On the Christian Education of Dr. Vance Boelter

When a bullet is a "prayer"

This is a photograph I took in March 2024 of the lobby of Christ for the Nations Institute, a Bible college in Dallas that the Minnesota political murders suspect, Vance Boelter, appears online to have claimed as part of the education that entitled him to use the title of “Dr. Vance Boelter,” security expert.

Boelter, said to have left behind a “kill list” on which the names of two Democratic state legislators appear, isof this writing at large and a suspect, not yet proven guilty. (Update: A housemate of Boelter says he texted the day of the killings to say goodbye, declaring that he might soon be dead. A car full of Boelter’s relatives, including his wife, was stopped the following day, containing “weapon, ammunition, cash and passports.”)

Either way, though, there’s this theology. “Violent prayer.” The religion of culture war, increasingly lurching toward something worse. When I decided to subtitle my book The Undertow “Scenes from a Slow Civil War” in 2022, I worried—and hoped—that by the time the book came out in 2023 that phrase would seem hyperbolic. Now, in 2025, it’s starting to feel too tame. It’s still “slow”; but it’s speeding up.

In 2024, at the Christ for the Nations Institute, I met a student at the Institute, a pleasant young man who wanted to pursue music ministry. I asked him about “violent prayer.” It was necessary, he said, to remind yourself every day that “the culture”—the rest of us, the unsaved—are the enemy. He clarified: “Not you, in particular,” he said. “Just, you know, the culture.” He wasn’t a killer.

Around 2, 3 am this morning, somebody in Minnesota was.

I stopped by at Christ for the Nations Institute because I was Dallas to speak at a very different church, First Unitarian, which has 60-year history of fighting for reproductive rights and through volunteers continue to aid people seeking abortions make their way to other states. It’s stepped up for trans rights, too. For my talk, the church hired off-duty cops as security. Because a church on the front lines of struggle for so long knows something about the violent prayers of others.

As it happens, Vance Boelter was involved in reproductive rights, too. According to Wired, he was the former president of “Revoformation Ministries,” and as a missionary in Congo—or, possibly, an aspiring oilman, or both—apparently preached a sermon in 2023 against churches that don’t fight abortion. “God,” Boelter wrote in his sermon, “will raise an apostle or prophet to correct their course.”

The hit list said to be Boelter’s included along with the names of Democratic politicians those of abortion providers and pro-choice activists; the addresses of Planned Parenthood clinics. Boelter joins the theological tradition of murder for “life,” heir to the so-called “Army of God,” a long list of killers, bombers, kidnappers, poisoners, and arsonists whose names need no recitation.

One of Boelter’s victims, Yvette Hoffman, threw herself in front of her daughter when Boelter opened fire. She took Boelter’s bullet to save her child’s life.

In a video of a 2022 sermon delivered by Boelter, he cites Galatians 5:22-3: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

Let us assume that between 2022 and 2025, something eroded or broke in the mind of Vance Boelter, that the “self-control” he preached in 2022 wasn’t then the discipline with which he carefully outfitted a vehicle to pass as a police SUV, the evident skill with which, having committed murder—or, in his mind, a righteous act of holy war—he now evades accountability to preserve only one life, his own. The next line of Galatians, though, filtered through the mad-mind of zealotry, can be read to justify such deceptions: “Against such things there is no law.”

Is it too much to think of the “theology” of another man who has come to speak of himself as chosen by God? “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible.”

Boelter, we know, was a Trump supporter, but he was a student of the man who preached a violent-prayer-a-day, the founder of Boelter alma mater Christ for the Nations Institute, Gordon Lindsay. We can no more pin Boelter’s crimes on Lindsay than we can say he’s the “fruit” of Trumpism’s spirit of political violence; the criminal bears the true weight of his actions. But it’s worth a moment to trace some of the tributaries which feed into an assassin’s death dreams.

Gordon Lindsay was born in 1906, in what was then called Zion City, Illinois (today just Zion). It had only recently been established as a “Christian utopia”—or, some said, a massive exercise in securities fraud perpetrated by faith healer John Alexander Dowie, of whom Lindsay’s father was a follower. As a young man, Lindsay would attribute to another faith healer his own recovering from “poisoning,” via exposure to this verse from the Book of Acts—seen here as depicted in a movie about Lindsay made by Christ for the Nations—sometimes taken by antisemites that Jews are “Christ-killers.”

The Christ for the Nations film skips over the late 1930s and early 40s, during which Lindsay was involved with British Israelism, an antisemitic movement which maintained that Anglo-Saxons were the true Israelites, not the Jews. That movement was forerunner of the white supremacist Christian Identity movement. In 1940, Lindsay organized the “Anglo-Saxon World Federation Convention,” which was about what it sounds like.

Lindsay also preached through the far more mainstream Assemblies of God, a large Pentecostal denomination. If you’re not familiar with it, there’s probably an Assemblies of God church near you, and almost all of the people you’d find there would be just as horrified by Boelter’s actions. And yet, I think of that Christian metaphor particularly resonant within the Pentecostal tradition from which Christ for the Nations descends, that of “spiritual war.” To the outsider, it can sounds menacing; to the believer, it refers primarily to internal, personal struggle to resist “the culture” of the sort the young man majoring in music ministry at Christ for the Nations described to me.

I’m pulling up from the comments below a description of the institute’s teachings from an alumna, Jessica Stradinger:

I actually attended CFNI for just under a year. (It was strongly suggested I leave before the end of the second semester.)

I can verify the teachings of "them vs us" mentality. We were told museums of nature and science were "temples to Satan." We were told Deep Ellum, a section of Dallas with tattoo parlors and venues/clubs primarily, was evil and to never go there. Homosexuality was demonized and conversion therapy applauded. We were told to attend anti-abortion rallies. I actually got angry in the moment at the rhetoric preached here. The rest made me feel uneasy, but this one infuriated me in the moment. It was dehumanizing anyone prochoice. We were not to listen to any music that wasn't Christian or classical, no movies that were beyond PG. People would accuse roommates who dared dress alternatively of being demon possessed. A lot of speaking in tongues and being "slain in the spirit." If you were not an ardent supporter, you didn't hear from God and had no voice.

I'd like to add, the creation science course was taught by Gordon Lindsay's son. Who also wrote the required reading and workbook. Reading "On the Origin of Species" was considered immoral and words of Satan.

That emphasis on Satan as an actual entity who needs to be contested not just spiritually but in the material world is central to Christian nationalism’s flattening of metaphor. Ephesians 6:12, a verse beloved in the traditions of Lindsay and Boelter, tempts the believer to project “spiritual war” outward, against “against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

There are different ways to wage spiritual war, some more literal than others. Faith healing, of the sort practiced in Lindsay’s tradition and in the modern ministries in which Boelter preached, makes of “spiritual war” a physicalized reality. And in researching my 2010 book C Street, I learned of senior U.S. military officers who’d come to describe the actual war they fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as “spiritual war.” I wrote of an incident in Samarra which a young American lieutenant, following their theological lead, instructed a translator to write in Arabic, on the side of a Bradley fighting vehicle, “Jesus Killed Muhammad.” Then he used it to roll into war, opening fire door to door.

Metaphors don’t just reflect reality, they shape it. Like actual war, spiritual war presupposes an enemy so dangerous and so unreasonable that violence is the only logical response. “The Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence,” says Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, “and violent men take it by force.”

For the close reader of scripture, that’s another metaphor; for Boelter’s Christian nationalist tradition, it’s a religion based on the “deep and holy goodness of masculine aggression,” in the words of fundamentalist author John Eldredge’s 2001 bestselling guide to spiritual war, Wild at Heart, still in print, which advised wives to gift their men actual broad swords as symbols of their warrior nature. Did Boelter, who boasted of bringing the gospel to “Islamic militants” in Gaza, who listed himself as “director of patrols” of the security firm he ran with his wife, Praetorian Guard, read this particular volume? If he’s caught, maybe we can ask him. But we don’t have to wonder whether he read the Word through theology of prayer as a violent devotion.

In Gordon Lindsay’s later years, explicit antisemitism and white nationalism don’t seem to have played a significant role in his faith healing ministry, and today Christ for the Nations Institute is diverse. But it continues to fuel holy war. Its most famous graduate, writes Frederick Clarkson—and later its executive director—is the “Apostle” Dutch Sheets, a key figure in the “prophecies” that animated many January 6th insurrectionists. It remains committed to a Christian nationalism it expresses through “violent prayer,” a spiritual practice some take all too literally.