The White House Correspondents’ dinner is supposed to be a roomful of journalists laughing at jokes about themselves. This year a young man named Cole Tomas Allen tried to interrupt the program with a shotgun. He had also, before driving over, written a letter to his family explaining why.
What he explained does not take long to read. The document has spread online, and the President has discussed it in interviews. It runs to barely two pages.
The letter opens with “Hello everybody!” Allen apologizes to his parents for saying he had a job interview. He didn’t say it was for “Most Wanted.” He says sorry to his students for the lie about a personal emergency. He says sorry to the hotel staff for the danger he was about to put them in.
He gives himself a nickname: “Friendly Federal Assassin.” He is no longer willing to let the current administration’s crimes, as he sees them, go on unanswered. He plans to shoot administration officials in order of rank. He chose buckshot rather than slugs, since buckshot travels less through walls. The tone, throughout, is cheerful.
Allen lays out five objections to his own plan and answers each one. The answers are short. Some are very short. Asked what he would say to the charge that he didn’t get them all, Allen writes: “Gotta start somewhere.”
Two of those objections come from Christian scripture. Allen takes on “turn the other cheek” and the charge that he should render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. He writes as a Christian — or at least as a man who expects to be judged by Christians.
Christians have argued themselves into political violence before, and they have usually done so at length. Dietrich Bonhoeffer joined the plot to kill Hitler. His prison letters and the unfinished Ethics show a deeply thoughtful man. John Brown, the abolitionist, gave speeches and wrote tracts before Harper’s Ferry. They weren’t right in the way they thought they were. But they knew that taking a human life on God’s behalf called for, at minimum, the effort of having thought about it.
Allen’s manifesto does land one point. Asked about turning the other cheek, he writes that the command applies when you yourself are the one struck. It does not apply when someone else is being harmed. He’s right about that part. Christian patience under personal injury is one thing; standing by while a neighbor is crushed is quite another. Scripture has a great deal to say about defending the weak.
What it does not say is that any man who notices an injustice may pick up a shotgun and head for the nearest gathering of his political enemies. Lawful resistance to a lawless authority runs through actual law and actual office. A lone man rushing a security checkpoint is the opposite of that order.
Serious Christian engagement with political grievance starts with prayer. But the Christian need not abstain from politics. Anabaptists try to do this, as do their modern-day heirs, the Mennonites.
Christians have the same means of civic engagement: persuasion, organization, the long slow work of running for office, sitting on boards, writing letters. Civil disobedience is also permitted. But there is a high bar for resistance to the authorities God has placed over us. In the Bible, God’s people resist when worship is forbidden or sin is commanded.
And even as Biblical figures resist the state’s rules, they submit to the justice system. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego show this in the Old Testament. Peter, John, Stephen, and Paul show it in the New. Jesus is the paradigm. Though he could call down more than twelve legions of angels, he allowed himself to be crucified.
Paul tells Timothy to pray for kings. Peter tells the believer to honor the emperor. This is rarely emotionally satisfying advice. Allen’s path skipped centuries of Christian wisdom, settling for garden-variety political violence.
“Gotta start somewhere,” Allen wrote. Every Christian has to start somewhere. Jesus is fairly direct about where. He says to look first at the log in your own eye, before troubling yourself with the speck in your brother’s. He says that whoever would follow Him must take up his own cross. The starting place He sets is not to take aim at a gathering of enemies. It is to face the sinner in the mirror. There is more than enough work there to occupy any of us for a lifetime, and almost none of it requires a shotgun.
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Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
