Events transpiring in Minneapolis last week sent me back to the book of Amos 5:24: “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” words worth staking one’s life on.
But what happens when history takes a turn and the opposite becomes all too normative for a person, a family, a community, a nation or a church, like now in the land of the free and the home of ICE? What if injustice rolls down like waters? What then?
Injustice rolled down like waters on Minneapolis in the first month of 2026 with an “ICE occupation” that cost the life of 37-year-old Renee Good, shot down by an ICE agent on Jan. 7, and Alex Pretti, another 37-year-old shot 10 times by ICE agents Jan. 24.
Bill Leonard
Both were immediately labeled “domestic terrorists” by the “principalities and powers” of our current political culture. Yet that label was refuted for those with “eyes to see and ears to hear,” when assorted videos of the heinous events were coordinated and made public. Nonetheless, government officials claimed the shooters had immediate “immunity” and hope for justice got washed away on the spot.
The sovereign state of Minnesota has become a test case for whether American democracy lives or dies, literally and figuratively in the 250th year since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Minnesota state Rep. Aisha Gomes calls what’s happening there “a stress test for our democracy,” even as she insists that “anybody who has an accent, anybody who has brown or black skin,” in Minnesota (and apparently the nation) is endangered.
Minnesotans have had enough. The day before Pretti’s death, thousands of citizens showed up at the Minneapolis airport to protest airlines that are facilitating the deportation of immigrants to other countries and/or to out-of-state imprisonment. On Jan. 20, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was sent with his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, to ICE incarceration in Dilley, Texas.
In America 2026, injustice knows no age limit.
At the same protest, 100 clergy of Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths were arrested for refusing to disperse when told they were interfering with airport operations. Mariah Furness Tollgaard, pastor of Hamline Church in St. Paul, said the ministers accepted arrest in support of migrants, adding, “We cannot abide living under this federal occupation of Minnesota.”
“In America 2026, injustice knows no age limit.”
The justice-demanding words of the prophet Amos are not lost on them.
On Jan. 25, the day after Pretti was shot dead on a Minneapolis street, columnist Jonathan Rauch published an Atlantic article titled, “Yes, It’s Fascism.”
Rauch acknowledges his early hesitancy at “using the F-word to describe President Trump,” since “there were too many elements of classical fascism that didn’t seem to fit,” and because the word had been utilized “to the point of meaninglessness.” However, certain current government actions now bring “Trump’s governing style into sharper focus.” Fascism, he believes, is now clearly evident, and hesitancy to apply the word is now “perverse.”
Rauch then lists the foreboding fascist signs evident throughout our government and culture.
Demolition of norms. Eschewing the “republican virtues” of the nation’s founders, current fascists “gleefully trash liberal pieties such as reason and reasonableness, civility and civic spirit, toleration, and forbearance.”
Glorification of violence. Rauch addresses Trump’s longtime advocacy of mob violence, as evidenced in the ICE ads that “glamorize” attacks on “homes and neighborhoods.” He warns the destruction of “civic decency” and “the valorization of violence is … part and parcel” of fascism.
Might is right. Rauch quotes Trump aide Stephen Miller’s assertion that we live “in the real world, that is governed by strength, … by force, … by power.” Rauch responds that the statement, foreign to “American and Christian morality,” is consistent with that “of any fascist dictator.”
Politicized law enforcement. Rauch says, “Trump’s single most dangerous second-term innovation is the repurposing of federal law enforcement to persecute his enemies (and shield his friends).”
Police-state tactics. Rauch cautions ICE has become a roving “paramilitary” unit composed of masked troopers using excessive force without legal warrants and claiming “absolute immunity.”
Undermining elections. Rausch alerts Americans that in 2029 Trump and “MAGA loyalists” will resist relinquishing the presidency to Democrats, regardless of the vote, thus fomenting a “second insurrection (that) will be far better organized than the first.”
What’s private is public. Rauch identifies “Trump’s most audacious (if only intermittently successful) initiatives” in his attempts to coopt “law firms, universities and corporations” into doing his bidding.
Attacks on news media. Rausch insists Trump has challenged broadcast licenses, ignored “regulatory authority,” denigrated journalists, interfered in corporate acquisitions and played favorites with news outlets.
Territorial and military aggression. Rausch believes Trump “has used the military promiscuously,” undermined international relationships, threatened Greenland’s relationship with Denmark and alienated long-term allies.
Transnational reach. Rausch charges Trump with undermining longtime government policy by reducing “support for human rights” while at the same time affirming “authoritarian populists and illiberal nationalists” … and acting “weirdly deferential” to the likes of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Blood-and-soil nationalism. “A fascist trademark,” Rausch says, involves a belief that the nation is “a Volk,” one people linked by “shared blood, culture and destiny.”
White and Christian nationalism. The MAGA movement gives continuing emphasis to American origins as a white, Christian nation, albeit a particular type of conservative Christianity, with national parks and museums removing “their exhibits of references to slavery.”
Mobs and street thugs. For Rauch, “the use of militias and mobs to harass, rough up and otherwise intimidate opponents is a standard fascist stratagem.” Trump’s pardoning of the January 6 rioters dramatically exemplifies the point.
Leader aggrandizement. Rausch suggests Trump’s “mindset, his symbolism and his rhetoric” confirm his January 2026 comments to The New York Times that “his own mind and morality are the only limits on his global power.”
Alternative facts. Rauch reminds us that “reality-distortion” is one of the first stages of fascism, confusing the nature of truth. He calculates that, for Trump, “alternative facts” of falsehood, overstatement and deception flow “at a rate of 20 a day.”
Politics as war. Here Rauch cites Stephen Miller’s declaration at Charlie Kirk’s memorial: “We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion.”
Governing as revolution. Rauch surveys a variety of issues — cancelling congressionally funded agencies and programs, deporting immigrants to international prisons, fostering ICE occupations and assaults — that Illustrate how “a radicalized state abandons rational deliberation and goes to war against itself.”
“Rauch has given us chapter and verse of the fascism descending.”
Rauch has given us chapter and verse of the fascism descending on the land of the free and the home of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. He concludes with a modicum of hope: “So the United States, once the world’s exemplary liberal democracy, is now a hybrid state combining a fascist leader and a liberal Constitution; but no, it has not fallen to fascism. And it will not.”
As our “hybrid state” waits for justice, the protesters in Minnesota exemplify a courage we’d all best find within ourselves. Accounts of the arrest of Minnesota clergy protesting at the airport seem hauntingly parallel to a story from 1970s Uganda during the reign of the ruthless fascist dictator Idi Amin.
As injustices multiplied, a Church of England mission society wrote to affiliated churches in Amin’s cruel regime: “What can we send you? Your archbishop has been murdered. Your land is in ruins. How can we help?”
And the answer came back: “Send us food, medicine and 250 clerical collars.”
Why the collars?
“You must understand,” the letter read, “our people are being rounded up to be shot. They must be able to spot their priests.”
No offense to my farmer-preacher Baptist forebears, but I’ve decided to purchase my first clerical collar and wear it as a promise of justice to come.
I think old Amos might be pleased.
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.