What is a Christian Warrior? Shooting of Kansas priest draws security YouTuber's attention

After the fatal shooting of a priest in Seneca two weeks ago, I searched online to learn more. On YouTube, I found a video covering the shooting with three times as many views as any other reporting. As of Friday, the video has 128,000 views.

The 13-minute video, titled “Murder of Kansas Priest Shows Growing Threat to Churches: Why Kansas Churches Should be on Alert” was posted on the Christian Warrior channel on YouTube.

The channel, created and hosted by former police officer Keith Graves, has more than 180 other videos. While some videos describe recommended training for church security teams, others focus on recent violence at churches across America.

“Gunshot Victim Hides in Church During Gathering”

“Church Security Volunteer Dies Shielding Kids from Gunfire”

“How to Protect Your Church From Imminent Terror Attacks”

The channel’s description reads, “If you love Jesus and you love guns, you’re in the right place. The Christian Warrior is focused on giving you the knowledge and skills to protect your church. We do this by giving you shooting drills, qualification standards and training ideas.”

As I prepared to interview Graves this week, I reflected on how these words create vertigo when set next to my life in Christian churches. Warrior? Guns? Shooting Drills? Training? I wondered whether Graves’s reaction was another sprouting of aggressive American gun culture.

I braced for him to lecture me on right-wing conspiracy theories and the virtues of concealed carry.

The conversation was something else entirely.

*

My childhood was spent in the white-walled sanctuaries of Presbyterian churches in Pennsylvania and suburban Chicago. My sister and mom in matching seersucker dresses with ruffles. My mustached dad in a suit with a starched white button-down collar. The gentle melody of an Easter hymn wafting out the windows on a spring Sunday morning.

In the dark-wood pews of those churches, my biggest worries were whether I was singing in tune and whether I could keep from fidgeting during the epic sermon.

With that experience in my rearview mirror, I felt a clash of worldviews with Graves’s security stance in his Seneca video and elsewhere on his channel.

“Churches have to remain spiritually grounded while also elevating their tactical awareness,” Graves says near the end of the Seneca video.

He advises parishioners to find a local police officer, an ally on the inside who will give the honest truth about what is happening in town. The implication? There might be something dangerous hidden from your church.

Coupled with the imagery of guns on almost every YouTube preview, the alarm that I sensed as coming from Graves is foreign to my Sundays at church.

His warnings about church security in Kansas were also disturbing.

“There is a lot of crime against Catholic churches in Kansas specifically over the past month,” Graves said. “And if you are in the Kansas area, you need to know about it. This is what my contacts are telling me.”

He described recent vandalism at a Catholic church in Wichita and the protest at the Kansas statehouse by satanists, which led to arrests.

In the video, Graves continued: “Officers in the area are watching these patterns carefully. It’s possible that this recent murder is connected to the escalating anti-Christian trends. But we don’t have a motive confirmed yet.”

Should we be as concerned as Graves, I wondered, or is this a moral panic fueled by his reaction to headlines about church violence? After all, every kind of apocalyptic news travels easily into our social media feeds.

*

Graves started his Christian Warrior YouTube channel after he retired after years of law enforcement work in Oakland and Berkeley, California.

“I could not do any of this until I retired,” Graces told me in our interview. Because cops don’t have a First Amendment right. We can’t speak publicly about anything.”

Since then, his videos (with 139,000 YouTube subscribers) and weekly newsletter (with 40,000 subscribers, he said) have documented church violence, along with security tips to prevent it. Alerts to his inbox arrive each morning after crawling the web for keywords like “Church shooting” or “Church stabbing.”

“Obviously, the violent things that happen at churches are the ones that get views,” Graves said. “And I hate that. I absolutely hate it.”

Since starting the channel, Graves said he has mostly moved away from his previous consulting as a speaker on narcotics law enforcement. Now, from his home in Idaho, he records himself, microphone in the foreground and framed firearms in the background.

He uses a social media forum, with 50,000 certified law enforcement officials in it, to research the latest church crimes. He would not share the social media platform during our interview.

“I will pray before I do every video,” Graves said. “And pray that I say the right things, because I don’t want to cause panic, right?

Graves sees the world as a precarious place for Christians in 2025 — the most dangerous atmosphere for Christians in modern American history.

“I do think that there is a cultural movement to have some hate against Christians. Then you look at the Christian faith, you see less and less people coming to church over the last couple decades for sure.”

Graves said that he monitors terrorist chats online, and that he’s “never seen them be so fervent about their hate towards Christians when you look at the jihadi side.”

He compares the level of threat to America before the attacks of September 11, 2001, and worries about attacks coordinated by ISIS and Al-Queda.

Graves connects the hostility that he sees toward police officers and Christians.

“Being a police officer, I know there are people that dislike me so much they would love to kill me,” Graves said. “But there are people that hate Christians and Jews so much that they would like to see you dead. And I don’t think people have ever thought about that before, because they just lived a fortunate life.”

The dire tone is hard to square in some ways with the cultural and political power that Christians hold in America. Graves sees the atmosphere as nonetheless threatening.

I told Graves how including “warrior” sounds a lot like vigilantism to me. I explained my worry of Christian militias seeking justice in the name of church security, armed with guns and tactical vests.

“You’re trying to make the name ‘warrior’ this bad name,” Graves said. “People have been using (the word) ‘sheepdog’ forever in the church security field. And I’m like, I’m not a sheepdog. I’m a warrior. I’m here to protect my people. I’m here to keep evil away from them. And warrior isn’t a bad name. I’m a Christian, I’m a warrior, and I’m here to protect the people that are within the church. Does that mean I’m going to go on the offense and start hurting people? Absolutely not.”

“True vigilantism, taking the law into your own hands, we all know it’s wrong, right?” he continued. “It’s biblically wrong. It’s criminally wrong. There’s everything wrong about it. I don’t know why anybody would want to go that route to begin with. It firmly goes against scripture.”

*

Halfway through the interview, Graves and I circled back to my central question: Is his YouTube channel addressing a substantial threat to religious people in America or is it overreacting to shocking headlines?

“Here’s the problem, if you don’t report (on church violence), then people continue thinking that there’s not going to be a problem,” he said, adding: “You just have to look at what’s happening and realize that it’s a possibility. You just have to realize it’s minimal. It’s just not zero.”

It took me that long to remember that my family is proof that the threat is not zero.

Eleven years and one week ago, my wife and two children were barricaded in a bathroom at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City. My 9-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son were still wet from their swimming lessons with friends.

Staff from the community center ordered them into the women’s locker room. The lockdown kept them there for more than an hour. Outside, an anti-semetic gunman killed a grandfather and his grandson in the parking lot of the facility before killing another woman at a nearby retirement community.

What if the Christian Warrior channel had existed in 2014? Would it have helped to have Graves’s review of the shooting and the law enforcement response?

I’ve thought about that all day — whether these Christian Warrior videos scoot us closer to being a more secure land of churches with well-trained security teams. Or whether they turn up the flame of panic and militarism under an already boiling pot.

Like so many religious questions, I think your answer is a personal matter of faith.