Let me be clear from the start: I do not condone what Cole Allen did. I do not support political violence. Not as strategy. Not as justice. Not as an answer to anything.

Past that, what follows is more complicated than the country wants to admit.

Cole Allen is 31 years old. A Caltech mechanical engineering graduate with a master’s in computer science. Son of an elder at Grace United Reformed Church in Torrance. A part-time teacher and tutor. Ten minutes before he charged a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives, he sent his family a letter.

Trump told the country Allen “hates Christians.” That Allen “was a Christian, a believer, and then he became anti-Christian.”

That is not what the letter says.

Multiple theologians and religious scholars consulted by Newsweek read the manifesto carefully and reached the same conclusion: Allen did not write as someone who hates Christianity. He wrote as someone who believed himself to be acting from within it. He thanked his church family. He cited scripture throughout. He engaged with the theological objection to violence — “turn the other cheek” — and answered it with a reading that sits, however distorted, inside a recognizable Christian moral tradition.

“Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed,” he wrote. “Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

He addressed the “render unto Caesar” question by noting that the United States is governed by law, not by men, and that an unlawful order does not bind a citizen’s conscience.

Those readings are not invented out of nowhere. They echo Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who concluded that the German church’s silence before Nazism was itself a form of violence. They echo every Black church pastor who marched in 1965. They echo the Catholic Church, which invoked just-war doctrine this month to condemn the Iran war.

Trump’s characterization of Allen as anti-Christian is not just wrong. It is a deliberate inversion of the truth, designed to redirect his base and obscure the fact that a man from a conservative Reformed church just attempted an assassination while citing scripture.

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Let me say plainly what Allen’s letter actually shows — and why it is an indictment of American Christian leadership.

The pastors of the American right-wing church have spent years failing their congregations on the things that matter most. They have blessed every war, every tax cut for the wealthy, every cruelty toward the immigrant and the poor. They turned Christianity into a political brand and called it faithfulness. They voted 81% for a man who bragged about sexual assault on tape, and they called it a mandate from God.

Matthew 23 records Jesus describing religious leaders who “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel” — obsessing over minor ritual questions while ignoring justice, mercy, and faithfulness. The American right-wing church has done this in every measurable way for decades. It built Jerry Falwell’s empire and the Religious Right. It propped up segregation from the pulpit. It blessed every war.

A 31-year-old in Torrance read the text more honestly than the men with the seminary degrees and the megachurch parking lots.

That is the indictment of American Christian leadership in one sentence.

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Allen’s action was catastrophically wrong. The cross a person of conscience is called to carry is their own — not a weapon turned on someone else. He knew it. His own letter shows he knew it. He wrote to whoever might be reading: “Can’t really recommend it. Stay in school, kids.”

He was a person carrying a weight that broke him. Both things are true simultaneously. The choice was his. The weight was real.

The weight is real for millions of people right now. To pay attention in this country — to refuse to look away from what is happening — is to live inside grief every single day.

As of January 20, 2026, according to modeling by ImpactCounter tracked by Health Policy Watch, 757,314 people — the majority of them children — have died as a result of the Trump administration’s USAID funding cuts. That is one policy. That number does not include the tens of thousands of Americans projected to die from Medicaid cuts. It does not include the people deported into countries where they face death. It does not include what the Iran war has already cost.

Three quarters of a million people, mostly children, dead from one signature line on one piece of paper. And the people defending the man who signed it are demanding we perform unbroken grief over a close call at a hotel dinner.

I refuse.

Trump wants to compare himself to Abraham Lincoln. Scripture has a different framework. First Peter 4 draws a line between suffering that has spiritual weight — suffering taken on for righteousness — and suffering that is simply the bill coming due on the life you have built.

Paul Pelosi had his skull fractured with a hammer. Trump turned it into a punchline at a California GOP convention. Dead soldiers were “losers” and “suckers.” John McCain was attacked for months after his death from brain cancer. A Gold Star widow was told her husband “knew what he signed up for.”

The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord. That is scripture. James 5. We are not required to add tears on top.

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MAGA is flooding social media demanding to know why the left won’t extend the same courtesy they extended to Obama and Biden, neither of whom they wished dead.

That comparison is not clever. It is a confession that the people making it cannot tell the difference between political disagreement and watching preventable mass death in real time.

Nobody on the left threatened Obama or Bush or Biden because none of them were doing what Donald Trump is doing.

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There is a clinical name for what sustained exposure to systemic injustice does to a person who refuses to look away: moral injury. It is what happens when someone is forced to witness atrocities they cannot stop, inside a system that insists those atrocities are normal.

Allen reached his breaking point. The wound underneath his break is the wound millions of people are still carrying. He chose the wrong answer. He knew it when he chose it.

The right answer — the harder answer, the one that requires more courage than picking up a weapon — is to stay in it. Stay alive. Tell the truth. Refuse to become them.

The moment the resistance picks up the weapons of the people it is resisting, it hands those people the only justification their lies have ever needed. Violence from our side does not hurt them. It hands them everything.

Whatever you feel, however justified the feeling is — and the feeling is justified — the answer is never the gun.

Stay alive. Tell the truth. Vote. Organize. Show up in November in numbers too large to ignore.

That is the harder cross. It is supposed to be.