The Lie That Killed Renee Good Is Strangling Democracy

On the morning of January 7th in Minneapolis, Minnesota, ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good. “I’m not mad at you,” were Good’s last words to Ross, seconds before he pulled the trigger three times as she tried to drive away from their encounter. On the video that he recorded, Ross called Good an expletive for a female dog in heat as he watched the vehicle she was driving with her wife as a passenger roll into a telephone pole. At a press conference hours later, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist.”

How did these representatives of the US government know what they claimed to know about their fellow citizen?

“Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole,” Good’s wife, Rebecca, said in a statement over the weekend - the first public comments she has made since witnessing her wife’s murder. Good’s smile, it seems, was meant to communicate her conviction. “I’m not mad at you,” was her expression of the love of Jesus to someone whose actions she opposed.

Why did her words enrage Jonathan Ross? What was he trying to kill when he shot her three times at point blank range?

Ross’ father, Ed Ross, told the Global Mail that his son is “a committed, conservative Christian, a tremendous father, a tremendous husband. I couldn't be more proud of him.” Jonathan Ross shot and killed a fellow American and a fellow Christian. His father couldn’t be more proud of him.

What would make a Christian father feel pride after watching his son kill his sister in Christ?

Two decades before the United States erupted into Civil War in the 19th century, every Christian denomination split over the question of slavery. Since launching a moral fusion movement in the 1830s, abolitionists had insisted that the humanity of enslaved people was not a political difference, but a moral issue. If a government insisted that some people could be denied their liberty, then it was an offense to God and a threat to all people. Those people who pledged their allegiance to the authoritarian slaveholding regime could not worship a God who granted all people liberty, whatever the color of their skin. They seceded from their churches two decades before they seceded from the Union. As one leading Virginian in the 19th century wrote, the “Northern crusade aimed at the sin of slavery” was a “religion of hate.”

How did Jonathan Ross hear hate when a young white woman looked at him and said, “I’m not made at you”? How did he tell himself, as he no doubt wrote in his after-action report, that he “feared for his life”?

When Ross’ father called his son a “committed, conservative Christian,” he identified him with a division that happened in the American church in the 1980s. In his 1994 book, Culture Wars, James Davison Hunter wrote, “America is in the midst of a culture war that has had and will continue to have reverberations not only within public life but within the lives of ordinary Americans everywhere.” Describing the institutions that had lined up across from one another on the battlefield of public life, Hunter noted that historic divisions in America had shifted. Increasingly, Hunter observed, Americans saw themselves on one side or the other of a war between traditional morality and progressive values. This wasn’t just about left versus right in politics, though the culture wars inevitably shaped where people stood on political issues. The divide between orthodoxy and progressivism was more fundamental, Hunter observed. People on each side increasingly understood their way of seeing the world as fundamentally incompatible with the enemy across the battle line.

This battle line has been manufactured and reinforced by a well-funded network of organizations that believe they can maintain power by dividing the American public. Donald Trump did not create the culture wars, but he has exploited them. An authoritarian regime controls the US government today because religious nationalists who call themselves “conservative Christians” have been persuaded that neighbors who believe “we are here to love each other” are their enemies.

Jonathan Ross did not know as much as we now know about Renee Good. He gathered that she opposed the extreme enforcement action that he believes to be a righteous crusade. He heard her say, “I’m not made at you.” He saw her smile. But he judged her a mortal enemy because he has lived his whole life in a culture war that pits so-called “conservative Christians” like him against fellow Christians who believe that “we are here to love each other.”

Bad theology kills. As teachers in the church, we have a responsibility to make clear there there is no such thing as a “conservative Christian” - nor a “liberal” or “progressive” Christian, for that matter. To commit one’s life to the way of Christ is to accept that all people are created in God’s image, that life is a gift to treasure, that the dividing line between good and evil runs through each of us, and that we are called to love our enemies, not exterminate them. No one who calls themselves “Christian” - us included - is a perfect example of Christ. But we deceive ourselves and mislead others if we pretend that that a failure to follow the way of Christ can be justified by adding an adjective in front of “Christian.”

If the lie at the root of our nation’s crisis is a theological lie, then Christian preachers like us have a special responsibility to proclaim in public the good news that can save us from destruction. We are not hell bent on destroying one another so that greedy oligarchs can extract from the US government as much wealth as possible. We do not have to accept the lie that our neighbors - even our own kin - are our enemies. We can embrace the moral values of love, mercy, and justice that have pushed this nation toward a more perfect union in its past, and we can use the nonviolent power of truth to build a movement that takes back the tools of our government to reconstruct democracy.

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