitol riot.
It shows individuals breaking into the Senate chambers, rifling through senators’ desks, and photographing documents with cell phones. Camera in hand, one young man declares: “There’s gotta be something here we can use against these f***ing scumbags.”
The film also documents the appearance of the now infamous “QAnon Shaman,” shirtless, with coyote fur headgear, who enters the chamber with a barrage of profanity, has himself photographed in the vice president’s chair, and then, bullhorn in hand, offers a lengthy prayer, while onlookers lift their hands in charismatic supplication.
The prayer of invasion begins: “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name. Amen. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for gracing us with this opportunity to stand up for our God-given unalienable rights. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us entrance into this building, to allow us to exercise our rights. To allow us to send a message to the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation and not theirs; that we will not allow the American way of the United States of America to go down. Thank you, divine, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love … . Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ … . Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists and the tyrants within our government. We love you and we thank you. In Christ’s holy name we pray. Amen.”
“He took seriously the countless messages of President Trump. He believed in President Trump.”
The “Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, aka Jake Angeli, later was arrested in Arizona on multiple misdemeanor charges and was refused bail. Before arrest, he told the FBI that the note he left on Pence’s desk (“It’s only a matter of time. Justice is coming.”) was not a threat against the vice president, whom he labeled a “child-trafficking traitor.” Chansley’s lawyer offered this defense: “He took seriously the countless messages of President Trump. He believed in President Trump. Like tens of millions of other Americans, Chansley felt — for the first time in his life — as though his voice was being heard.”
Another invader, Matthew Black, 44, when arrested, explained his participation in the Capitol riot: “Once we found out Pence turned on us (by refusing to redirect alternative electors from certain states, thereby throwing the election to Trump) and they had stolen the election, like officially, the crowd went crazy … . We just wanted to get inside the building. I wanted to get inside the building so I could plead the blood of Jesus over it. That was my goal.”
Inside the Capitol, the halls echoed with the chant “Hang Pence,” the veep’s long and highly public evangelical commitments apparently disregarded.
These actions fostered the largest inaugural lockdown of Washington, D.C., in U.S. history, as fears of violence and COVID kept crowds away. Amid a threatened presidential inauguration and a COVID death toll of 400,000 Americans, it is time for Christians to do five things:
- Challenge, even repudiate, all lies and liars claiming that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen.” There is no truth to that assertion, as countless recounts and court cases have shown. Perpetuating this lie deepens our divisions irrevocably. If we are going to disagree, let’s at least try to do that about things that are true but open to interpretation.
- Avoid identifying leaders, particularly political ones (and others), with specific biblical characters. Such analogies ask more of living individuals than they (and we) can ultimately bear. In fact, given their inevitable foibles, biblical characters themselves often can be more “character” than “biblical.”
- Distinguish between prophetic dissent and mob violence, between working for justice and fomenting injustice.
- Be less concerned about co-opting Jesus to our causes and more concerned about determining how Jesus co-opts us to his way in the world.
- Recognize, as Roger Williams taught us, that there are no “Christian nations,” only Christian people bound to Christ, not by citizenship but by faith.
Such efforts are never easy and seldom immediate. Sometimes, however, we experience a new “grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking.” You know, an epiphany.
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.
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