I’ve never been a violent person. Even so, I am intimately familiar with the language of violence. I was introduced to it as a teenager in the early 2000s in my charismatic evangelical youth group.
Church leaders encouraged us to go everywhere with our “sword” so we would always be prepared to fight the “ways of the world.” I took that instruction as gospel and always made sure there was room for my “sword” in my backpack before going to school. The weapon they were referring to was my Bible.
As a college student in the early 2010s, the language of violence permeated the Christian spaces I frequented. We were encouraged to put on our “armor” before leaving our homes for the day (a metaphor from Ephesians). The rationale was that we never knew what spiritual attacks we might experience and we needed to be able to protect ourselves.
Even the contemporary Christian music of this era was full of references to fighting and warfare. Christian hard rock groups like Pillar produced songs such as “Frontline,” which became the theme song for Teen Mania’s Battle Cry initiative. Honestly, I could list countless examples from groups like BarlowGirl, MercyMe, DC Talk and others, pulling exclusively from the CDs from my evangelical days that, for whatever reason, are still in the back of my closet.
Even when evangelical churches didn’t explicitly use the language of spiritual warfare, the theology was still in the waters of evangelical culture.
All these influences were part of a larger belief system within evangelicalism that insisted we were at war with the “secular” world. We had to be willing not only to defend God but also to fight on God’s behalf. We were told we had to battle the demonic influence that “manipulated” people into being gay, non-Christian, or whatever cultural difference the evangelical movement deemed “ungodly” in the moment.
The theology of spiritual warfare is deeply self-centered. It cultivates religious paranoia, convincing you that the devil is constantly attacking you, sending demons your way to influence you to sin.
Anyone who did not ascribe to your theological worldview was assumed to have been contaminated by that demonic influence. They were either your mission field to convert or your enemy to protect yourself from. In this vision of the kingdom of God, there was no middle ground.
No one wants to be a lukewarm Christian, after all. We needed to be on fire for God—and fire burns.
Groups like Teen Mania specifically focused on teaching this theology to teenagers from the late 1980s through the mid-2010s. The second season of the documentary Shiny Happy People effectively traces how the organization spread these teachings. While my youth group never participated in any of Teen Mania’s events, much of its literature and teaching still made its way into my church. Their reach was far and wide.
In recent years, we have seen the line between the metaphorical language of spiritual warfare and the literal enactment of violence blur nearly to nonexistence—and it is terrifying.
Generational Alignment
ICE was created in 2003 in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Prior to August 2025, individuals were required to be between 21 and 40 years old to apply to work as an ICE agent. That age range is significant.
Around the time ICE was formed, young adults who had been exposed to the theology of spiritual warfare as teenagers would have been in their early 20s. Today, those who were exposed to that theology as teens in the early 2000s are in their 30s (like me). Those exposed in the mid-2010s would be in their 20s now.
While the violence of white Christian nationalism certainly predates ICE, it is difficult not to notice how the Department of Homeland Security appears to have recruited from generations of Christians shaped by calls to prepare for spiritual warfare. It did not take much to push those individuals to move the war from the spiritual realm into the physical one.
Rhetorical Indicators
I’ve written before about how metaphors lead people to real, physical violence. It feels unnervingly relevant to the violence we are seeing in Minneapolis right now, so I’ll restate it here to help contextualize what we are witnessing.
In 1991, American linguist George Lakoff published a powerful essay examining the metaphors of war that President George H.W. Bush used to justify the first Gulf War to the American public. One of those metaphors was the fairy tale of the just war.
According to Lakoff, the fairy tale of the just war reduces conflict to three components: a hero, a villain, and a victim.
Depending on the circumstances, the hero and the victim can be the same person, as in the American Revolutionary War. For this metaphor to work, the hero must be portrayed as inherently moral and the villain as inherently evil. Because the hero is only good, any action taken to defeat the villain becomes justifiable—and, in many cases, celebrated.
Within this framework, the villain cannot be reasoned with because they are believed to have no capacity for good. Therefore, the only way to defeat the villain is to annihilate them.
Weaponizing the Metaphor of War
The Trump administration is replicating this weaponized metaphor beat for beat. The terrifying reality is that an entire demographic had already been primed to enact this violence against their own neighbors.
For decades, they were conditioned in the language of spiritual warfare and trained to see their neighbors as villains who could not be reasoned with. All DHS had to do was issue the call to recruit them.
Those ICE agents have embraced the metaphor’s premise hook, line, and sinker. In their minds, they are the heroes.
They imagine themselves as John Wick, the star of a violence-laden narrative. For them, the only way to defeat the villain is annihilation—and they have “known” who the villain is since they were teenagers.
In moments of high stress, they simultaneously claim the role of victim, asserting that they “feared for their lives” as they assault those they have deemed villains.
That is how the ICE agents, whom we are told are “good Christian men,” can justify the killings of Keith Porter, Renee Good, Alex Pretti and too many others to name. For anyone familiar with the evangelical language of spiritual warfare, this outcome is not surprising. It is the result of conditioning an entire subsect of Christianity to worship violence instead of Jesus.
How Do We Stop the Bullets?
Understanding how ICE agents can stomach their treatment of fellow human beings may be helpful, but it does not stop the violence now. How do we stop the bullets? How do we undo decades of conditioning?
I am not an expert in how to cultivate compassion in people who have been trained to hate. But I can share what pulled me out of that culture and made me receptive to a more life-giving theology: hearing people’s stories.
As a college student, I listened to classmates share their experiences as queer people seeking love. I listened to Muslims describe how their faith calls them to love. I read their sacred texts alongside my own, stunned by the similarities.
By hearing their stories firsthand, I was forced to see their humanity. In seeing their humanity, I was forced to see my own. These stories became my own road to Damascus.
They changed my life forever and I am eternally indebted to them. They freed me from a theology that had convinced me there was a proverbial boogeyman lurking behind every corner.
Countering a Violent Narrative
White Christian nationalism tells a dramatic, attention-grabbing story. It has convinced a small but powerful demographic that they are the heroes of that story. In this narrative, blockbuster-level violence is the only way to protect faith, family, and self.
How do we tell a better story—one rooted in the truth of Christ’s love? How do we tell a story that moves people beyond simplistic metaphors that fail to capture reality?
And even if we tell that story, how do we get white Christian nationalists to listen when they are so committed to the belief that everything we say is a lie authored by Satan himself? How do we help them become receptive to their own redemption?
I wish I knew, beloved.
Until they are willing to listen, we must continue to band together and protect one another. We must continue to document their actions and demand accountability. We must continue to call our representatives and demand the defunding of this state-sanctioned domestic terrorist group.
All our lives—and our futures—depend on it.
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A bivocational pastor, writer and spiritual director based in Williamsburg, Virginia, she currently works as a Spiritual Director at Reclamation Theology. Cawthon-Freels is the author of Reclamation: A Queer Pastor’s Guide to Finding Spiritual Growth in the Passages Used to Harm Us (Nurturing Faith Books), and a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
