Minneapolis has been a cauldron of bad behavior and poor management for some time, and the disruption at Cities Church this past Sunday is the latest instance of this misbehavior. The details of the story are readily available in several places. I simply have a few points for Christians who would like to keep their heads in all of this—eight of them, to be exact—moving from the self-evident to the slightly more complex and likely more important:

First, Don Lemon should be sent straight to the county jail.

Second, in case the folks in Minneapolis need a reminder, here is the difference between a protest and a riot: https://youtube.com/shorts/s1bmkYw5bT8?si=nPhLVXALvAIMBl99

Third, civil authorities must be a terror to evil (Romans 13:3). If they are not, you will get more misbehavior. One of the disruptors who yelled at the Christians at Cities Church has done the same at our Christ Church service in Washington D.C. He should be in the clink right next to Lemon. This is a most practical point. Amid all of the commentary, you will either have the disruptors punished or not. If not, the social commentary will vaporize soon enough and Minneapolis will still be a cesspool.

Fourth, Christian churches should steadily and intelligently prepare for disruptions in their worship service. They should not undergo these preparations frantically or in a spirit of fear.

Fifth, if you are the kind of strange person who likes to disrupt your enemy when he is making a fool of himself, I kindly ask you not to do so. The left’s insanity has the genuine difficulty of manifesting itself regularly, as it has in Minneapolis this past Sunday. Now would not be the time for conservatives to return stupid for stupid and go disrupt a storefront mosque in Minneapolis. I’m fairly confident no one would try such a thing. But Cipolla’s Basic Laws of Human Stupidity do come to mind at a moment like this:

1. Everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals among us.
2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses themselves.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Sixth, use this moment to cultivate your horse-laugh. Mencken once said, “One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.” I am not downplaying the disruption. See other points in this list for verification. But I am saying that if any gods are busy in the restroom, it is those worshipped by the malcontents who cried out to them for faux-justice in Cities Church this past Sunday. A spirit of cheerful defiance does not underestimate your opponent. A spirit of “ominous worry” overestimates him.

Seventh, presenting problems are real problems, but they are not all of the problems, or the main problem. The presenting problem here was that an ICE agent was in leadership at this Christian church. The underlying problem was that idolaters entered a Christian church to worship their false gods. You may see some crackle along these lines: “This was not about immigration; it was about sacred worship.” And the reply: “No, this was manifestly about immigration and political tactics. It had nothing to do with worship.” Our dichotomized ways produce this unnecessary debate. The fiasco at Cities Church was a matter of both, because Christ is King of both.

Eighth, the FACE Act is a perfectly fine standard to implement for prosecution at the moment if it is the best option we have. I make this point given the discussion circulating about using this act to prosecute the rabble who entered Cities Church. We still have several shrewd leaders in the civil realm who understand that they have to work with the standards they have. They look to Christian ministers to move the Overton window so that new and better laws can be established. But for the moment, they have to use the secularized ones on the books.

However, if the FACE act is used, it must be employed while Christians understand it is an insufficient standard. FACE stands for Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances. When the act was established in 1994, its main focus was to grant access to abortion, noted by euphemism in the act as “obtaining or providing reproductive health services.” The following prohibition was added:

“by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship;”

You can find the text here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/senate-bill/636/text

Given the video footage, Don Lemon and the other obstructors should have quite a time in court, since they physically obstructed and interfered with several persons lawfully exercising their First Amendment right at a place of religious worship. We will happily go for this while insisting the civil laws be reformed to acknowledge Christ’s lordship. Jesus is King and He actually has differing opinions on access to worship Him and access to tearing babies limb from limb.

My friend Pastor Douglas Wilson has defined Christian Nationalism as “the belief that human societies require a transcendent anchor to hold all our cultural, political, and social assumptions in place, and that this transcendent anchor should be the true and living God, not an idol.” As we deal with the mess in Minneapolis according to the religious egalitarianism structuring the FACE act, keep in mind that such religious egalitarianism is, in fact, a lie.