The Gospel According to Vance Boelter

Perhaps the scariest thing about Boelter's sermons is the lack of hateful, radical, far-right rhetoric

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Pastor Vance Boelter’s mug shot. (Uncredited / Hennison County, MN, sheriff’s office photo.)

Vance Boelter is a fraud and a failure. His biggest fraud wasn’t concealing his own failures, although he did that. It was preaching that failure in this world didn’t matter if you had Jesus.

His alleged actions this weekend — shooting four people, two of them fatally — have unmasked that fraud. It sure seems as though Jesus was, in fact, not enough for Boelter.

From 2021 through 2023, Boelter gave four sermons in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They’re not bad, actually, as samples of the genre.

And although he does take passing shots at abortion and gender issues, they’re one-offs, aberrations, and not at all in line with current, far-right American rhetoric on those issues.

Boelter’s predominant message in his sermons was that God has given humanity joy and the gift of eternal life, if only humanity will accept it by believing. Believing without checking what others think; faith over reason.

This is, it’s important to note, an extraordinarily common theme in American churches.

There’s almost a vulnerability to his sermons, the hesitant pauses when he’s not sure whether the translator will jump in to share his words with the French-speaking DRC congregation. And his message is far from hateful.

He doesn’t go after those who perform or have abortions. He doesn’t mention drag queens or grooming. He doesn’t ask anyone to hate anyone.

Wired did some excellent early reporting on Vance’s background, unearthing these videos, but I take issue with how they characterize his remarks on abortion. Here’s what Wired wrote:

…he preached against abortion and called for different Christian churches to become “one.”

“They don't know abortion is wrong, many churches,” he said. “They don't have the gifts flowing. God gives the body gifts. To keep balance. Because when the body starts moving in the wrong direction, when they're one, and accepting the gifts, God will raise an apostle or prophet to correct their course.”

”God is going to raise up apostles and prophets in America,” he added, “to correct His church.”

He actually wasn’t preaching against abortion. That was his only mention. He said the word once and it was to offer an example of what he was preaching about: Division among American churches.

The lines about God correcting His churches struck me as referring not to abortion but to churches coming together. Boelter gave an example of an Assemblies of God pastor who urged his congregants to help a new Baptist church get on its feet.

His reference to sexual orientation was similar. That was in a sermon two years ago, and although it employs the noxious implication of Satanic influence, it definitely falls into the school of “Hate the sin, love the sinner,” urging his listeners not to categorize LGBTQ+ness as unforgivable.

It was, again, an example of a bigger point, and this is his only reference to the subject:

“There’s no sin that God can’t take care of. Nothing. There’s people, especially in America, they don’t know what sex they are, they don’t know how their sexual orientation, they’re confused. The enemy has gotten so far into their heart and their soul. But this word [The Bible] cuts deeper.”

My point is not to make a case regarding whether Boelter is a good or bad person. (Not a helpful framework for understanding human behavior.)

The point is to grapple with how a mainstream view of religion may have animated a man whose public face was one of love and faith and whose record bore no trace of violence to commit, allegedly, multiple acts of cold-blooded, premeditated murder.

(I should also note that while I understand Christians wanting to disavow Boelter, to denounce him as a false Christian, that argument posits that Christians only do good things, a conceit roughly on par with the worst tenets of Christian nationalism and wildly discriminatory against every other faith and nonbelievers. Christians do bad things. Even The Bible says so. It’s too easy just to write this off as, “He’s not a real Christian.”)

Author Jeff Sharlet notes that Boelter attended the Christ for the Nations Institute and that it teaches “violent prayer,” the lifelong battle against the enemy: Our culture.

Jeff’s a friend, and one of the pre-eminent journalists and thinkers on this stuff, so his whole article is worth reading. I think it’s important, too, to ask how ingrained Boelter was with the hardcore Christ for Nations ideology, because his sermons were fairly mainstream, at least for the modern right.

Boelter’s journey may even hold a lesson for some magical thinkers on the left. God has a plan, everything happens for a reason. That can justify a lot.

His sermons aren’t grim denunciations of enemies, they’re fairly uplifting. They’re the kinds of hopeful messages that most people point to when they want to argue for the benefits of belief.

I looked at the religious traditions of his associates, too. The church in the DRC where he speaks. The ministry of the pastor with whom he often travels.

There are pro forma mentions of Biblical inerrancy and a passing but not definitive reference to the Assemblies of God, but for the most part the content is pretty benign, and mainstream. Whatever their positions on social issues, they don’t drive the messaging.

What they do have in common with mainstream Christianity is a potentially radical and radicalizing trait: Certainty.

Religion gave Boelter certainty, a confidence and boldness that he displays on the church stage but is nowhere to be found in a Minnesota business presentation.

Boelter’s confidence was so great that he wrote a pamphlet about his surrender at age 17 to Jesus. He printed thousands of them.

And then he got on a plane to distribute them to people in the Middle East. He wanted to share the joy that loving Jesus gave him.

He claimed he was ordained in 1993, but there’s no indication he ever took up residence behind a pulpit anywhere. What he did, was bounce.

Not just from job to job, but from industry to industry. Food management. Security. Others, apparently. Some were wholly secular, some explicitly religious. Some lived somewhere in between.

In 1999 he registered a business called Souljer Security.

In 2006 he registered Revoformation Ministries, and began filing tax records the following year.

A Revoformation Ministries website was first archived in 2011. It teases a coming book by Boelter called Original Ability. The release date it promotes is spring 2006.

The site was updated in April 2018, adding new categories for all kinds of coming content. “50 Bible verses for 1 church,” (the theme he revisited later in the DRC). “50 Practical reasons for 1 church.” “50 areas that you can get involved in to help out.” “Upcoming events.”

If any events ever happened, there are no surviving archives of the links to them. In fact, none of the links to the future that Boelter envisioned for Revoformation have left any trace online, if they ever existed.

In late November, 2018, Boelter reportedly attended a luncheon for the DRC ambassador, sponsored by local businesses, representing Marathon Petroleum. Boelter pitched an idea for Minnesota businesses to train DRC residents and then send them back home after seven years to start their own businesses.

The ambassador called it “a very, very wonderful idea.” There’s no indication anything came of it.

But Boelter also met a DRC native who was living in Minnesota, named Mcnay Nkashama, who would soon become a partner of sorts. In the meantime, Boelter’s aspirations continued to sprout, never reaching full bloom.

His Revoformation Ministries site was last archived in January 2019. The registration for the URL expired three months later.

A LinkedIn post from 2020 identifies him as the CEO of something called Red Lion Group. (The post encourages voting, but with no partisan message other than a reference to prayer and the particular importance of the 2020 election.)

The following year is a big one, with more initiatives launched. In March he creates a site for a new venture called Praetorian Guards. The company’s leadership team consists of Boelter, his wife, and Todd.

In June, Boelter registered a Bible-based business called You Give Them Something to Eat.

Also that year, Nkashama became Boelter’s travel buddy. The two of them spoke at a French-language church in the DRC, La Borne, in Matadi.

Boelter was billed as a pastor, and delivered his first sermon there. Nkashama introduced him.

This is where Boelter told much of his story that’s been retold in the days since he was first identified as the suspect. He spoke of his college friend, David Emerson, a missionary killed in a 1987 massacre in Zimbabwe.

Around that time — though it’s not clear which came first — Boelter found Jesus, seeing his own life as serving only himself and vowing to change, to serve God. Jesus, Boelter said, “changed that selfish person into a person who cared about other people first.”

He named his four daughters Grace, Faith, Hope, and Joy. His son he named after David Emerson.

And, he said, he had no bitterness toward Emerson’s murderers. “If they had known Jesus, they wouldn’t have done that.” It’s what some now say about him, and, of course, it’s not necessarily so.

Boelter talked about God’s plans for everyone, how everyone should dedicate each footstep to Jesus. How even a moral life would be empty without Jesus.

No one in the audience could know it, but he also offered guidance relevant to his own failed business ventures. “Failing at anything in this life with Jesus by your side is a thousand times more valuable than succeeding in everything in this life without Jesus by your side. When Jesus is by your side, you always win.”

In retrospect, it sounds like he was ministering to himself. At the time, Boelter seemed still to believe it. He mentioned that he was in the DRC not just to preach, but to pursue business deals.

And despite the lack of business success, he was still full of the joy of loving Jesus:

It’s hard not to wonder whether some of Boelter’s joy in that moment came also from having a large audience hanging on his words, applauding him.

Other audiences apparently proved less receptive. And they would test his claim about how awesome failure is with Jesus at your side. Multiple failures.

The following August, he was back in the DRC. Remotely, he participated in a Minnesota webinar about doing business in Africa. The Aug. 5, 2022, webinar is a painful contrast with his La Borne sermon just two days later.

In the webinar — in which it’s clear that Mark Ritchie, Minnesota’s Democratic former secretary of state, does not know him — Boelter comes across as a possible huckster, or just a loser. He speaks last and they don’t even return to him when they do a last round.

Boelter says his company, Red Lion Group, is incorporated in the DRC (I couldn’t find any record of it), and says he’s partnering with Nkashama. He’s got plans. Big plans.

He’s partnering with 400 farmers and 500 fishermen. He wants to get about 1,000 female motorcycle taxis going, “but we need some sponsors to invest in that.” Oh, and he’s got a media company, Red Lion Media, to share uplifting news about the DRC.

When Ritchie asked Boelter about investors, he said first he wants to demonstrate that his plans will work at a small scale. When he’s pressed, Boelter says he doesn’t have “a good answer for that.” It’s pretty cringe.

But he’s in his element, reborn, a winner, just two days later on stage again at La Borne. Respected. Heeded.

And again selling a faith that should shield him from setbacks like his webinar and corporate failures. “He’s given us eternity with Him. And what does He ask? He says, ‘Life didn’t go the way I wanted it for you, but it wasn’t my fault. Vance, you sidetracked. You messed up your life.’ … But He says he loved us so much that He came and He died to pay for it all.”

Boelter continues God’s end of their dialogue: “Do you wanna live forever with me? Then get on your face, Vance, and repent of your sins. Turn away from the sin. Let me fill you with my holy spirit, and live with me forever.”

The plans Boelter envisioned in the Minnesota webinar appear have been unfulfilled. Back home, he apparently served on a two-county workforce development commission, commenting on LinkedIn on the “great meeting” in January 2023. Networking. Projecting upbeat.

He’s listed in that comment as the CEO of Red Lion, but the Red Lion website wasn’t even created until that month and only archived for the first time in July.

The site listed Red Lion Group’s supposed fields of endeavor: Food production, electro-mechanical technical assembly, oil refining, and glass production.

Boelter was seeking “partners,” reassuring hypothetical investors that getting up and running would be a snap, thanks to “our own construction company … and our own international supply chain systems.”

That’s in addition to his U.S. companies reportedly specializing in security, including canine security.

He goes back to the DRC at least one more time — in February 2023. A LinkedIn post from that trip mentions meetings with a DRC governor and his aside that “Some of our team” will meet in Washington with the DRC ambassador, “about how our third trip to the DRC has gone.”

Given the absence of any followup, it seems more than possible that some of this at this point is simply bullshit.

But he speaks twice that month at La Borne. It’s these two appearances in which he gets more political than his first two, with references to sexual orientation on Feb. 10 and abortion on Feb. 12.

The overall vibe is one of joy. But a few phrases strike different notes today.

“When I hear Pastor Mcnay or Pastor Maurice [Mwehu] preach, it grows my faith and helps me see the plan God has for me,” Boelter says. He doesn’t say what that plan might be. But he’s reflective about his own life, and his ambitions for it.

“When I die and go to Heaven, I don’t want to just listen to all the other people tell their stories, I want to have my own stories to tell,” Boelter says. “If there’s something in my life not right, get it straightened out today.”

It’s the next sermon, Feb. 12, 2023, in which Boelter dwells on the state of the Christian church in America.

“America’s in a bad place,” Boelter says. But he doesn’t mean politically. Or doesn’t say so. “Jesus didn’t suggest being one body, He commanded it. The American church didn’t listen to Jesus. I’m not speaking for all churches. I’ll share you an example of someone who was doing it, who was part of the body.”

That’s when Boelter relays a story about Ron, an untrained Assemblies of God pastor chosen by his congregation to lead them. “Ron said ‘I’ve never been to Bible school.’ They said, ‘We don’t care. You love Jesus, we want you to be a pastor.’ So he prayed and said okay. That was one of the fastest growing churches I’ve ever seen. Do you know why? Because he was one with the body.”

“Ron” even helps a Baptist church get on its feet. That’s the unity Boelter’s craving. Ecumenical — but united on politics and theology.

“The churches are so messed up, they don’t know abortion is wrong, many churches,” Boelter says. But that one mention’s not his main focus.

He also critiques churches focused on good works. “If service is the only gift in the church, if there’s not teaching [Scripture], we’ll get all messed up,” he says. “The American church is all messed up right now, because we didn’t listen to Jesus. And I say to the African church, don’t be like the American church. Be one body.”

At the start of last year, Red Lion’s website was archived for the last time, its pitches from 2023 unchanged.

Last month, Boelter posted on LinkedIn that he’s “pretty open” to return to the food industry.

His language was the performative jauntiness mandatory for reassuring employers you’re not desperate. The rote semiotics of a passion for capitalism.

Hi everyone! I’m looking to get back into the U.S. Food Industry and I'm pretty open to positions. Other Leadership positions outside of the Food Industry I'm willing to hear about as well.

He’s “willing” to consider corporate roles including president.

It’s tempting to think Boelter changed radically somewhere along the line. That he “snapped.” But those who knew him don’t describe any such break.

Which suggests maybe something had been broken all along. Maybe the logical cracks in his faith narrative were strained by financial straits or the elusiveness of leadership and a position of respect. Whatever joy Jesus still brought him, Boelter wasn’t dancing early Saturday morning.

According to CNN, Boelter’s childhood friend said he was having financial problems and was looking for work. He “wasn’t a hateful person,” the friend said.

He confirmed that Boelter opposed abortion but said it didn’t define him. “He would talk about other things.”

“I’m in shock,” Nkashama’s wife told Wired. “I’m worried about him. This cannot be the person I know. I’m wondering what happened.”

Their conversations she said, was “more of like, holiness all the time.”

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I’m a veteran journalist and TV news producer who’s worked at MSNBC — as co-creator of Up w/ Chris Hayes and senior producer for Countdown with Keith Olbermann — CNN, ABCNews, The Daily Show, Air America Radio, and TYT. My original reporting on Substack is made possible by a handful of paid subscribers. Thank you.