The Assassination in Minnesota Is January 6th with Bullets
About a week and a half ago, on Saturday June 14th, a man impersonating a police officer invaded the homes of two Minnesota politicians and their spouses in an attempt to assassinate them. State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were seriously wounded, but managed to survive both the attack and the surgery that followed. Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were not so lucky; both died later that morning.
The perpetrator of this targeted political violence was a resident of Green Isle, Minnesota named Vance Boelter (pronounced “belter”). On the morning of the shooting, Boelter’s policemen’s disguise enabled him to get away & he was still at large during when scheduled No Kings protests were happening the same day. Boelter had abandoned a car that he had retooled to look like a police car, but when the Minnesota State Patrol looked in the back of Boelter’s abandoned car, they founded a pile of “No Kings” flyers. As a result, both the State Patrol and the governor’s office encouraged the public not to attend the No Kings protests.
I was originally planning to attend a No Kings protest in St. Paul at the state capitol, but because of the warnings, my wife warned me away from doing so. I went to a No Kings protest in nearby Bloomington, Minnesota instead. I saw one sign that said, “SOMEONE WAS KILLED TODAY” in reference to the assassinations that happened that morning, but otherwise, the mood was joyously defiant. It was an amazing display of physical courage by hundreds, if not over a thousand ordinary people.
Why the Assassinations Are a Continuation of January 6th
To understand the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman and the attempted assassination of State Senator John Hoffman, I felt I needed to do a deep dive into the religious background and theology of their assassin, Vance Luther Boelter. I normally send out this column on Friday, but I felt I needed extra time to figure out what was going on.
To cut to the chase, I would like to argue that the insurrectionary attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the assassination of Melissa Hortman in Minnesota are both outgrowths of a religious movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. The problem is not Christianity per se or even conservative Christianity, but the militaristic and anti-democratic strain of Christian nationalism promoted by the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and its ideological peers in the church.
The historical roots of Vance Boelter’s assassination of Melissa Hortman can be specifically traced to the preacher Gordon Lindsay, who founded Christ for the Nations Institute, the interdenominational Bible college which Vance Boelter attended in the 1980s. Christ for the Nations Institute was founded in 1970, over 20 years before the charismatic Christian theologian C. Peter Wagner coined the term “New Apostolic Reformation,” but the college was definitely instrumental in helping to build the NAR movement.
The most important theological predecessors to the NAR movement are the healing revival movement and Latter Rain movement beginning in the late 1940s after World War II. The founder of the healing revival movement was a preacher named William Branham. Branham was charismatic in multiple senses of the term. He was a founder of the modern charismatic movement within the Protestant church, but he was also had a very charismatic personality that enraptured thousand of attendees at numerous religious revivals in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Branham claimed that he had been anointed by the Biblical prophet Elijah as a harbinger of the end times. He would travel the country and host large interdenominational Protestant religious revivals that claimed to work modern-day miracles through faith healing. As a result of Branham’s example, many other preachers also hosted revivals that offered faith healing, including the future televangelist Oral Roberts and the notorious cult leader Jim Jones.
Gordon Lindsay got his start by working as the “campaign manager” for William Branham’s healing revivals. To publicize Branham’s revivals, Lindsay took over the editor’s role at a publication called the Voice of Healing.
The relationship between Lindsay and Branham illustrates a concept that sociologists of religion call the “routinization of charisma.” Branham was a magnetic evangelist who told stories about angelic visitations, but he did not always leave an organizational footprint when he pulled up his revival tent and moved on to the next town. By contrast, Lindsay was not simply a publications editor, but a visionary organization builder. He began using the Voice of Healing newsletter to highlight testimonies about preachers who had performed acts of faith healing. Eventually, the newsletter became an interdenominational platform for organizing conservative Protestant preachers at mass scale. Branham and Lindsay encouraged hundreds of Protestant religious leaders to now think of themselves in as faith healers. Lindsay helped inexperienced faith healers develop their stage personas and began using the Voice of Healing newsletter to publish theological justifications that could be used as disclaimers to explain why the faith healing didn’t work (e.g., “Your faith wasn’t strong enough”).
In 1947, Branham’s healing revival movement toured several local Bible colleges in Saskatchewan, Canada. Students at those colleges were so inspired by Branham’s events that they began to engage daily prayer and fasting. Some of the students who fasted began to experience visions, which some interpreted as prophetic. Other students began laying hands on each other, which led to new reports of miraculous faith healing.
This event created the Latter Rain movement, which would later prove to be more influential in the United States than it would be in Canada. The Latter Rain movement proved to have more staying power than the healing revival movement. The healing revival movement eventually burned out by 1960 for mainly financial reasons, because the gigantic spectacle of massive faith healing events like Branham’s crusade proved to be a major financial burden for the local churches that hosted them. A phenomenon like the Latter Rain movement was easier for local church congregations to keep under control.
Lindsay eventually broke from William Branham in 1954 over theological disagreements and due to Branham’s blatant promotion of white supremacy, including his endorsement of the KKK. Lindsay did not necessarily oppose white supremacy; he just felt Branham pushed white supremacy too openly in his preaching. In the early 1940s, before he met Branham, Lindsay was a colleague of Gerald Winrod, a Kansas evangelist who was so pro-Hitler in the 1930s that he was dubbed “the Jayhawk Nazi.” Lindsay also supported the doctrine of British Israelism, a pseudo-historical belief arguing that Protestants of English or American Anglo-Saxon ancestry are the true descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, not Middle Easterners or Jews. In 1940, Lindsay was well-regarded enough in British Israelite circles that he won the opening speaker slot at a convention of the Anglo-Saxon Christian World movement, where he claimed prophecies embedded in the Egyptian pyramids foretold what would happen to both Great Britain and the U.S.A.
In the 1950s, Lindsay began using his newsletter Voice of Healing to promote his own Biblical interpretation of UFOs, which was an attempt to exploit the popularity of the “flying saucer craze” that began in the late 1940s. All this culminated in the 1954 publication of The Mystery of the Flying Saucers, which became the first book ever published in the subfield of Christian UFO literature.
By 1962, Lindsay was downplaying the weirder aspects of his preaching associated with British Israelism or UFOs & concentrating on building the Full Gospel Fellowship of Churches and Ministers International, an organization that provided services to independent Pentecostal ministers that they could not provide for themselves. Members of the Fellowship could get certificates that verified their ministerial status, and the Fellowship also hosted conferences where ministers could compare notes about what methods worked and what didn’t.
How to Make an Apostle
In the second chapter of the book of Acts in the Bible, the apostles, the Virgin Mary, and other early followers of Jesus are gathered for the Jewish harvest festival of Shavuot when the Holy Spirit descends in the form of tongues of fire, which in turn gives the apostles the ability to speak in other languages a.k.a. “speaking in tongues.” This event is commemorated by Christian churches all over the world as Pentecost Sunday.
According to most mainline and conservative churches, the events of the first Pentecost not only created what we know today as the Christian church, but it also gave the Twelve Apostles the gifts of divine healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues. Both mainline and conservative churches generally follow a theological doctrine called cessationism, which argues that the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit bestowed on the Twelve Apostles stopped happening to other people or “ceased” after Biblical times. By contrast, the Pentecostal ministers organized by Gordon Lindsay’s Full Gospel Fellowship believed in the doctrine of continuationism, a belief that divine healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues are not only common in the present day, but are central to what being a modern Christian is all about.
By 1967, Lindsay renamed his Voice of Healing publication as Christ for the Nations. The shift was partially due to Lindsay belatedly dealing with the collapse of the healing revival movement in the early 1960s. Instead, Lindsay wanted independent faith-healing ministers to focus less on flashy revival events and start building their own institutions to spread the gospel all over the world, just like the Bible said the Apostles did after Pentecost Sunday. Eventually, by 1970, Lindsay had spun off Christ for the Nations Institute from his Christ for the Nations publication, creating a new educational institution for recruiting young disciples to the growing neo-Pentecostal movement of the time.
Enter Vance Boelter
One of Gordon Lindsay’s young disciples at Christ for the Nations Institute was the future assassin, Vance Boelter. Boelter grew up as a fairly mainline Lutheran. He was not home-schooled, but attended the local public school in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, where his father was both a social studies teacher and an athletic coach. As you might expect from the son of an athletic coach, Boelter in high school was more tied to sports than he was to anything else.
Boelter’s conversion to religious extremism didn’t begin until he entered college at St. Cloud State University. According to Jeff Petricka, another St. Cloud student who lived in the same dorm on the same floor as Boelter, he and Boelter both tried out for the school baseball team when school started in September 1985. By the time October and November rolled around, Boelter told Petricka that he was quitting the baseball team, and he sold him a $200 baseball bat for only 5 dollars. According to an account by Petricka on YouTube, Boelter told him that he was “all in for Jesus” and that he had joined a religious group that told to sell off all his baseball gear. “He became more of a zombie by the day after that,” Petricka concluded.
It’s unclear what religious organization recruited Boelter, but Boelter eventually dropped out of St. Cloud to attend Christ for the Nations Institute instead, where he learned to do missionary work. According to three sermons that Vance Boelter later gave with a translator at a French-speaking evangelical church in Matadi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, his first religious mentor was a young missionary in his thirties named David Emerson, who had been murdered in a 1987 massacre in Zimbabwe that happened when anti-government rebels attacked the Pentecostal agricultural community of New Adams Farm. Boelter
The massacre was so gruesome that it ultimately obscured the problematic internal dynamics at the New Adams Farm community. The New Adams Farm movement was funded by a group called the Kansas City Fellowship, a group of self-appointed “apostles” and “prophets” who made questionable claims about their own spiritual powers. In a report entitled “Documentation of the Abberent Practises [sic] and Teachings of the Kansas City Fellowship,” the Kansas City pastor Ernie Gruen compiled testimony from other Christian believers who reported being wronged by Kansas City’s would-be prophets. According to one minister contacted by Pastor Gruen, the New Adams Farm exhibited cultish behavior and discouraged their members from doing external missionary work. Instead, members were pressured not to leave the farm and messages that came from the outside world were censored.
According to the minister’s testimony about New Adams Farm:
This is actually a missions organization which operates in Africa and I was born and brought up in Zimbabwe. My brother, who is Director of this ministry was pastoring a church (Assemblies of God) in Zimbabwe in 1982-86 and one of our associate pastors left to join a “Missions” organization called New Adams Farm in southern Zimbabwe. I called K.C.F. yesterday to confirm that they were actually involved with that farm and they confirmed that they had purchased the land and supported the work. New Adams Farm believed that all evangelism was done on your knees and that there was no such thing as “Go ye into all the world.” They publicly stated that persons such as Reinhart Bonnke were from the "pit" because of the mass crusades they held. As time went by so the control started to take over there and all mail and phone calls both outgoing and incoming were censored. Eventually our former associate pastor could no longer stand it and so he and his family “escaped.” (That was how they described it). It has taken them years to regain spiritually all that they had lost there.
Aside from the “Kansas City Prophets,” another influence on Vance Boelter at Christ for the Nations Institute was the author and pastor Dutch Sheets, who taught classes there frequently while Boelter was a student. Sheets is not only a member of the New Apostolic Reformation movement, but a central figure who has used the NAR movement to create a fusion of Trumpism and Christian nationalism.
In 2015, Sheets popularized the use of the Revolutionary War-era Appeal to Heaven flag as a symbol of support for Christian nationalism. The Appeal to Heaven flag appeared at the January 6th insurrection against the U.S. Capitol. Supreme Court Justice Alito also flew the Appeal to Heaven flag at his beach house to signal his support for the Stop the Steal movement that viewed Joe Biden’s election in 2020 as invalid. As recently as last week, the Appeal to Heaven flag flew over the Small Business Administration building in DC.
Christian nationalists have perverted the meaning of the Appeal to Heaven flag. During the Revolutionary War, the reference to “an appeal to heaven” was an anti-monarchist slogan, which derived from John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, the first major modern work to argue that the legitimacy of government must reside in the consent of the governed. It meant that King George III could be trumped higher authorities. By contrast, the Christian nationalist interpretation of the Appeal to Heaven is to argue that the United States can only survive as a Christian nation and that your consent does not matter if you oppose Christian nationalism. Instead of using the flag to oppose monarchy, modern-day Christian nationalists are using the Appeal to Heaven flag to oppose the “No Kings” movement and support a quasi-monarchist autocracy led by an extremely unvirtuous man.
Dutch Sheets is also a prominent advocate of “violent prayer,” a philosophy pushed by Vance Boelter’s alma mater, Christ for the Nations Institute (CFNI). In the lobby of CFNI, there is a picture of the founder Gordon Lindsay standing to the right of the quote “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.”
As Gordon Lindsay explained it in his book Watchman Prayer: Protecting Your Family, Home and Community from the Enemy’s Schemes,
Sometimes we must be very aggressive in our dealings with the enemy. Gordon Lindsay used to say every Christian should pray at least one violent prayer a day. He was, of course, speaking of spiritual warfare.
This theology had the predictable effect of inculcating an intolerant, tribalist mentality among students at Christ for the Nations Institute. According to an account from a woman who attended the institute,
I actually attended CFNI for just under a year. (It was strongly suggested I leave before the end of the second semester.)
I can verify the teachings of “them vs us” mentality. We were told museums of nature and science were “temples to Satan.” We were told Deep Ellum, a section of Dallas with tattoo parlors and venues/clubs primarily, was evil and to never go there. Homosexuality was demonized and conversion therapy applauded. We were told to attend anti-abortion rallies. I actually got angry in the moment at the rhetoric preached here. The rest made me feel uneasy, but this one infuriated me in the moment. It was dehumanizing anyone prochoice. We were not to listen to any music that wasn’t Christian or classical, no movies that were beyond PG. People would accuse roommates who dared dress alternatively of being demon possessed. A lot of speaking in tongues and being “slain in the spirit.” If you were not an ardent supporter, you didn’t hear from God and had no voice.
The reference to “violent prayer” is based on a misinterpretation of the Bible verse Matthew 11:12: “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.” The reference to John the Baptist is crucial here, because the verse is denouncing the prophet’s beheading by the tyrannical ruler Herod Antipas. Instead, figures like Dutch Sheets and the Christ for the Nations Institute argue that Christians shouldn’t oppose the “violence” mentioned in the verse but rather emulate it. They will argue disingenuously that the “violence” is not literal, but merely a metaphor about how zealous and effortful you have to be as a believer to storm your way into the kingdom of heaven. The only problem with this promotion of figurative violence is that somebody forgot to tell Vance Boelter it wasn’t literal.