As bigoted media and government reports of the murder of Renee Good emphasize that the ICE officer who shot her was a "committed, conservative Christian," I want to emphasize that Renee Good was also a Christian, whose faith and values informed her actions.
Like many queer Christians, Renee grappled with her faith in the past, even winning a poetry award in 2020 for a poem exploring issues of faith and science. She'd discarded the bad (the poem mentions getting rid of "the parasitic kind" of bibles) while holding onto her faith's foundation of kindness, community, and love.
Her wife Rebecca Good remembers her thus:
“We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness. Renee lived this belief every day. She is pure love. She is pure joy. She is pure sunshine. Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: We are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.”
Like many queer folk in this day and age (and like so many immigrants), Renee Good, her wife, and their son had migrated for "the chance to make a better life" just last year, when they'd moved from a more conservative place (Kansas City, Missouri) to a more progressive one (Minneapolis). But no place is devoid of bigoted violence; it just takes different forms.
Good was murdered within 1 mile of where George Floyd, also a Christian devoted to helping his neighbors break out of cycles of violence, was murdered six years prior.
She is also only one of countless people, largely im/migrants & BIPOC, of many faiths and values who have died at ICE's hands — including Black US citizen Keith Porter, at least 30 detainees in 2025, and at least 4 detainees in these first few weeks of 2026 already.
Every single life is of infinite worth, and violence against im/migrants is just as heinous and needs to be decried just as loudly as violence against citizens. I focus on Good here because this post's purpose is to refuse to allow conservative Christians to control the narrative of what it means to follow Jesus.
My own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), claims Good as one of our own:
Ms. Good was one of us. She was a fellow Presbyterian. Edgewater Presbyterian Church in Illinois remembered her with these words: 'Renee Nicole Good lived out the conviction that every person deserves kindness, regardless of their background. …We mourn a fellow Presbyterian whose quiet smile and creative spirit touched lives from Colorado to Northern Ireland to Minnesota.'
In the PC(USA)'s official statement, which opens by connecting Good's death to Jesus's declaration that "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends" (John 15:13), Renee Good is placed among "a sacred lineage of faithful witnesses who have risked and lost their lives in defense of human dignity." Among these martyrs are the Rev. Elijah Lovejoy, who was murdered for his opposition to slavery, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
As the Rev. David Black, a PC(USA) pastor in Chicago, put it,
“When Jesus saw evil in the world, he put his body in the way and was tortured and executed by the state because of it. ...Renee’s life and death now stand within the lineage of Christian witness — not as a political slogan or a caricature, but as a summons to the church and to the broader society to see where people are oppressed, and to be present with them not merely in thoughts and prayers but with the presence and solidarity of our whole bodies.”
This "sacred lineage" challenges us to continue the the fight for liberation that they died for. For Renee in particular, her wife Becca tells us that
"We honor her memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love."
Black has experienced ICE's violence firsthand himself:
While protesting at an ICE detention center on September 19, he was shot with pepper balls after quoting Jesus's words to several officers: "Repent and believe the good news, that the Kingdom of God has come near" (Mark 1:15).
Black believes this incident went viral because “people recognize this is actually the consequence of Christian witness in the middle of an empire that calls itself Christian, and yet violently persecutes people who engage in real Bible-based, Jesus-centered Christian witness.”
Rev. Black emphasized that persons of various faiths and no faith have all banded together against ICE in the name of what is right and good. To him, action is more important than creed:
“Jesus never said you all have to be Christians and go to church... He said to do this work in my name, and people are doing that work in real time."
Nor does Jesus tell us we have to have everything figured out, only to show up:
“The good news is the Bible tells us many times that God uses the foolish to shame the wise and the weak to bring down the strong. We can show up in that foolishness and that weakness and know God will move through us more powerfully when we don’t have pretense about knowing what we are doing... [Showing up is] what we are called to do in this moment, particularly Christians of privilege.”
The queer advocacy organization I'm part of, More Light Presbyterians, describes the universal call to show up for im/migrant rights thus:
Together, let us seek to follow the God of the stranger —
the God of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar,
of Ruth and Naomi, of Mary, Joseph,
and countless other biblical immigrants and refugees.
Let us seek to follow God the stranger,
the One who migrated from the heavens to earth,
from Bethlehem to Egypt and Nazareth,
the immigrant and refugee
who was persecuted by local authorities
and found a home in a foreign land.
We each have a part to play
in ushering in God’s Kin-dom,
which has no walls, no borders, no prisons.
Read our full statement here, which ends with a list of many different ways to show up in this struggle.
Detail from "José y María" by Everett Patterson.
So let us pray, in order to prepare ourselves to act:
Justice-bringer, border-shaker,
God of the oppressed in every time and place,
With the prophets we cry out, HOW LONG, o God?
HOW LONG will wave after wave of evil consume your people,
as hateful people claim to act in Your name?
No words can do our grief and our rage justice. So we release our lamentations to Your own Spirit's wordless, ceaseless groaning.
We center ourselves not in speech, but in these inspirited bodies You fashioned in Your image. We connect our bodies to Yours, which shouldered Empire's cross.
As Your body, we will rise. As Your body, we will hold fast. As Your body, we will place our bodies in front of those more vulnerable.
Subversive Spirit of the Living God,
be our rage, our will, our voice, the ties that bind us together.
Enfold us and embolden us for this holiest work
of solidarity that risks all things
in the name of love.
titsay
germansingergirl
kianamaiart
ellievsbear
origamiaround
discoholicmusic
pixelskylines
tangentwithtanner
blakekathryn
