Trump Called Cole Allen Anti-Christian. His Manifesto Suggests the Opposite

In a message sent to family members minutes before attempting to breach the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, suspect Cole Tomas Allen thanked his church family and invoked Christian theological traditions to justify the violence that was about to occur.

“Hello everybody,” the message began. Over more than 1,000 words, Allen wove together apologies to loved ones, political grievances, and religious reasoning. He cited Scripture throughout and argued that Christians have a moral obligation to resist unjust authority through force.

When shots were fired and Allen was arrested minutes later, President Donald Trump offered a swift characterization. Allen, the president said, was anti-Christian, and the manifesto represented a rejection of Christianity itself.

Experts consulted by Newsweek disagreed with that characterization. A careful reading of Allen’s manifesto, they said, reveals something far more theologically complicated and far more troubling: Allen was not anti-Christian. He was claiming to be deeply, seriously Christian while committing violence in what he believed were Christian terms.

The Misuse of Christian Teaching

“I think he abused Christianity,” Christopher Hale, a Catholic theologian and scholar of religious violence, told Newsweek of Allen. “But the abuse he engaged in is something very particular and very dangerous.”

Allen, a 31-year-old part-time teacher and game developer of Torrance, California, had deep roots in the Christian community. From 2013 to 2017, he was an active member of the Caltech Christian Fellowship (CCF), where he served as a large-group coordinator leading discussions on the Apostles’ Creed and forgiveness. His father, Thomas Allen, is a ruling elder at Grace United Reformed Church in Torrance, a congregation in the United Reformed Churches of North America.

But it was the theological arguments in Allen’s manifesto that concerned the experts most. Allen made two core claims, both drawn from recognizable Christian traditions, and both distorted to justify violence.

His first argument centered on the biblical teaching to “turn the other cheek.” Allen wrote that this principle applies only to personal insults, not to the oppression of others. “Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes,” he wrote.

Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus at Duke Divinity School and America’s most prominent Christian pacifist, directly disputed that reading. “Turning the other cheek is a practice grounded in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus calls Christians to turn the other cheek and not strike back when struck,” Hauerwas told Newsweek.

Hauerwas’s point extended beyond semantic correction. His life’s work has been arguing that the Christian commitment to nonviolence is not peripheral to the faith but central to it. Allen’s claim that Christian pacifism enables complicity in oppression runs counter to a centuries-long Christian pacifist tradition that argues the opposite.

“Christian participation in violence, even for seemingly just causes, betrays the Gospel’s fundamental call,” he said.

Darrell Cole, a professor of ethics at Drew University and a specialist in just-war theory, offered a markedly different assessment. He said Allen’s reading contains a kernel of legitimate Christian teaching. “Allen is right in the main that turning the other cheek should not be understood to mean that a Christian should do nothing about an oppressed neighbor,” Cole told Newsweek.

But Cole emphasized the critical boundary Allen crossed. “The Christian tradition has always held that the duty to do something about oppression should rest in the hands of those whose duty it is to counter it. Private acts of force are never encouraged,” he said.

Allen’s second argument concerned the teaching to “render unto Caesar”-the biblical instruction to obey legitimate authority. He argued that Christians need not obey unlawful orders. When positive law violates divine law, Christian tradition has held, obedience becomes optional.

“There are times when Christians do not obey,” Hauerwas, the Duke Divinity School pacifist scholar, said. “But that is about discerning when authority is to be obeyed and when it is not. The question of disobedience comes from that. Christians are called to resist violence against the neighbor.”

“His argument that unlawful orders need not be obeyed extends back at least to Thomas Aquinas,” Cole, the Drew University ethicist, said, stating that this concept reaches back to medieval Christian philosophy on natural law and even influenced Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil disobedience, with roots deep in Christian thought.

But again, Cole stressed the tradition’s limits. “The resistance had to be orderly, with clearly defined leaders capable of installing and running a more just form of government,” he said. “No private acts of force were seen as morally acceptable.”

Hale, the Catholic theologian, explored the “render unto Caesar” argument in detail.

“In the Christian worldview, God’s domain touches everything, including politics, including the state,” Hale told Newsweek. “So there is a reality that we do render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. The secular authorities have legitimate rule over the state. But everything belongs to God. Every domain belongs to God. So we honor the elected authorities, but we don’t simply appease them.”

An American Misunderstanding

Allen’s manifesto drew on real Christian concepts-turning the other cheek, the obligation to resist evil, the limits of state authority-but invoked them in ways that fundamentally misrepresented Christian thought, according to Reggie Williams, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Saint Louis University.

“It is a cultural claim that they’re making about the way that that oppression or that kind of altercation would happen,” Williams said. “Turning the other cheek is basically saying, treat me as an equal, or leave the altercation. It’s non-violent resistance of evil.”

The problem, Williams suggested, ran deeper than Allen’s personal theology. The country itself has distorted the Christian tradition Allen drew from: just-war theory. Authentic just-war doctrine, developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, carries strict constraints on when and how Christians can engage in violence.

Pope Leo XIV‘s recent statements on peace reflect that traditional understanding. But the U.S. government’s invocation of just-war reasoning to justify the Iran war, Williams said, mirrors Allen’s error: a selective, politicized misreading of a tradition designed to constrain violence, not authorize it.

“The country has misused just-war theory to a terrible degree,” Williams explained. “What the country is doing with just war is the same as what Cole is doing with just war: making use of a terrible misunderstanding. One is an intentional distortion for political ends.”

The remark suggested Allen’s error was not unique to him. In an era when both left and right invoke Christianity to justify violence, Christians are operating without a clear grounding in their tradition’s actual constraints on force. Hauerwas, the Christian pacifist scholar, articulated a broader concern about how Christian traditions of force are being invoked in contemporary American politics.

“Christian reflection on the use of force has always been shaped by a framework that is fundamentally nonviolent,” Hauerwas told Newsweek. “There is considerable controversy within the Christian tradition over how to justify Christian participation in war, which largely departs from that nonviolent framework.”

“Abusing the Bible and the Gospel is a bipartisan endeavor in this country. It’s the left as much as the right,” Hale, the Catholic theologian, added. “But what I know is that when they commit these acts in God’s name, they remake Scripture through their own ideology.”

The Isolation Problem

What remains clear to the theologians interviewed is that Allen was not foreign to Christianity. He drew on real Christian traditions, misapplied them, and acted in isolation from the very communities those traditions require.

Authorities said Allen acted alone. He maintained social media accounts, now deleted, where he consumed religious content in isolation. Hale, the Catholic theologian, described the danger of this, noting that in such situations, no pastor interrogates his reasoning, no theology professor challenges his logic, and no fellow Christian points out that he is misreading the Gospel.

“One of the most dangerous things you can do is pursue religion outside of the context of community. When you have an individualized approach to religion, it oftentimes becomes an ideology and it becomes unchecked by reality,” Hale said.

Cole, the Drew ethicist, pointed to a similar institutional failure. The tradition Allen drew from, just-war theory, has always required institutional oversight and community validation. “The Catholic Church invoked just-war doctrine this month to speak out against the war in Iran,” Cole said. “The doctrine constrains violence; it doesn’t authorize it. Those constraints require institutional voice, not individual judgment.”

Williams, the Saint Louis University ethics professor, said that Allen had clearly done his homework. “It’s clear that Cole has some history of learning about these things,” Williams said. “Learning about the practices of non-violence, but he’s just a little misguided on how he engages them, how he uses them.”

Federal investigators are continuing to examine Allen’s background, social media activity, and other writings. Authorities have charged him with using a firearm during a crime of violence and assaulting a federal officer, with additional charges possible.

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This story was originally published April 27, 2026 at 2:42 PM.