Protesters Who Disrupted MN Church Practice A Godless Religion

Anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities spilled out of the streets and into a house of God last weekend. Incensed by reports that one of the pastors at St. Paul’s Cities Church was affiliated with ICE, agitators accompanied by corporate media has-been Don Lemon (who claims to have been only covering the event, despite video evidence to the contrary) broke into the church, disrupting a Sunday worship service and harassing congregation members in the name of defending illegal immigration.

Not surprisingly, the civic “leaders” of the Gopher State turned yet another blind eye to this latest outrage. After Minnesota’s AG Keith Ellison once again brazenly supported leftist lawlessness by questioning whether the FACE Act (which protects both abortion facilities and houses of worship) or the Ku Klux Klan Act (which makes it a federal crime for individuals to deny citizens the exercise of their civil rights) applied in this case, the DOJ arrested far-left professional activists Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Allen, and William Kelly on Thursday for their leadership of this assault on religious liberty.   

There is more going on in the Land of 10,000 Lakes than the usual anti-Christian bigotry from Democrats. Having embraced Marx’s dictum that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” the American left has created its own pseudo-religion, which I have dubbed the “Church of Id.” Understanding how this false faith operates can give us great insights into what is happening in the Twin Cities and other blue urban centers around the country.

Faith as Performance Art

The Church of Id’s theology is based not on ancient truths filtered through human reason, but on the shifting sands of Marxist ideology and its various attendant theories (critical race theory, queer theory, etc.). From their pulpits in academia, legacy media outlets, and political offices, the church’s clergy preaches these doctrines incessantly, sending the faithful out to suffer for “their truth” while they remain comfortably immune from the consequences of their words and actions. 

Those who are seen as suffering the most become the church’s martyr-saints, symbols of the victimization myth on which it is founded. The latest of these is Renee Good, the fanatic who was shot after apparently striking an agent with her Honda SUV while disrupting ICE operations in Minneapolis. While she is certainly a less disgusting candidate than the church’s previous martyrs, career criminals George Floyd and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Good’s canonization continues the church’s sacred tradition of rewarding objectively bad behavior with temporary fame for the benefit of the church’s leaders.

In this perverse spiritual model, political protest is the chief act of worship. The actual content or form of liturgy doesn’t matter, so long as it is blessed five minutes beforehand by the clergy. The key to understanding these protest rituals is remembering that their goal is not to effect real change, but to disrupt life for as many ordinary Americans as possible and intimidate them into submission. Apparently, the worshippers of Id gain bonus points when those Americans are peacefully gathering on a Sunday to honor their chief rival, the one true God.

The fruits of the Church of Id are mental and spiritual confusion, which is why its acolytes can carry “No Kings!” signs one day and “Free Maduro!” signs the next. The utter blindness of their faith enables them to recite a paradoxical catechism (like “Queers for Palestine”) with zero sense of irony. Instead of sanctifying grace, they receive the cognitive dissonance they need to continue serving the church as sacrificial lambs.

Converting the AWFULs

Even prior to the uprisings in Minneapolis, observers noted the preponderance of white women taking part in leftist protests. A few years back, conservative pundits started calling them the AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals), a moniker The New York Times just discovered. The zealotry of the Church of Id goes a long way in explaining their rise as a political force.

Social science research has long held that women are more religious than men, especially in Christian countries. A Pew Research Center study in 2016 found that even though religious commitment in the U.S. was “exceptionally high” when compared to other prosperous countries, there was also a much more significant “gender gap” in terms of religious observance. Women were a lot more likely to pray daily, to attend religious services weekly, and to say religion is “very important” in their lives.

In recent years, that spiritual vibrancy has dipped somewhat, especially among Gen Z adults. While there are several factors at play in this development, the long-standing connections between feminism and atheism are surely part of this explanation. Once religious belief is identified with “the patriarchy,” all “right-thinking” feminists must reject it as a major obstacle to the supremacy they seek.

The unholy Church of Id thrives in such a spiritual desert. By replacing the transcendent God with an earthly idol of political and cultural power, it has harnessed the natural religiosity of these women, turning them into secularized crusaders ready to sacrifice themselves and those they love on whatever altar their clergy point them toward. Their promised reward isn’t heavenly bliss or even earthly happiness, but only a vague promise of “self-fulfillment.”

The Long Dark Night of the Political Soul

And even this promise is clearly a lie. Studies done over the past few years reveal that the women we now see on nightly newscasts engaging in activist protesting in Minnesota are statistically the unhappiest people in the country. They also show a powerful correlation between being a liberal woman and mental illness; according to a Pew Research study in 2020, 56 percent of young liberal white women have been told by a doctor or other health care provider that they have a mental health condition.

The statistics we have about traditionally religious people reveal the exact opposite: They are healthier both physically and mentally than their nonreligious counterparts and report higher levels of happiness as well. This is scientific evidence for the truth confessed by St. Augustine of Hippo: “You [God] move us to delight in praising You; for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

Try as it might, the leftist Church of Id cannot replace true religion, especially for the women it draws into its net. Like all satanic enterprises, it can only poorly imitate that which God provides. The next time these ideologues decide to break into a church, they should consider falling to their knees in actual prayer instead of stamping their feet in performative rage. Only then will they find the grace and peace they’ve been looking for in all the wrong places.

Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.