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Violent secular activism is moving from culture war rhetoric to physical intimidation, exposing a growing hostility toward faithful churches and raising urgent questions about religious liberty.

Historically, there have been two main ways to undermine, subvert and destroy Christianity: from within and without. Radical leftists, Communists and other God-haters preferred the latter form, by simply imprisoning church leaders, tearing down churches and persecuting believers wherever they were found.

In the West, it has mainly been the former, with the white-anting of churches from within, via false doctrine, destructive heresies, full-scale worldliness, carnality and compromise. Liberal and leftist churches pushing all things homosexual and trans, for example, is one clear case in point.

This distinction between internal corrosion and external coercion matters, because it helps us recognise when an old pattern is re-emerging in a new and more dangerous form.

A New Phase of Old Hostility

Here, I want to look at what just transpired in Minnesota, where an ugly attack on an evangelical church in Minneapolis on Sunday is bringing back memories of leftist violence and hate against Christianity. One report describes the situation this way:

A mob of anti-ICE agitators stormed a church Sunday in St. Paul, Minnesota, interrupting a worship service after protesters claimed a pastor inside was affiliated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Video shows agitators chanting “Justice for Renee Good” inside the sanctuary at Cities Church as the service began, raising concerns among law enforcement and religious leaders about protesters targeting houses of worship amid escalating anti-ICE demonstrations across the Twin Cities.

In one video circulating online, agitators can be heard chanting, “Justice for Renee Good,” and “Who needs justice, we need justice,” as they stood inside the church during the service. In another clip, the person filming says demonstrators positioned themselves in the middle of the sanctuary as the pastor was speaking. The person filming then described the disruption as a “clandestine mission” and claimed agitators had just learned one of the pastors at the church was connected to ICE.

Cities Church lists eight pastors of varying roles, including David Easterwood, who shares the same name as the acting director of ICE’s St. Paul field office. Fox News Digital has reached out to ICE to verify whether the two individuals are the same person…

“Agitators aren’t just targeting our officers. Now they’re targeting churches, too,” DHS said in the post. “They’re going from hotel to hotel, church to church, hunting for federal law enforcement who are risking their lives to protect Americans.”

Scary stuff indeed. Many are already speaking out against this, as in these brief posts:

“This is disgusting. Radical protesters enter a Southern Baptist Church in St. Paul, MN and shut down a worship service to protest ICE. The radicals shut down a Christian worship service. Let that sink in.” —Denny Burk

“I normally do not post to social media on the Lord’s Day, but the unspeakably evil intrusion of a leftist mob into a Christian worship service today in Minneapolis must be called out for what it is—and Federal authorities should be fast and effective in response.” —Al Mohler

“President Trump will not tolerate the intimidation of worship. The Department of Justice has launched a full investigation into the despicable incident that took place earlier today at a church in Minnesota.” —White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt

“This was just posted by one of the members of the St. Paul church raided by a leftist anti-ICE mob today. Even after they terrified the children present, they didn’t stop threatening & screaming obscenities at the church members. Demonic behavior. Unthinkably disgusting & vile.” —Kangmin Lee

“Church service in St. Paul shut down by a mob of anti-ICE rioters on Sunday. Imagine if any other group did this to any other religion. This is truly appalling.” —Paul A. Szypula

“If you’re storming churches, you’re not the good guys.” —Outspoken Samantha

“Disrupting a church’s worship service to make a political point is disgraceful. Targeting a Southern Baptist church in Minneapolis crosses a clear line, and I stand fully with the church and its members who simply came to worship Jesus in peace. Southern Baptists, let’s pray for and stand with Cities Church. Public officials should investigate whether civil rights were violated and ensure the freedom to worship is protected.” —Clint Pressley

Each of these reactions points to the same disturbing reality: a line has been crossed when political rage spills into the sanctuary itself.

Secularism’s Long Record of Contempt

That the radical secular left has long taken a contemptuous view of Christians and Christianity is simply a matter of historical record. Much has been written on this. One of the newer books to do so is Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History by Thomas Albert Howard (Yale University Press, 2025). Just one quote from it is worth sharing here:

Despite their differences, both combative secularism and eliminationist secularism are the offspring of the Enlightenment’s progressive wing—what the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel has influentially called the Radical Enlightenment. They stem from the belief that secular reason should everywhere supplant tradition and “superstition” and that an individual or group’s religious convictions ought to take a back seat to collective immanent social progress.

Surveying the Communist onslaught against religious communities in the twentieth century inclines one to understand not only Voltaire’s “écrasez l’infâme” but also the philosophe Diderot’s well-known quip that “men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest” not as instances of rhetorical excess, but as prescriptive desiderata.

As the philosopher and dissident from Communist Poland Leszek Kolakowski once wrote: “The rationalism, contempt for tradition, and hatred of the mythological layer of culture to which the Enlightenment gave birth developed, under Communism, into the brutal persecution of religion, but also into the principle that human beings are expendable: that individual lives count only as instruments of the ‘greater whole’ or the ‘higher cause,’ i.e., the state, for no rational grounds exist for attributing to them any special, non-instrumental status.” The historical record lends credence to Kolakowski’s judgment.

Read my extended review of this book’s discussion of secular-statist violence and its historical roots, here.

As mentioned, up till now in much of the West, the assault on the churches has come from within. But now it seems we are witnessing a new phase of an old horror: thuggish mobs crashing church services and causing mischief and mayhem. How long before actual destruction, bloodshed and death start to happen because of these unhinged and hateful radicals?

A Call to Vigilance and Prayer

The culture wars and the political divide are ramping up big time – certainly in America at least. It is taking us in the direction of a new civil war. As always, the violent misotheists and destructive Christ-haters are overwhelmingly those of the political left.

Please keep this divided nation in your prayers, and pray for the protection of pastors and church leaders who remain true to the Gospel. In times like these, faithfulness, courage and steadfast trust in God’s sovereignty are not optional extras, but essential Christian virtues.

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Screenshot via CarolinaCoastOnline.