The Alleged Minnesota Assassin's Connections to the New Apostolic Reformation
In this emergency episode of 'Straight White American, Jesus,' host Brad Onishi discusses the assassination of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband by a shooter impersonating a police officer. Brad provides details about the suspect, Vance Boelter, and his background, including his ties to Donald Trump, anti-abortion views, and Christian ministry. Scholar Matt Taylor explains Boelter's connections to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), diving into the history and influence of Christ for the Nations Institute, a significant institution in the independent charismatic Christian world. Their comments contextualize the violent act within the broader landscape of political violence and radicalization in the U.S., highlighting the dire implications of such events.
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Axis Mundi Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi and this is an emergency.
Episode of our podcast.
We're coming to you today, Saturday, June 14th, late in the evening, to give you some details about the Minnesota shooting and what appears to be the assassination of State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband.
As many of you know already, Representative Melissa Hortman was killed in her home by a shooter who was impersonating a police officer.
Another politician was also targeted, and it, as far as we know, at least at this hour, is still alive along with their partner.
Police are looking for 57-year-old Vance Bolter, who is the suspect in this crime.
Some facts that we have.
At the moment are that he is still at large.
Governor Tim Walz encouraged people not to protest today out of fear of his intentions.
There was a hit list found that included Democratic lawmakers such as Tim Walz, and there were concerns that he would target protests in Minnesota.
Now, the right wing has already spinned this into a conspiracy.
That somehow goes like this.
The person had a hit list and is therefore somehow related to the protesters in LA from this week.
There are others who are using some of his experiences, the alleged shooter's experiences, on councils and nonpartisan appointments in local government to demonstrate or prove.
That somehow the shooter, the alleged shooter, is a Democrat or a leftist or whatever.
What we know is that he is two things.
Somebody who supported Donald Trump and was strongly against abortion rights, according to a close friend of his.
He was also somebody who homeschooled some of his children.
And most importantly for us today is somebody who has a deep history with Christian ministry.
The goal today is simple.
It is to relay to you some comments from Matt Taylor, world's expert on the New Apostolic Reformation, about the alleged shooter's connections to that movement.
There are hints in his biography of his understanding of Christianity and the theological waters that he was trained in.
The alleged shooter Claims in his bio to be an alum of Christ for the Nations Institute in Texas.
And so I want to talk a little bit about what the Christ for Nations Institute is and then let Matt take it away.
Matt sent in a dispatch of about 20 minutes explaining how certain aspects of the shooter's bio connect up with the New Apostolic Reformation and figures such as Dutch Sheets.
Jeff Charlotte had a very good Substack post from today.
Talking about his personal experience with Christ for the Nation Institute during some of his research trips for his work.
He took a photo in March 2024 in the lobby of that theological college, and in the lobby is a picture that says everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.
That is jarring, and you're going to hear more from Matt about that trope a little bit Founder Gordon Lindsay got his start in virulently anti-Semitic, quote, British Israelite movement, which claimed that Anglo-Saxons, not Jews, were the true Israelites.
Lindsay was an organizer of the 1940 Anglo-Saxon World Federation Convention, which was just what it sounds like.
It included speakers from the KKK.
Jeff talks about meeting a Latino student who is training there for ministry and talks about how this is somewhat indicative of the changes there.
He says Christ for the Nations long ago dropped the Anglo-Saxon focus of its founder.
And like many Christian rite, orgs is more diverse than most mainline Protestant churches, but its theology is Christian nationalist.
And what I want to follow up on here is two things.
It's multicultural, and the most multicultural movement in this Christian cosmos of the United States is the independent charismatic movement.
If you've listened to our show and all of the work that Matt Taylor has done here on If you've listened to Narwatch, which we did in the run-up to the 2024 election, you will know, if you've read Matt Taylor's book, The Violent Take It By Force, you will know that the most multicultural, ethnically diverse Christian movement in this country is the New Apostolic Reformation.
Period.
So for Jeff Charlotte, Christ for the Nation Institute is a charismatic, spirit-filled type of place.
It is a place that falls in the category of the charismatic Christian world.
It's not mainland Protestant.
It is not old-school evangelical, Southern Baptist, and so on.
It is a place that fits into the charismatic side of religiosity.
Now, that fits with what the shooter, the alleged shooter, I should say, the alleged shooter, said in things from his sermons to his written words.
This was a man who believed in prophets and apostles.
This was a man who believed in the Holy Spirit having a direct influence on people's minds.
And what I want to do is just stop here and let Matt Taylor take it away.
You'll hear in his voice, he's tired.
It's been a long day for everyone, and we were doing this on very short notice.
But as always, he lays out, I think, details and insight that you're not going to find anywhere else with a kind of clarity and nuance that is really essential for anyone listening, whether you are somebody who considers themselves a layperson, an ex-evangelical, a journalist, a researcher, whatever it may be.
So I'm going to turn it over to Matt, and I'll see you on the other side.
Hello, Straight White American Jesus listeners and friends and colleagues.
Sometimes Brad asks me to do these late-night dispatches when there's breaking news.
I'll note it's never been breaking news of a good kind.
I'm recording this on Saturday, June 14th, the day of the No Kings protests, the day of Trump's military parade.
Very unfortunately, the day of the assassination of at least one Minnesota lawmaker and the shooting of another.
As far as I know, he's still in critical condition at this moment.
We are seeing this rise in political violence that is deeply, deeply concerning and yet somehow very, very predictable as the boiling point in our society It keeps everything at this high boil of intensity and rage and aggression and incitement.
We are on a knife's edge, and it's a situation where incidents like these are going to happen.
I got drawn into the news today because at least the suspect, the alleged suspect, Vance Belter, apparently has ties to the world that I study and the movements that I track.
And so Brad asked me to share a little bit about what I know so far.
Again, this is Saturday evening, the day of.
There may well be more knowledge even 12 hours from now.
But from what I've been able to gather today in looking into this man who, frankly, I had never heard of before this.
He is absolutely not a prominent figure in the independent charismatic world.
What I could gather from A quick survey of his life and digital history is that he is somebody who has dipped into the world that surrounds the New Apostolic Reformation, has spent some time in charismatic leadership circles, has some ties in that world, and that seems to have played some role in his radicalization.
Let me talk a little bit about the background there of what connections we see between him and The New Apostolic Reformation or the independent charismatic broader world.
And then I'll try to connect the dots in some of where we see his theology playing out in his behavior.
So, the shooter claims in an online biography on a website that he apparently created that he attended Christ for the Nations Institute.
And Christ for the Nations, if you're not charismatic, is a pretty prominent Independent, charismatic training institution, educational institution.
Colloquially, we'd probably call it a Bible college.
And Christ for the Nations Institute is headquartered in Dallas and was founded by a guy named Gordon Lindsay.
And it's very, very influenced by this movement called the Ladder Reign that we talked about very briefly in Charismatic Revival Theory.
I get into some more in my book, The Violent Ticket by Force.
But the latter reign was a Pentecostal revival movement that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s.
It emerged first in Canada and Saskatchewan and then spread from there to the rest of the world, mostly through Pentecostal networks.
But many of the Pentecostal denominations actually cast out the latter reign leaders, saying that this is actually not a godly movement.
This is not a biblical movement.
And so they moved out into this independent charismatic space, which is Again, a very, very important sector of Christianity today.
This is the realm of televangelism, of the prosperity gospel, of Messianic Judaism, and of the New Apostolic Reformation.
And this is the realm of Paula White Cain and the Trump advisory circles.
So very, very central space today in American Christianity.
But in the 1940s and 1950s, it was pretty fringe.
Even an institute like Christ for the Nations that was founded out of some of these latter rain ideas was pretty marginal to American evangelicalism at the time, but pretty central to this charismatic non-denominational space.
And so in the late 1970s, a young man named Dutch Sheets and his brother Tim came and studied at Christ for the Nations Institute.
Dutch met his wife, Cece, there at CF&I.
And it was there, I would argue, that at least the beginning of Dutch's own radicalization began around some ideas that were very popular in some circles at CF&I in the 1970s and 1980s, what we would call dominion theology, what often gets labeled dominionism, this idea of Christians taking control of the world to build the kingdom of God on earth.
And Dutch really latched on to those ideas while he was a student, seemingly.
There were some professors there, people like Jim Hodges, who became a mentor to Dutch, who was trafficking in those very aggressive ideas of theological conquest and mixing dominion theology with more charismatic frames.
Including the latter reign.
And so you have kind of this convergence at CFNI between these latter reign ideas and these dominion ideas.
And there's many things in the charismatic world that come out of that convergence.
But one of the things that comes out of that world, that convergence, is the new apostolic reformation.
And so Dutch actually stuck around there in Dallas and became a professor at CFNI.
Was also a pastor at a church with Jim Hodges, a church that I have interviewed people who've talked about it as a nexus of radicalization around CFNI.
And then Dutch moved to Colorado Springs in the early '90s.
And I'll just note that Vance Belter, the suspect in the Minnesota shooting, was...claims that he was ordained in 1993.
I don't...in the infinite charismatic sector, So if he did his ministry education at Christ for the Nations and ended around 1993, then he would have probably overlapped with Dutch sheets there.
That was an era in which Dutch was teaching there.
And I also know that Cindy Jacobs has been a very frequent person.
She and Dutch have been close since the 1980s, and she has been...
She speaks at their chapel quite frequently.
And recently, as in March of 2025, CFNI gave Cindy Jacobs a major award named after one of its founders.
And also describes her as an advisor with a capital A. And I'm not totally clear what that means in their governance structure, seemingly sort of a board of advisors kind of thing.
So very close ties to Cindy Jacobs, very close ties to Dutch Sheets.
In fact, Dutch, when he moves to Colorado Springs, gets tied in with Peter Wagner, and then Cindy Jacobs moves to Colorado Springs, and that's really the wellsprings of the new apostolic reformation.
And Dutch was core to the NAR through Most of the 90s and up through the 2000s.
But then he and Peter Wagner actually had kind of a relational fracture.
And I write about this in my book.
More a disagreement, sense that they weren't quite aligned.
And so Dutch was kind of out of the NAR orbit, so to speak, in the early 2010s.
And he actually came back to CFNI and became the executive director.
He had become so prominent through these NAR circles that he was seen as both a very reputable alumni, apparently, and also a good candidate for being the president of this Bible college.
And he was actually in that role as the executive director of CFNI at a graduation ceremony in 2013 when he was presented with a flag, a white flag.
With a green pine tree at the center and the phrase, an appeal to heaven, across the top.
And this was the genesis of the appeal to heaven movement.
It happened at a CF&I graduation in 2013, where Dutch Sheets is given this flag, told about its history, presented with it on stage.
And he comes to believe that he has a prophecy that this is a sign of a spiritual movement to instigate a new revolution in America.
And he begins to popularize.
He leaves CFNI, writes his book, An Appeal to Heaven, launches this whole campaign in 2015, right as Donald Trump's coming on the scene.
And you can just go listen to Charismatic Revival Fear if you want to know the rest.
Yeah, CFNI is a very central institution of the independent charismatic world.
Lance Wallnau also lives in Dallas.
He's been featured on the CFNI magazine and the cover story there.
Frequently on campus, from what I understand, and I would guess probably has spoken there dozens of times.
So, yes, NAR ideas, NAR leaders are flowing in and out of CFNI historically and coupled with these other kind of laterine ideas that are percolating there and some of these dominion theology ideas.
So it has really been kind of this merging space of all these trends within the charismatic world.
So, Brad also asked me to say whether I've seen any spiritual warfare rhetoric in the evidence that is laid out so far around Vance Belter.
And I have not, I haven't detected a ton of it.
So, there's a couple videos of him preaching he had.
So, after he graduated from CFNI, at least from the online, fairly small digital footprint that he has, it seems like he, Went into business, has had a number of different businesses, and also has tried this kind of fledgling ministry on the side thing, and even seemingly tried to write a book, an independent charismatic book at one point, which is where that bio naming CFNI is.
He seems to have been kind of one of these middling, half-businessman, half-minister kind of figures, but he doesn't.
Take some trips to the Democratic Republic of the Congo for ministry, and he preaches in churches there.
And those videos, there's a couple of them that I've seen are online on YouTube.
And when he's preaching, he talks about, he's making reference to the American church there from the Congo and says the American church needs to be renewed.
It's out of line.
And so God's going to send apostles and prophets to renew and bring it back into line to correct it.
And those are just straight latter rain ideas.
I mean, that is kind of fundamentally latter rain.
Many people today would say that those are NAR ideas, but they were latter rain ideas before they were NAR ideas.
And again, there are many, many people who talk about apostles and prophets today because of the influence of these latter rain ideas who are not necessarily NAR affiliated.
I don't know where he's picked up some of these ideas.
He's very clearly charismatic in his theology and his preaching as well.
He talks constantly about the gifts of the Spirit, needing to unite around the Spirit.
So there's definitely that kind of charismatic influence on his kind of preaching and teaching style.
But I have not seen any direct evidence of him talking deeply about spiritual warfare.
But I would just note that he has focused in on abortion.
in apparently the manifesto that he left behind, which I obviously have not had a chance to read, but also in the targets of his attacks, there was something about abortion that was the nexus, the center of his targeting of these individuals.
And I don't know where he picked up that radicalization around abortion, but I will say that
And just to give some examples, and these come mostly out of the NAR, because the NAR are some of the thought leaders in the independent charismatic media space and are also some real influential characters.
People like Lou Engle will talk about abortion as a form of child sacrifice to demons.
I mean, when you think about the conventional pro-choice, pro-life debate, it's usually framed around, on the pro-life side, a sort of argument about the humanity of the fetus, and then a kind of debate around how do you calibrate and balance the needs of a woman to bodily autonomy versus the rights of this fetus to life, right?
I mean, that's the conventional argument.
This is not that.
Abortion is a demonic form of child sacrifice that empowers the demons over America that hold this culture in its satanic sway.
And if that's your position, there is no debating.
There is no compromising.
There's no negotiating that they believe that this is...
Again, I don't know if it was through NAR preaching or something that this guy came to those ideas, but he's swimming in the waters where those ideas are present.
I'll just close with a thought.
So, again, as I said, from what we can tell about Vance Belter, he was a guy who had a relatively unsuccessful and seemingly not terribly well-motivated life in ministry as kind of a side gig while he was doing these different business things.
And that was how he got connected to the governor's office and had...
But he had this side hustle with the independent charismatic ministry stuff.
Hustle might be pejorative.
This side career in trying to pursue the ministry training that he had gotten at CFNI.
I think one of the things that leaves me perturbed tonight is that there are probably thousands of guys like this.
I mean, these schools churn out, frankly, mediocre graduates.
And some of them achieve great success in that independent charismatic media space and become high profile profits and become these kind of conference.
Those are the exceptions.
There's a lot of people who kind of slip through the crack, land at a church, valley a lot of that and start a business and just kind of muddle through their career.
And then there's all these very radical ideas spiraling and circling through those same channels.
Where these folks are consuming media today, ideas about dominion and extreme visions of abortion as child sacrifice and spiritual warfare to take over the country.
And radicalization can happen very, very fast in an environment like this.
The discourse of the country is at a high boil and you just have so much hatred, so much bile, so much demonization, so many conspiracies, there's so many lies out there about particular groups of people.
You can't quite predict it, but attacks against those demonized people are almost inevitable.
And we saw this just a few weeks ago with this Molotov cocktail-throwing attack on Jewish protesters who are marching for the Israeli hostages.
That's stochastic terrorism.
There's so much hatred towards Jews in the environment, and at some point somebody's going to pop off, and who is going to do it is not predictable, but the direction of their violence is.
And there's so much of this bile in the far-right and right-wing and independent charismatic media spaces about abortion, about LGBTQ rights, and that's something that Belter touches on in his sermons as well, about trans people, about Muslims, about immigrants.
There's so much of that.
Hostility in the air.
And there's so many people like this guy that I've encountered in my research.
I worry that this is the harbinger of what's to come.
And we could see more attacks like this in the coming time because he fits a very common profile.
"The New York Times" is a production of the U.S. Department of State.
I want to thank Matt Taylor for coming on on short notice and for just sharing all of that expertise in history.
Dr. Matthew Taylor is senior scholar at the Institute for Christian Jewish and Islamic Studies.
He is the author of The Violent Take It by Force, which is perhaps the definitive text on the New Apostolic Reformation.
He's also the creator of Charismatic Revival of Fury, which is a podcast, an award-winning podcast that we produced here at Axis Moondy.
And you can find on our website, axismundy.us, if you'd like a I want to close today with a couple of comments about where what appears to be an assassination fits into the larger landscape of the United States and Minnesota politics and things surrounding Minnesota and what happened there.
Over the last year, and you might be wondering what that means, but I'll try to make it clear in a second.
Daniel McKeanion, who's the editor-in-chief of BoltzMag, had a good thread on Blue Sky today.
Says, Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated last night, was the Speaker of the Minnesota House in 2023 and 2024 when Democrats ran the state government.
That means she had a leading role in shepherding the many landmark reforms that Dems adopted in that period and an important legacy.
Perhaps most famously, Nikanian says, Tim Walls ran for VP last year, and we all learned that Minnesota has free school meals.
It became a talking point on the campaign trail.
Minnesota restored the voting rights of tens of thousands of people in the state.
Minnesota advanced new paid family and medical plans during this session.
It eliminated prison gerrymandering for future cycles.
The practice of counting incarcerated people where prisons are located for the purpose of redistricting.
Made some major changes in criminal justice reform.
Banned life without parole sentences for children, affording people who were incarcerated under that chance to seek relief retroactively.
Passed the state-level Voting Rights Act.
A mandate to provide some paid sick leave.
Clean energy mandates.
And made sure that abortion access was enshrined in Minnesota's laws.
There's a lot there in terms of a progressive set of policy reforms that not only sound good to a lot of us and are one of the reasons I think that Tim Walls became Kamala Harris' running mate, but also speak to Why Representative Hortman was perhaps, and we don't know for sure now, the target of this violence.
A woman who went viral about five years ago for refusing to say sorry when she called out a gaggle of white men in the legislature who were not listening to women of color.
When she was asked to apologize for "being racist," she said, "I'm sorry, I am not sorry," and that went viral.
It's quite a legacy to leave, to be somebody who led that session in the legislature over the course of the last year or so, year and a half, and to oversee those changes.
Somebody who helped to flip the Minnesota legislature blue and make those things possible.
I won't lie, I gasped out loud when I saw the news today and was holding back tears as I was driving my kid to...
And she asked me, Dad, what's wrong?
And I didn't really know how to respond to a four-year-old asking me about the political assassination of a very strong and independent woman who had stood up for her colleagues of color and overseen what many would take to be one of the exemplary slate of policies and laws.
In perhaps what some might take to be an unexpected place, and that's Minnesota.
I want to put this in context and say that in light of what Matt said about the connections to the NAR, we have made the case on this show, and Matt makes this case in his scholarship over and over, that spiritual warfare is a motif that is saturated in our spaces.
It saturates in our spaces, and it's one that has overstepped those bounds.
We have a culture now of political violence in this country.
We have seen in the last week a senator thrown to the ground and handcuffed.
We've seen over the last months mayors and a black woman who is a representative being arrested and handcuffed.
We have seen our president make jokes when Nancy Pelosi And Paul Pelosi had their home broken into and Paul Pelosi was injured and attacked in a grave way.
We've seen the jokes about Donald Trump has told about assassinating General Milley.
He also said that Governor Newsom should be arrested this week.
Not to mention the gallows for Mike Pence on January 6th.
Matt left us with a kind of dire warning.
But I think that we need to realize that we are living under this kind of political culture at the moment.
And this is where that kind of rhetoric sets the tone for what happened here.
The person who, inside of January 6th, pardoned all of the people who took part in that insurrection.
Some of the people who planned the J6 rally planned the military parade that happened.
Hours after Representative Fortman was assassinated.
Hours after she was assassinated, a military parade ran down Constitution Avenue.
A parade of vanity, supposedly displaying strength and power, in which the president, who was celebrating his birthday on the birthday of the army, looked on.
On a day when millions and millions of Americans protested that parade and that president.
This is where we are as a country, and I think that it bears keeping in mind that masked police and law enforcement, let me back up, masked law enforcement agents are now showing up all over the country in unmarked vehicles and taking people away.
The alleged shooter reportedly showed up.
Dressed as a police officer.
And that is how they made their entree into Representative Hortman's home.
This is not good news.
This is not anything but a day that is vexing in terms of celebrating the protests, but also mourning this utterly devastating act of political violence.
I hope that Matt's comments and the context we've provided here have been helpful as we surely learn more and we'll make our way through the details of what happened.
Thanks for listening.
We appreciate your support and could really use your support as a subscriber if you have the means.
You can see all of the details in the show notes.
We'll be back in a couple days with our regular programming.
For now, I'll say...
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