The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Monday, January 19, 2026

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.Part I (00:14 – 06:11)It Happened in Minnesota: ICE Protestors Invaded an Evangelical Church and Interrupted Worship YesterdayActivists interrupt Sunday church service, say pastor works for ICE by The Star Tribune (Kim Hyatt and Kyeland Jackson)Part II (06:11 – 15:23)The Worldview Issues of the ICE Protests: The History of ICE, the Protests Against ICE, and the Leftist Capture of Urban Minnesota by Part III (15:23 – 22:27)Minnesota’s Fault Lines: The Growing Divide Between Minnesota’s Big City Liberals and Rural Conservatives by Part IV (22:27 – 25:59)A Parable From St. Paul: We are Watching a Battle Between Two Different Visions of ChristianitySign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

It's Monday, January 19, 2006. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Tension had been building in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, for a matter of weeks. And yesterday, what can only be described as the unthinkable happened. An evangelical church was interrupted in worship by protesters who burst through the doors, very loudly, scaring children, shouting, blowing whistles, interrupt. and bringing to an end to worship service, the church was City's Church there in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the accusation being made by the protesters was that one of the pastors of the church is connected to ICE. Indeed, one of the pastors of the church is the acting director of the ICE office,

field office there in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm not going to mention this name just simply for security reasons at this point, but let's remind ourselves that this is the Immigration and Customs enforcement service of the United States. It is an official branch of the United States. It is a law enforcement agency, just like any other federal law enforcement agency. ICE agents are federal law enforcement agents, period. So let's just get this straight. Yesterday, protesters, leftist agitators, and by the way, that's exactly what they are, in this case aided and abetted by former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who was videoing the entire thing, offering his own commentary. They interrupted the worship service, basically bringing it to an end, and you can see the video for yourself. You can understand

how so many people in that evangelical congregation were scared, and you had children and teenagers clearly traumatized by the entire event. It's a scandal. It's a scandal that something like this could happen in the United States of America. It is a scandal that so many in American politics and in popular culture, entertainment, all the rest, are on the side of the protesters who just broke into an evangelical church gathered for Christian worship on the Lord's Day. The major newspaper there in the Twin Cities area is the Star Tribune, and in its coverage, the stories described this way, quote, protesters disrupted a St. Paul church service on Sunday after activists determined one of the

pastor's works as the acting director of ICE's field office in St. Paul, end quote. What took place in St. Paul in that church yesterday is a page. right out of the radical activist manuals of the 1960s. Agitators such as Paul Olensky became leftist ideologues who basically set the agenda for how these kinds of protests would take place. Maximum media coverage, maximum impact, maximum disruption. And you'll notice that all the arguments put forward follow a very predictable pattern. The report in the Star Tribune stated, quote, when activists discovered, and I'm not going to say the man's name, is a local pastor, they decided to mobilize, they said.

Quote, this man is a wolf in sheep's clothing, masquerading as a pastor, who said that. Well, Nekima Levy Armstrong, identified as a local attorney, activist, and reverend. End quote. Three strikes, she's out. When you see these kinds of liberal activists identified as a reverend,

you just need to know what's going on here. This is very much out of the playbook of the activism of the political and theological left in the United States. Mainline Protestantism, the way, is becoming so feminized that if you look at this article, almost all the liberal pastors mentioned in this, or reverends, they are women. And that's what's happening in these churches, and the leadership at every single level. And by the way, that is an absolute corollary in terms

of the direction of these denominations with theological liberalism. You can tell exactly what you're dealing with here. Harmi, Dillon, Assistant Attorney General of the United States, announced yesterday that responding to the videos that were very much spreading through social media, he said that they would launch an investigation, quote, the Civil Rights Division is investigating the potential violations of the Federal Face Act, F-A-C-E Act, by these people desecrating a House of Worship and interfering with Christian Worshippers. The Assistant Attorney General went on to say that federal officials are, quote, investigating potential criminal violations of federal law, end quote.

Well, and good they should. Let's just remind ourselves some basic facts. Ice is very much on the ground, mobilized there in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region is the most populous within the state. And for a good reason, President Trump has mobilized the federal authorities in an effort to try to identify and then to deport those who are immigrants to this country without legal documentation. Now, there's a lot of controversy about this, and tensions have been running particularly high there in Minnesota, is a particularly liberal state in more than one way. We're going to talk a little bit more about the worldview contours of the state of Minnesota, but the most important thing to understand is that

local political leaders have really been amping the energy there. They have really been mobilizing, trying to make Minneapolis-St. Paul ground zero of an effort, in their view, declared basically an effort to stop the Trump administration and the ICE efforts there in Minneapolis and beyond. And so the tensions are running really high. And we're talking about local citizens and there is a very thick, liberal, leftist ideological activism group there in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota in general, or urban Minnesota, as we're going to see. And they've even been passing out whistles. They have been trying to interfere with ICE actions. They've been protesting. And of course, this led to a horrible incident in which a woman was killed when she refused to get out of her car or

even to stop her car when she was told to do so by ICE agents. All of this is simply leading to a situation in which we need to see the left is determined it's going to draw a line there in Minnesota. It's going to draw a line and it wants to bring all this to a stop. Now, there are huge worldview issues, of course, implicated in this. And there are so many, as a matter of fact, we're going to have to take some care and just trying to line them out. First of all, what are we talking about in terms of ice? Well, let's just remind ourselves that that that organization came about through the consolidation of other federal programs and the expansion of federal law enforcement in the aftermath of the 9-11-2001 attacks. And so what had been previously

customs enforcement, what had been the immigration control, it was all consolidated and expanded in terms of the development of ICE. That came about by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. the INS and the Customs Service, that's the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Custom Service were combined. All of it was expanded simply because of the fact that the challenges to the security of the United States were growing so large. There was vast bipartisan support. There was not even really controversy over the development of ICE back by the Homeland Security Act in 2002. And by the way, does the federal government have the authority to do this kind of thing? the answer is absolutely yes. And if you're looking for a footnote or a point of documentation,

we'll go to a Supreme Court decision in 1876, which stated very clearly that the federal government has the authority to police immigration and to define who is and is not a legal entrant into the United States, which means that the states and municipalities are not supposed to interfere with the federal government's authority in this area. That is exactly what these leftist activists are determined to do. And here's one of the great divides in this country. There are those who absolutely do not want anyone ever to be removed, and that means whether they acknowledge it or not, they're basically for open borders. And open borders is, as any rational person should understand, the absolute redefinition of the nation, and eventually its transformation

into something else. Open borders means that virtually anyone from anywhere around the world can enter. Now, those who are supposedly for this, they will say, of course, we want security screens and all the rest, but all of that has been shown to be woefully inadequate, and frankly, the arguments are now blatantly dishonest. Now, let's go back to the church. Let's understand that an evangelical church, a Southern Baptist church, gathered for worship on the Lord's Day, was invaded by leftist agitators, let's say ate at and abetted by a media figure such as Don Lemon, videoing it all. They entered into the church. They brought Christian worship to an end. And as you see in that statement that I read from the Star Tribune, they made the accusation that one of the pastors, one of the

elders is, quote, a wolf and sheep's clothing, masquerading as a pastor. And the accusation is simply based in the fact that he is the acting director of the field office of a law enforcement branch of the United States government. Now, if you're old enough to remember the 1960s, and I realize that's a decreasing number, then you realize this is right out of the playbook from the activists, the leftist, the Marxists, the revolutionaries of the 1960s. Why in Minnesota now? And the answer is, Minnesota historically has had an extremely liberal political culture. And that liberal political culture is marked by social liberalism, economic liberalism. And when you look at a state like Minnesota, it is more than any other state in the United States, seeking to emulate.

the social welfare states of especially the Scandinavian areas. And one of the reasons is that so many of the historic immigrants into Minnesota were from those Scandinavian nations, you have also had the deliberate effort to establish Minnesota as a laboratory for liberal policies and liberal politics in the United States. Back in the middle of the 20th century, it was transformed into the Democratic Farm Labor Party, a coalition of liberal parties that came together.

it basically functions as the Democratic Party, but it was brought about by liberal political scientists in the academy and other activists who sought to try, once again, to create in Minnesota a liberal laboratory for social welfare policies. And when it comes to political activism on the left, well, Minnesota has been ground zero. Now, of course, there's all kinds of controversy there, including controversy over a scandal concerning the misuse of millions of dollars, federal tax dollars, so social welfare programs there in Minnesota. Governor Tim Walls, who, after all, is not only the Democratic governor in his second term, with all this controversy, he's announced

he's not running for a third term. But remember, he was the vice presidential nominee, the Democratic Party, as recently as the 2024 presidential election. And you'll notice that there aren't many national Democrats wanting to have their photograph taken with Governor Walls right now. That's for good reason. But you also see liberal mayors like, or Jacob Frey there in Minneapolis, seeing themselves as part of a national revolution, which is also, as we know now, a national soap opera. Let me just state a basic fact, which we need to keep in mind, and that is that to be a nation, to be a nation in virtually any sense, is to have control over your own borders, a defined

territory, and control over who does and does not enter your own territory with legal permission. And citizenship is a category, particularly of the modern nation state, but the roots of citizenship go back into the ancient world. Just consider the apostle Paul, citing the fact that he was not only born within the confines of the Roman Empire. As he stated, he was a citizen of Rome, and that meant something then. It certainly means something now. But in the giant worldview divide that increasingly marks blue and red America, blue America and the cultural elites, the academics and the political activists on the left, they are basically against any meaningful enforcement of immigration laws. And frankly, our immigration laws are a mess. And the left really

doesn't want to fix that at all. Instead, what you have here in the red and blue is to some degree also the parallel conflict over nationalism and globalism. And if you see those as the two alternatives, you understand that the anti-ice agenda is. very much correlated with that more globalist agenda, global identity, so it's individual identity and then global identity, a decreased emphasis or even recognition of the role of the nation state, red America sees it very, very differently. And I think the average American is likely to see it very differently, whether that average American understands the issues most fundamentally at stake or not. But what we have right now in this country is a political impasse because neither

the left nor the right has had a workable political majority that would allow it to press through some kind of meaningful immigration reform. And thus the nation has been in an impasse. The idea of doing this kind of reform in a bipartisan way is, well, as contemporary attention show, probably something of an illusion. It might become possible under certain political circumstances, but not these political circumstances. President Trump ran on the platform of opposing what he described was the basic open borders policy of the Biden administration. Now, I think there's no doubt the Biden administration,

either deliberately or out of incompetence, lost control of the nation's borders. And you're looking at unprecedented levels of illegal immigration into the United States. Now, there's a crass issue here that is very much a part of this. It's a matter of math. You have many people on the left who think, that a vast numbers of immigrants into the United States will serve the purpose of basically

redefining the political landscape at the expense of the Republican Party and historic Republican constituencies. And one of the reasons for that is that when you look at immigration, the immigrants tend to go to established metropolitan areas, which tend to be more liberal than rural areas. One of the great frustrations of the left, and in particular of the Democratic Party in recent, decades, is that they can continue to win many elections, but they can't win over red America. They at this point cannot put together a political coalition of any kind of stability that will bring in moderates and conservatives. And the reason is because I think, as this action shows, really the party is under the control of extremely liberal activists. Now, you might say,

well, it wasn't so much elected senators and members of Congress. Congress that were a part of this invasion force in an evangelical church. No, but watch very carefully, how many of them will dare to criticize the action? I think that's going to be a woefully small number, and that's going to be very revealing. Well, speaking of red and blue America and this issue, before the church invasion yesterday, I had intended today to talk about recent observations, for example, in yesterday's edition of the New York Times front page article in Minnesota, two stark views about a victim. And this has to do, of course, with the ice involved shooting there.

What the subtitle makes clear is, quote, a rural urban divide reflected at a bar. Okay, now that means, in this case, literally a bar. And the bar in this case is in Niswa, Minnesota. It is known as the Old Pickle Factory. and it is a gathering place for people there in this small town in rural Minnesota, and the point of this article is they're not liberal. As a matter of fact, they are now very predictably Republican in their voting pattern. And the article makes the historical observation that that's new.

If you were to go back, say, a half century, the Democrats would have claimed these voters. Now, Republicans do. And one of the reasons this made very clear in this article that these rural voters are very, much opposed to the liberal direction of cities, and several of them said they're even so scared they don't like to go to Minneapolis or St. Paul. But it is because of the leftist capture of the Democratic Party, and especially of the cities, you really do have this divide. And so when you think of Minnesota, you think especially of its history of voting for Democratic presidential candidates and electing liberals and statewide votes. But that's because of the votes overwhelmingly

cast in the metropolitan areas, the urban areas, and that means most importantly Minneapolis, St. Paul. The team of reporters for the New York Times reported the story this way, quote, this is the divide in a single sentence, and that has to do with whether or not the ice-involved shooting was legitimate. Quote, in Minneapolis, protesters saw an innocent woman killed by a federal agent and took to the streets at the pickle, that's this bar in small town, Minnesota, quote, the regular saw a woman who should have complied. Now, on the briefing, I have often made the observation that urban areas, let's just say cities, are in general far more liberal than rural areas. But that divide

is not lessening in our contemporary times. Instead, it's becoming even more stark. The developments right now in Minnesota are making that incredibly clear. Even in the liberal Minnesota, rural Minnesota ain't going liberal. And I think the New York Times, which after all is a liberal newspaper published in New York of all places, I think the reporters are working hard to say these are two very different worldviews, two very different ways of looking at the same video and drawing conclusions. And that was true of the video of the death of Renee Good. It is also true now of the video of this leftist invasion of an evangelical church. People are going to see what they want to see. But let me just tell you, they can't deny in the case of this invasion of the church

that there was no right of these protesters to enter the private space to enter and disrupt evangelical worship. It's going to be, as I say, very interesting to see how many people, for instance, in the Democratic Party have the nerve to come out and say that was wrong. That's going to be very telling. Now, just in recent days, specialists and analysts looking at the political scene, including some consultants who are very friendly to the Democratic Party, have said the obvious, and that is that the great danger to the Democratic Party is that its national leaders and those running at statewide levels across the country aren't going to be able to say this was wrong. They're not going to have the courage to say this is wrong, because in doing so, they will incur

the wrath of the left of their own party. And apparently right now, that is the one thing they are unwilling to do. The Times article noted this, quote, this area, meaning that rural Minnesota area, like most of rural Minnesota, vote solidly Republican. It was not always this way. For decades, rural Minnesota was home to moderate Democrats who would vote for candidates from their own party who aligned with their views. The rightward shift, says the Times, was catalyzed by the rise of Donald J. Trump. Now the regulars at the pickle that's at the bar say that what everyone in the region seems to agree on is that life there is safer and quieter than in the Twin Cities.

Listen to this. Quote, most of the regulars avoid Minneapolis if they can. They see the city is dangerous, out of control, and something to flee. One woman cited in the article there in rural Minnesota say, quote, I don't even want to go there, not since the George Floyd riots. I want to draw attention to one paragraph in this article. I'm going to quote here. There was a term for what Ms. Lynde and Mr. Jensen, as two of the people in the bar, are expressing, quote, Christopher Frederico, a professor of political science and psychology, the University of Minnesota calls it, quote, rural consciousness, a sense that living in a rural area comes with consequences, less political power, fewer resources, less respect.

End quote. I'll just say that this academic, and he may be quoted out of context here, but this appears to be a term of art, rural consciousness, that effectively says nothing. I think if he's indicative of what it means to be in Minneapolis or St. Paul looking at rural Minnesota, this is the reason why they just don't get it. I do think at this point we just need to recognize that the great divide we're talking about here. Conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, yes, although that's the not the most significant issue in worldview terms. What you're looking at is secular religious, and you're looking at,

of course, liberal conservative left, right. But it's really interesting to note that when you look at this particular kind of conflict, it's also interesting to see that the great theological divide within American, let's just say Protestantism, let's just put it that way, is fully in evidence. I mean, you're looking here at what Jay Gresham-Machin declared over a century ago. You're looking not just at two different polarities within American denominational life. You're looking at two different religions. And the religion that was going on on the streets and burst into the church is a different religion from the evangelical Christianity that was being preached and was professed by that church there, that evangelical Southern Baptist Church. And I'm keeping some of the names at a minimum simply because I

do not want to give any further opportunity for the kind of targeting of these groups. It's way out there in the public, but I'm going to do my best to reduce their exposure. But we are looking here at something that is so fundamentally at odds with our understanding of what should be right in the world. We're talking about protesters breaking into an evangelical church in worship, scaring children, teenagers, and frankly just about everyone there in terms of their intent anyway. and they were doing so because of their outrage at the fact that one of the leaders of the church, in this case one of the elders, pastors of the church, is the acting field director for the ICE office. But you'll notice they went in and they attempted at least to make a theological argument

to say that this is illegitimate. He should not be serving. And at the same time, what you have here is the exposure of two completely different theologies, two different understandings of what Christianity is all about. It is also true that liberal Christianity, it's just talking less and less about Christianity. It's talking openly more and more about political activism. And I think that's entirely predictable. The minimal theology that liberals have held to in these mainline denominations is becoming so thin, they increasingly don't even feel the need to cite it much. All evangelical Christians, all Christians of goodwill should be praying for this church,

for its pastor, for its pastoral team, its elders, for its members, for its young people who were very clearly shaken by this intrusion. But you know what? We also, as Christians have to understand that as horrible as this is, and as much as we need to call upon law enforcement and especially federal authorities to take the requisite action, this also may in its own way, by the providence of God provide an incredible opportunity for gospel witness by this church and by Christians in this area, we all know there are many. many faithful Christians there in the Twin Cities area, some very important influential ministries there, very gospel-centered, many of them. And that fundamental divide between liberal and

conservative Protestantism, and let me be clear, I believe, that evangelical Christians holding to the gospel are authentic Protestantism and authentic Christianity. I think that divide is so stark and now so undeniable that this becomes a touchstone as we look to the future and understand how events are going to unfold in the United States. And we have to pray that for this church, and for all of us, this may lead to even greater gospel opportunities. But it also is going to have to bring about a fundamental reassessment of an awful lot of judgments, looking at these issues. We're going to have to remember that we as Christians do believe in legally constituted order. We do believe in legitimate government, Romans 13. We really do believe in legitimate government action.

and we really do believe that certified law enforcement agents of the government of the United States of America need to be recognized for their authority and for the legitimacy of their mission. That doesn't mean that anyone in the federal government is beyond investigation or accountability. It does mean that if we do not have basic order and respect for our federal government all the way down even to all the initials for all those federal agencies, if we don't have respect for law enforcement of the federal area, no place is going to be safe. There's a lot more that's going to unfold here over the next several days,

even over the next several hours. This is so important, I'm sure we'll be talking about it again very quickly. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website at Albertmohler.com. You can follow me on X or Twitter by going to X.com forward slash Albert Moller. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to

voicecollege.com. I'm speaking to you from Polk County, Florida, and I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.