Opinion | Why aren’t we calling Vance Boelter a Christian terrorist?

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If Vance Boelter had a different faith or a different skin tone, we might have an easier time seeing him as a religious terrorist.

The alleged assassin of Minnesota’s DFL House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, who also attempted to take the lives of DFL state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, would perhaps be more believable in that role if he more closely resembled the religious terrorists we’re used to hearing about — most often, radical Islamic terrorists. Instead, here’s this middle-class white guy from Minnesota.

There’s been a focus on Boelter as a political terrorist because his list of about 70 targets included mostly Democrats. But it seems apparent they were on that list because their beliefs didn’t line up with Boelter’s religious beliefs, and therefore were selected to die by him. That would make him a Christian terrorist — a person using religion as a vehicle to terrorize others into submission. His warped faith seems to have led to his bloody suburban rampage, just as the warped faith of other religious fanatics have led to horrific deeds done in the name of their religious beliefs.

By now we all know about Boelter’s seemingly idyllic childhood in the small southern Minnesota town of Sleepy Eye, where his father was the local high school social studies teacher and varsity baseball coach. The Boelter family was known for playing baseball. Boelter was named “most courteous” in his class.

As various reporting has indicated, all this changed when Boelter was 17. He had a religious conversion that “shook his life.” He burned most of his personal possessions. He pitched a tent in a local park and lived there for several months. He handed out pamphlets about Jesus to everyone he encountered and called himself a born-again Christian.

Between his conversion and the assassination of his friend, Boelter was done with St. Cloud State University, where he was a student, at least for a while. He later enrolled at Christ For The Nations Institute in Dallas, Texas, where he graduated in 1990 with a degree in practical theology.

Known as a prominent training institution for charismatic Christians, Christ For The Nations Institute was founded in 1970 by evangelist Gordon Lindsay, a disciple of the revivalist movements that began in this country soon after World War II.

“Followers believed that an outpouring of the Holy Spirit was under way, raising up new apostles and prophets and a global End Times army to battle Satanic forces and establish God’s kingdom on Earth,” according to a story in The Atlantic. This was all part of the New Apostolic Movement, which the story noted, is considered the grassroots engine of the Christian Right.

Instructors at the school also promoted the belief that “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer every day.” Violent prayer, also known as imprecatory prayer, is often defined as praying to God to rain down curses on one’s enemies, and is found in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament’s Book of Psalms, but not so much in modern-day America. That is, until right-wing Christians seized on imprecation as a way to combat anything they disagreed with in their all-too-frequent culture wars.

As writer Logan Davis has noted, one of the instructors at the institute was Dutch Sheets, a prominent Christian evangelist who started his own ministry that advocates a very literal kind of spiritual warfare.

Before the shooting spree, Boelter was also following a far-right website that trafficked in conspiracy theories about stolen elections and evil Democrats, according to the New York Times.

A steady diet of demonizing Democrats may have inspired Boelter to compile a list of about 70 politicians and other officials, most of whom were Democrats, as enemies of Christians. It’s not clear if Boelter continued to follow Sheets’ teachings up until the time of the June 14 shootings but the compilation of the list and the assassinations of the Hortmans support the belief that he saw his role as eliminating enemies of Christians and that violence was acceptable in doing so.

Just what beliefs qualified victims for his list can be glimpsed from some of the videos of his sermons to a congregation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past few years. The videos show him condemning Christians who don’t fight abortion and homosexuality and insisting “God is going to raise up apostles and prophets who will correct his church,” according to a story by Wired.

So politicians and officials not opposing abortion as a choice or those in favor of LGBT people having civil rights seem to have qualified for Boelter’s list. Apparently Boelter felt they deserved to die, both for their views and to prevent them from allowing anyone else such choices. (For the record, it should be noted that Boelter pleaded not guilty to federal charges on Thursday.)

Some of these views used to be the talking points of a handful of extremists. Now, according to Davis, “These false beliefs of demonic Democrats and persecuted Christians are not the views of a far-out minority but central to the modern Christian nationalist movement.”

As Davis concluded in his essay, “Vance Boelter was a Christian extremist. He was a terrorist produced by a radical homegrown Christian movement. And he will not be the last.”