Minnesota leftists showed no pangs of conscience after disrupting a Sunday worship service at Cities Church in St. Paul. The church was targeted because one of its lay elders works in federal law enforcement — specifically, serving as the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director for St. Paul. But, despite sparking national outrage, the anti-ICE demonstrators are only doubling down.

“Today, we are calling for the resignation of so-called pastor David Easterwood from Cities Church,” declared career activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who led the Sunday demonstration, at a Tuesday press conference organized in front of the Hennepin County Government Center. “We are asking Cities Church to operate in truth and integrity and the true meaning of the gospel and to recognize that David Easterwood’s dual role as a pastor and the director of the ICE office is a most definite conflict of interest, and it cannot stand.”

The change in venue was the only accommodation activists made to public criticism, although it still lacked a reasonable connection between means and ends. On Sunday, agitators demonstrated in a church to protest government action. On Tuesday, they assembled at a government building to protest the church.

“In the New Testament, pastors are called by God and examined, affirmed, and held accountable by the local congregation alone, under the lordship of Christ. Political activists possess no jurisdiction over a church’s pastoral leadership,” David Closson, director of FRC’s Center for Biblical Worldview, told The Washington Stand. “Scripture is clear in the pastoral epistles, particularly 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, that a pastor’s qualifications are moral, doctrinal, and pastoral in nature, not political. Disqualification arises from moral failure, false teaching, or abuse of office, not from disagreement over public policy or the perceived political implications of a pastor’s lawful vocation.”

“Ultimately, the controversy reveals a serious confusion of jurisdiction. God has entrusted the church, not activists or the state, with authority over doctrine, discipline, and shepherding,” Closson concluded. “For someone outside the congregation to insist on a pastor’s removal is to claim authority they do not possess, impose standards Scripture does not require, and subject the church to political pressure. Such a demand cannot be accepted without undermining the biblical autonomy and spiritual authority Christ has granted exclusively to the local church.”

Sadly, public officials who should know better misused their credentials to provide political cover to the agitators. As TWS reported Tuesday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) expressed astonishment that the U.S. Department of Justice would consider charging the agitators with violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, indicating that he may have never read the full text of the law.

In the same interview with ex-CNN host Don Lemon (who was in the thick of the Sunday demonstration), Ellison attempted to further justify the protest with the platitude, “none of us are immune from the voice of the public.”

Of course, this statement has little to do with Sunday’s outrage. It sounds true because those wishing to engage in a public forum will inevitably be exposed to contrary opinions (although, ironically, leftists refuse to accept this). But Ellison twisted the meaning by equating a small cadre of agitators with “the public,” the intrusion into a private space with a public forum, and the disruption of a worship service with a generic exchange of ideas.

In a separate interview with CNN, Ellison simply passed the blame to President Trump. “The reality: he’s trying to provoke us,” Ellison alleged. “And I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened. I can only tell you that the president is causing all of this.” Ellison is up for re-election in November.

Yet Ellison is not the only Minnesota politician siding with the church-disruptors. In a Facebook post, Minnesota Rep. Leigh Finke (D), a transgender-identifying male who has produced movies critical of the church, compared it to a 1989 “die in and protest in St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York” over the AIDS epidemic among gay men.

“Actions like this — nonviolent resistance in the face of government inaction or oppression — are essential,” Finke wrote. “And they must continue until I.C.E. is out of our state, the administration is out of the White House, and dignity and humanity for all of our neighbors is achieved.”

Thus, Finke makes the unwelcome disruption of Sunday worship not only defensible but “essential.” He describes it not as an encroachment on time-honored religious freedom but as “nonviolent resistance in the face of government inaction or oppression.” And Finke declared that such assaults on Christianity must continue until it nullifies federal immigration law in Minnesota and forces regime change in Washington.

Of the many problems with this declaration, the most significant is its conflation of a local Christian church with the U.S. government. Agitators have yet to explain what government action was resisted by their disruption of worship. And they have yet to explain how persecuting one local church will force the entire federal government to change its policy and personnel.

The basic reality is that Cities Church stands in no relation to the federal government. It belongs to a different kingdom, holds to different principles, and aims at a different goal. Protests against federal policy have nothing to do with the church and are irrelevant if directed at it. The agitators who disrupted the church service — particularly the many who profess familiarity with Christianity — should understand this, even if all they did was read the church’s website. One can only conclude, therefore, that their targeting of a church suggests not merely hostility toward the federal government, but hostility toward the church as well.

Yet another activist’s comments illustrate this point well. In defending her participation in the worship disruption, Chauntyll Allen, head of BLM Twin Cities, claimed, “We have the head of this whole [ICE] operation standing in a pulpit preaching to a congregation every Sunday morning. And that was really just not okay for us.” Anyone who took five minutes to peruse the church’s website would realize that David Easterwood is one of eight elders, who rotate preaching duties; no recent sermons were preached by Easterwood.

But Allen failed to recognize her own ignorance of the church’s practices, choosing instead to mask it with a superficial claim to know more about Christianity than those who attend church weekly. “I mean my mother’s a pastor, and so I grew up in Christianity, I grew up in the church. And one of the things I remember about Jesus Christ himself is that when things weren’t going right in the church, he went in and he flipped tables.”

According to the gospel record, Jesus only flipped tables once, or arguably twice (Matthew 21:12-13 John 2:14-17). His purpose was to drive worldly business out of the temple, so that God’s house would once again be a “house of prayer.” Thus, table-flipping is no model for routine Christian behavior, but Jesus’s words do convey a stark warning to those who would invade the church and use it as a prop for their political agenda.