jesus would be in minneapolis

posted on Jan 25, 2026

danny caballero

The killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by agents of our federal government in Minneapolis is horrifying. No amount of political justification can make up for the murder of two people who were exercising their First Amendment rights and standing up for their neighbors and community. No rhetoric will resolve the heartache their families and friends must feel. Nothing we do will return them to us.

Their murders have hit me very hard; not because I knew them or because I was directly affected by their deaths. But because Renée and Alex represent the kind of humanity we should hope to see in the world. People with the privilege to look away from what’s happening in Minneapolis and who, given the choice to stay home and stay warm, or to stand up for their neighbors, chose to be in the streets. It hit me hard because I could be Renée or Alex – so could my kids.

I frequently process difficult feelings through writing, and sometimes that writing is public. This is one of those posts.

where am I coming from

I am a former Catholic. I don’t have a word for what I am now. I’m not out here evangelizing atheism, and I’m not sitting around meditating on my agnosticism. Organized religious practice is not for me. I’ve seen too many people in my life use their religion like a shield to hide behind or a hunting license to justify their cruelty. That broke any desire I had to belong to Catholicism, Christianity, or any other organized religion.

So no, I don’t belong to a church anymore, and I don’t pretend to. My grandparents were devout Catholics, and when I was a child in the lower Rio Grande Valley, they made sure that I went to church. I remember hearing the words of the priest as if they were infallible truth; words that were equally loving and condemning. Suffering is a central theme in Catholicism, and I remember being told that through our suffering and our sacrifice, we would live eternally in heaven. I remember being told that Jesus suffered for our sins, and that we should be willing to suffer for others. Suffering in this life was our path to redemption.

As I grew older, I realized the men who spoke to me (the priest, his deacons, his bishops, the pope) were all just men. They were as fallible and flawed as I was. That is what the Bible teaches us. I understood that they were interpreting a book, a series of stories, that had been written and rewritten over centuries by people with their own agendas, biases, and limitations. I realized that the church was an institution, a human institution, and like all human institutions, it was subject to corruption, hypocrisy, and error. I saw how the church had been used to justify wars, colonization, oppression, slavery, and genocide. I saw how it had frequently failed to protect the vulnerable and marginalized. I saw how it had turned a blind eye to the suffering of so many. Of course, the church has also done good, but those stories don’t erase the harm.

I also remember the teachings of Jesus. And while I don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus or the promise of life everlasting, I do believe his moral and ethical teachings are powerful and transformative. For me, Jesus represents the compassion, love, justice, and humility that we need in this world – the one world we have before us and the one we owe to future generations.

Jesus’s teachings are ones of radical inclusion (Luke 14:15-24; John 4:7-26), of loving our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:37-40; Luke 10:25-37, of centering the poor and the marginalized (Matthew 25:31–46; Luke 4:18–19; Luke 6:20–21), and of confronting hypocrisy, injustice, and oppression head‑on (Matthew 23; Luke 6:27–31; John 18:33–37). That is the moral universe the Gospels give us, and it is light‑years away from a politics that treats people as disposable.

I remember enough of these stories and teachings to know that Jesus would tell us to be in Minneapolis standing up for our neighbors right now. Because that is where he would be.

what is happening

I remember enough of these stories and teachings to know that Jesus would be in Minneapolis right now. He would not be in a war room in Washington signing off on “Operation Metro Surge.” He would not be in tactical gear, filming himself like a content creator while he pointed a gun at a woman trying to drive home from dropping her kid at school. He would be at the memorials, at the vigils, in the frozen streets with the people who are grieving and the people who are afraid.

And that is what makes what we are watching so obscene, so vulgar, so un-American. The people ordering and carrying out these raids insist they are doing it for “America” and for “Christian civilization.” They use the language of faith and patriotism to bless the political and militarized machinations that cage families, suffocate communities, and now kill American citizens in broad daylight. They tell us that to be a good Christian and a good American is to stand with ICE, with Border Patrol, with a second‑term Trump administration that treats Minneapolis like occupied territory. Here’s a Baptist pastor’s views:

I honestly do not care:
> how bad it looks
> how loud they scream
> how much they cry
> how many arrests it takes
> how much money it costs
> how many foolish American citizens who interfere with ICE suffer the consequences of their reckless actions

I just want my country back pic.twitter.com/6ZIMVWqyfN

— William Wolfe 🇺🇸 (@WilliamWolfe) January 15, 2026

I have no idea who William Wolfe is, but I know that he is wrong. I don’t care if he is a pastor, a priest, a rabbi, or an imam. I know that he is wrong because his words betray everything Jesus taught about how we are to treat the stranger among us. His disgusting and vulgar interpretation of Christianity is not unique; it is what is driving the hate-filled, violent, and xenophobic politics of 2026 America. And it must stop.

If the Gospels mean anything, they mean that Jesus identifies himself with the hungry, the sex worker, the prisoner, and explicitly the stranger. “I was a stranger and you took me in (Matthew 25:35-46)” is not a metaphor; it is a test. To terrorize, cage, or deport the stranger is, in his own words, to do it to him. A politics that calls migrants “invaders” and treats legal observers like enemy combatants isn’t just cruel. It is an anti‑Gospel, preached with guns and shielded by necklaces of crucifixes and crosses that, if there were any justice in the world, would burn the very skin on which they rested.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the ethnic and religious outsider is the moral center of the story. The religious insiders, those who know the law and perform the rituals, are the ones who cross the street and look away. When we avert our eyes from workplace raids, border deaths, deportation buses, and now ICE and Border Patrol agents executing people in Minneapolis, we are following their example. We are failing the test.

The first chapters of Matthew present Jesus as a refugee child, his family fleeing a murderous king and crossing borders without papers. Any Christian politics that portrays desperate border‑crossers as an existential enemy has forgotten its own founding story. It has made “taking back our home” into a sacrament and turned “America for Americans” into a creed.

That is not Christianity. That is white Christian nationalism: a project that worships blood, soil, and police power, and then slaps a cross on the front. It is anti‑Christian and anti‑American at the same time. Anti‑Christian, because it betrays everything Jesus teaches about the stranger, the poor, the prisoner, and the peacemaker. Anti‑American, because it spits on the parts of our own history that moved America forward. Abolitionists, labor militants, civil‑rights organizers, and so many more more understood that any country worth loving has to be judged by how it treats the people with the least power.

y’all motherfuckers need jesus

I don’t mean that in the youth pastor way, like you need more quiet time and a better worship playlist. If you are going to drape yourself in crosses and call for ICE raids, then you need to reckon with the actual Jesus in your own book. Not the Jesus on the bumper sticker, not the Jesus on the campaign mailer, but the Jesus who keeps choosing the “wrong” people: the migrant family, the sex worker, the prisoner, the foreigner, the ones the empire wants gone.

The bitter joke is that I am the one saying this. I don’t buy the miracles or the heaven pitch, and I still seem to care more about Christ’s basic ethic than a lot of people who claim his name. If that stings, good.

Because when I say “y’all motherfuckers need Jesus”, what I mean is: you need a Jesus who ruins your appetite for this kind of violence, who makes it impossible to cheer when an agent empties a clip into somebody’s body and calls it “order.”

Eugene V. Debs, a prolific socialist and trade unionist, said during his trial for sedition that “while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal class, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” He didn’t quote Scripture, but he might as well have been paraphrasing Matthew 25.

Norman Thomas took that instinct and tied it explicitly to the Gospels, arguing that the Sermon on the Mount, if it means anything, points toward a world where nobody’s life is disposable for profit, fear, or “security.”

That is the tradition I claim not the Christian nationalism of William Wolfe, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino, Karoline Leavitt, or Donald Trump. I claim a stubborn, this‑worldly faith that says our freedom is bound up with the people in cages, the people on the deportation buses, the people in the streets of Minneapolis, Portland, Washington, DC, Chicago, LA, and elsewhere. In that sense, I ascribe more to the teachings of Norman Thomas than the Nicene Creed.

I don’t know what happens after we die, and I don’t pretend to. What I know is that in this life, right now, we are being asked to choose between a Jesus who stands with the stranger and a regime that calls the stranger an invader; between a socialism of solidarity and a nationalism of scapegoats.

Debs chose his side. Thomas chose his side. Renée Good and Alex Pretti chose theirs. The least we can do is refuse to baptize Christian nationalism.

And if you don’t believe at all, if you’re like me and the resurrection doesn’t move the needle, that’s fine. My point isn’t to save your soul for the next world; it’s to save as many people as we can in this one. Love your neighbor, especially the one the algorithm calls a threat. Stand with the people being targeted, not the people doing the targeting. Let your politics be haunted by Jesus, a man who was killed by an empire and never once asked anyone to avenge him.

Because the truth is, America does not need Christian nationalism. It needs people willing to act like the Sermon on the Mount still has jurisdiction over their behavior. It needs more people whose faith, ex‑faith, or no faith at all pushes them into solidarity instead of into uniformity.

When silence manifests as complicity, and complicity as violence, we need more people willing to say: not in my name.

If you’re going to keep Jesus’s name in your mouth while ICE and Border Patrol roam our cities like an occupying army, then yes: y’all motherfuckers need Jesus.

The real one.

The one who would be in the streets, not in the armored truck.