When the Pastor Has a Badge: On ICE, the Pulpit, and the Governance Formation That Lets Both Stand

Indhira Udofia
May 7
5 min read

Untangling the Knot | April 2026

Untangling the Knot is where the web's structure gets named. Mapping tells us where the threads are. Reading tells us what is vibrating. Untangling asks the harder question: what design makes this pattern legible as normal, and whose body pays the cost of its legibility?

In January, in a suburb of St. Paul, four Black women walked into a church service on a Sunday morning and refused to stay quiet.

The pastor they were protesting is, by day, a federal officer in charge of an ICE field office in the Twin Cities. By another day, he preaches. These are not, in his life, separate vocations. The same man who signs the order to detain the mother of three congregants one Thursday stands behind a pulpit Sunday morning and reads from a text that says I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

The women who walked into the service were themselves ordained ministers and civil rights organizers. The leader of the group, Nekima Levy Armstrong, is a reverend and a lawyer. They did what the tradition has always taught them to do: they interrupted the service when the service had become complicit with harm. The administration responded by threatening them with arrest.

I want to sit with this story because it is a laboratory for what Untangling the Knot actually does.

The Knot Is Not 'Is This Wrong?'

The knot is not whether a man can hold both jobs. That question has a short answer, and the answer is that he cannot hold both jobs with integrity, because the vocations are in direct opposition. The one vocation asks him to obey a law that separates families. The other vocation asks him to confess a God who crosses borders to find us. One of those vocations is the state speaking. The other vocation is the state being confronted.

The knot is not the ethical question. The knot is the governance question.

The knot is: how does the institutional church arrive at the configuration in which a man can hold both, and the men who sign his denominational credentials can shake his hand at the regional meeting, and the elders of his board can introduce him as their pastor from the pulpit, and the Sunday service can proceed as if nothing is wrong, and the people who say something is wrong can be threatened with arrest?

That is a structural question. It does not have an individual answer.

What the Formation Teaches the Congregation

There is a specific governance formation that makes this configuration possible, and it is worth naming its logic out loud because the logic is rarely audible from inside the sanctuary.

The formation teaches the congregation that the pastor's exterior life — his job, his salary, his civic conduct — is not the church's business. The congregation's job is what happens inside the sanctuary. What the pastor does Monday through Saturday is between him and God. The congregation's job is to receive the word, not audit the weekday.

The formation teaches the congregation that disruption is spiritually dangerous. To interrupt a service is to grieve the Spirit, break the flow of worship, dishonor the anointing. The reflexive condemnation is not of the harm being interrupted. It is of the interrupter.

The formation teaches the congregation that obedience to the state is a Christian virtue — Romans 13, stripped of Romans 12 and Romans 14 and the rest of the letter and the rest of the canon — and that to protest the state in a worship context is to confuse the orders of creation.

The formation does not require anyone to be a bad person. It only requires the formation to be in place.

With the formation in place, a man who cages families on weekdays can stand behind a pulpit on Sunday and the congregation will not leave. Without the formation, that configuration is unsustainable.

This is what governance formation analysis is for. It is not a rhetorical frame. It is a diagnostic.

What Anancy Sees in This Knot

Aunt Nancy would sit with this web for a long time before she would pull the first thread. She would want to know: who wove the authorization? Which denominational structure ordained the pastor? Which congregational polity declined to ask about his other job? Which theological training told him his secular vocation and his sacred vocation were separate halls of the same house? Which members of the congregation knew and said nothing because they were afraid of what naming it would cost them in their own standing with the church? Which said nothing because they were not afraid, they simply did not think it was their place?

Each of those questions traces a thread.

Each of those threads is attached to a larger weave.

The larger weave is that the American church, across denominations and racial lines, has spent generations developing theological grammars that permit individual members of the state's enforcement apparatus to understand themselves as faithful Christians while performing the state's daily violence. The formation that makes this possible is not accidental. It is the long fruit of a specific history: the chaplaincy of empire.

The Black church has historically been more suspicious of this formation than almost any other American Christian tradition, because the Black church knows what the state's violence feels like. But the Black church is not immune. The formation has been exported, imported, and naturalized in enough places that a pastor with an ICE badge can, in 2026, draw a paycheck from both institutions without the incoherence registering as incoherent in the room where he preaches.

That is the knot.

Why the Interruption Was Sacred

When Levy Armstrong and the others walked into that service, they were not desecrating the sanctuary. They were performing one of the oldest offices of the Black prophetic tradition.

The tradition teaches that the preacher does not have the last word. The prophet does. When the preacher's preaching has been compromised — when the preacher has, by his own secular labor, nullified the credibility of the text he is preaching — the prophetic tradition authorizes the interruption. This is not a contemporary invention of identity politics. It is Amos walking uninvited into the royal shrine at Bethel. It is Jeremiah standing at the temple gate. It is Fannie Lou Hamer in the 1964 convention. It is the women of the AME who would not sit down when Jarena Lee began to preach.

The interruption is the tradition. The administration threatening arrest for the interruption is the state attempting to annex the tradition into its enforcement apparatus.

Anancy sees this clearly. The state is not trying to quiet four women. The state is trying to quiet the practice of the tradition itself, because the tradition, practiced, is the only thing that consistently names the state's violence by name.

What Untangling Requires

You do not untangle this knot by firing this pastor. You do not untangle it by resolving this specific congregation's crisis.

You untangle it by naming the formation. By making the governance question the subject of the conversation in denominational assemblies, seminary classrooms, ordination committees, Sunday school curricula. By asking, out loud, in every body where the question can be asked: what does our tradition say about a pastor whose weekday vocation is in direct contradiction to his Sunday proclamation, and what mechanisms do we have to hold the contradiction accountable?

If the answer is we have none, the formation has told you something about itself.

Untangling begins when the formation has to answer.

— Church Gworl Maroon

Sources and related work: Democracy Now!, 'Nekima Levy Armstrong on the Minneapolis ICE Protest' (Jan 2026); Amos 7:10–17; Jeremiah 7; Romans 12–14; related: 'It's Not One Pastor. It's the System.' (Untangling the Knot); 'The Threshold Guardian' (Reading the Vibration).