The Spiritual Formation of Vance Boelter

Not all spirits are good.

Vance Boelter, accused of the shooting deaths of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark and of shooting and injuring legislator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, is a right-wing Christian, according to reporting of the last few days.

Boelter is a graduate of Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, Texas, which is closely associated with the decentralized movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a development of the Pentecostal tradition which advances the claim that the US is a Christian nation that should rightfully be governed solely by Christians of their particular persuasion. The movement’s leadership is a decentralized network of “prophets” who claim to receive and transmit direct revelation from God. Prominent among these prophets is Dutch Sheets, who used his considerable authority in the movement to lend spiritual support and encouragement to the January 6 insurrectionists, as Matthew Taylor and others have reported.

Journalist Jeff Sharlet and the Atlantic’s Stephanie Crummen have written recently on this developing story of the influences on Boelter’s spiritual formation. In Jeff Sharlet’s story he shows us a photograph he took in the lobby of Christ for the Nations Institute. It shows a quote from the Institute’s founder, Gordon Lindsay. It reads: “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.”

Christ for the Nations Institute last Saturday issued a press release acknowledging that Vance Boelter had been a student there, expressing sympathy with the victims of Mr. Boelter’s violence, and asserting that the Institute “unequivocally rejects, denounces, and condemns any and all forms of violence and extremism, be it politically, racially, religiously or otherwise motivated.” The statement claims that by “violent prayer” Gordon Lindsay “meant that a Christian’s prayer-life should be intense, fervent, and passionate, not passive and lukewarm, considering that spiritual forces of darkness are focused on attacking life, identity in God, purpose, peace, love, joy, truth, health, and other good things.” The statement went on to “strongly disavow any attempt to align Mr. Boelter’s ungodly thoughts and actions with our biblical teachings.”

I accept the sincerity of the Institute’s leaders in making this statement. Vance Boelter is responsible for what he did. I believe them when they say they condemn Boelter’s actions.

I am troubled, however.

In January of 2023 I was alarmed by what I saw on Facebook from one of my Facebook contacts. This Facebook friend is a Christian believer whose Facebook page displays conspiracy theories, QAnon references, and the pronouncements of the leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation movement. I took a screenshot of that post and saved it, and today, reading the news about Boelter, I took it out and re-read it. In it my Facebook friend passed on with his endorsement the words of one of his friends. Here are those words:

Remember, the evil leftist will use your faith in God to attempt to cripple you in guilt by saying your comments are “not Christian”. Here is how I respond. “I follow Jesus but I am not Jesus. Truth is a harsh reality and although vengeance belongs to the Lord, I am more than comfortable with being a tool for doling out the consequences that come with defeating evil. I will not turn the other cheek and I certainly will pray for you, after your defeat.”

“Men, it’s time to be a warrior and stop listening to the perversion of the church that says you need to be weak and submit. It is a lie, and it’s time to stop letting them lie to you on both sides…

Happy New Year. 2023 is the year of restoration and a reckoning on evil like never before.”

So, here it is. What we have here is an explicit rejection of the teaching and example of Jesus and an explicit statement of willingness to carry out violent acts.

I don’t want to imagine my Facebook friend is capable of enacting the intent of the words quoted above. I want to believe that this is just performative speech and that his moral character and mental health are strong enough to restrain him from acting out these words. But I also have learned over seven decades of living to take people seriously when they tell you who they are, and I’m not sure who he is. And I recall this from the Book of Proverbs: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” (KJV)

Vance Boelter probably saw that sign in the lobby of Christ for the Nations Institute many times. The sign that says “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.” The leaders of this institution, as we’ve seen, recently gave this prayer of Gordon Lindsay the very most positive interpretation they could, stung as they must have been by the horrifying realization that one of their own was responsible for these hideous crimes.

But let’s stop a minute and think. This is the prayer that they chose to hang prominently at their institution, visible at all times to all who come and go? This is the priority for daily prayer? Really?

Let’s be clear, the Bible does have violent prayers in it. But this does not mean that Bible readers must read these prayers as prescriptive.

I inhabit a Christian tradition that commends the Daily Offices of prayer to all believers and especially the clergy, and in that practice the whole Book of Psalms is recited in a set rotation, including what we call “the imprecatory Psalms” such as Psalm 69. In these Psalms the ancients gave vent to their anger and frustration in sometimes quite violent terms. However, we do not read those Psalms every day, and we recite them not as prescriptions for behavior but as a way of confronting the baser emotions that remain within us as we contemplate the centrality of Christ and his resurrection power over human hatred and violence. The whole process is overall intended to facilitate our growth out of our basest instincts toward letting the peaceable way of Christ overtake us.

The prayer of Gordon Lindsay on that lobby wall in Dallas is, however, in character with what I’ve come to understand about the movement we refer to as the New Apostolic Reformation. The NAR, as Taylor and other scholars have shown us, is a movement dedicated to the idea that the world is divided up between evil people and good people. The language of spiritual struggle and warfare in the New Testament maps out, in their view, onto a war between those who are part of this movement and all those who are viewed as in opposition to their movement on a range of culture war issues and religious differences.

The Facebook post above is a sign of what can happen when someone has not encountered and made their own the spiritual insight of Alexander Solzhenitzyn:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.” - The Gulag Archipelago

What was done to Melissa and Mark Hortman and to John and Yvette Hoffman in the presence of their daughter is a work of pure evil.

I pray that this will not be repeated. But I fear, given the present reality of a president who incites violence and a segment of Christianity that is committed to conquest rather than to service, that we haven’t seen the end of this sort of thing.

This bothers me a great deal.