When Jesus Kills–A Moral Mutation

Christian Nationalism is behind the horror of the Trump administration

Vought and Trump by ChatGPT

This is no longer an abstract argument. It is not a metaphor. It is not political posturing. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, two American citizens are dead because political power in this country has been seized by people who believe their ideology is above law, above restraint, and above human life.

Renée Good and Alex Pretti should be alive today. They were killed during a federal immigration enforcement operation that the Trump administration sent into Minneapolis not because there was a genuine threat to public safety, but because this administration needed a spectacle — a demonstration of force, a message to those who live in a blue city that dissent will not be tolerated, that opposition will be crushed, that political difference is equivalent to spiritual rebellion.

This was not a routine law-enforcement action. It was vengeance. It was retribution. It was a political operation cloaked in the rhetoric of enforcement. The federal government, through ICE, poured into Minneapolis as if it were hostile territory, as if the very act of being a thriving, diverse, democratic city had made its residents enemies of the state. And in that climate, federal agents, empowered and emboldened by a president who has fused his personal political project with a mythic notion of divine mission, shot and killed Renée Good and later shot and killed Alex Pretti.

Good was sitting in her car when an ICE agent approached her and opened fire. The official accounts tried to frame it as self-defense. Local leaders called that narrative what it was: bullshit. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s report labeled her death a homicide. In the same city, weeks later, ICE agents shot and killed Pretti, an ICU nurse, in broad daylight. He was a caregiver, a neighbor, a veteran’s advocate, and he was holding only a phone when the agents confronted him and opened fire. These are not fringe stories. They are a reality on the streets of America.

You do not get two deaths by federal agents in one month in one city without a policy or directive producing those outcomes.

The people running the show in Washington are not neutral administrators. They are ideologues at war with democracy itself. At the apex of this transformation is Donald Trump, a cruel, stupid man, whose public pronouncements have repeatedly translated secular policy fights into existential, spiritual battles. He speaks of the nation as if it is chosen, of policy as if it is scripture, of governance as if it is divine mission. That rhetoric does not live in a vacuum. It conditions the behavior of his appointed officials. It conditions how law enforcement agencies perceive their role. It conditions how they interpret resistance, protest, confusion, and chaos —not as citizens exercising their rights, but as enemies to be subdued.

At the center of this moral mutation is Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director and one of the loudest evangelists of Christian nationalist ideology inside the administration. Vought did not stumble into his position by accident. He was placed there because his worldview — a fusion of MAGA, Christian nationalism, and zero-sum culture war thinking — aligns perfectly with a political project that views pluralism not just as wrong, but as a threat, and disagreement not as a policy dispute, but as spiritual hostility.

Under Vought’s influence, the administration’s rhetoric has become unmoored from reality. Cabinet members hop into public view with conspicuous crosses around their necks, invoking “the Lord” as if they are not government officials but apostles with badges. They speak in mythical terms about destiny and divine favor. They sanctify policy decisions as if they were ordained rather than debated. This is not humility. This is hubris. And it makes ordinary governance impossible.

What distinguishes this myth from many others throughout history is that it is dangerous. Not symbolically dangerous. Not theoretically dangerous, but practically deadly.

Because the moment you tell agents that what they are doing is righteous, you remove every restraint on how far they can go. You take away the idea that the people they confront are fellow citizens. You replace legal boundaries with spiritual imperatives. You turn federal law enforcement into an occupying force rather than a civil institution bound by the Constitution.

This is what happened in Minneapolis.

The operation that brought ICE and Border Patrol agents into the city was not simply about finding undocumented immigrants. Local officials, including the governor and the attorney general of Minnesota, explicitly described the surge as retribution — a punitive mission meant to make a political point about who holds power in this country and what happens when you defy it. That sentiment — thinly veiled but unmistakably real — laid the groundwork for brutal tactics, aggressive enforcement, and violence that took the lives of Good and Pretti.

When federal agents arrive in a city with that mindset, it should not surprise anyone that confrontation follows. When the commander in chief frames dissent as godlessness and opposition as insurrection, it should surprise no one that people are treated as enemies. When policy is driven by ideology rather than law, such consequences are inevitable.

Renée Good and Alex Pretti were both killed by federal agents acting under the authority of policies and operations that exist because this administration has blurred the lines between governance and myth, between enforcement and conquest. You cannot preach apocalypse from the halls of power and then feign surprise when people on the ground are treated as combatants rather than citizens.

This is why I reject every attempt to sanitize these deaths, to couch them in procedural terms, to separate the policy from the mythology that produced it. The politics of vengeance, the politics of retribution, the politics of Christian nationalist fervor — these are not abstract currents. They are how the machinery of the state now operates. They are how federal agents come to see Americans in Minneapolis not as neighbors, but as targets. That is the causal link, and it is visible in every fatal shot fired in the streets of that city.

Fine words about public safety do not erase the fact that two Americans are dead because the government chose to wield force as punishment. That is the reality. That is the danger. And it is precisely why this moment should terrify us.

Because once the myth overtakes the law, liberty dies.

In Minneapolis, that death is no longer metaphorical.

Resist.

---

Professor Mike is a university lecturer. He teaches, among other subjects, justice studies and global security, including international terrorism. In his spare time, he writes for Medium and Substack. His work has been published on CNN.