Eric Thomas, Kansas Reflector

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.

Today, I offer a story for you to read to your children and grandchildren:

Once upon a time, there was a small town.

And in that small town, there was a small school.

And in that small school, there was a single person. And, while that single person might not know it, they made a big difference.

We know the name of this small town. It’s Belleville, a small town in Kansas. But it’s barely in Kansas. If you drove 15 minutes north from Belleville, you wouldn’t be in Kansas at all. You would be in an even smaller town, named Chester, Nebraska.

We know the name of the small school. It’s East Elementary, a school that is probably just like the school where you attend classes. The school has slides on its playground, tornado drills during the school day and drivers for its school buses.

What we don’t know is this: the name of one brave parent.

Even though we don’t know this parent’s name, we do know their story.

Last school year, the principal of East Elementary invited a person to the school to visit with students and hand out Bibles. The principal visited classrooms, telling students that the visitor was a “nice man” who would be handing out Bibles.

In case you don’t know, the Bible is the sacred story of the Christian religion. Some people in East Elementary and Belleville and Kansas and all over the world believe deeply in the message of the Bible.

In fact, some people believe so strongly in it that they hand out Bibles in unusual places. Maybe you have been to a hotel with your parents and found the drawers empty, except for a Bible in the bedside table. Or, maybe you were in the waiting room for the doctor and saw a Bible sitting on a table. Or maybe you were on the street and someone walked up to you with a Bible.

Many of those Bibles are from the same group that was handing out Bibles at East Elementary School on this day in May.

During recess on that day, many students received Bibles. The principal also stayed near the man who was handing out Bibles. The adults working at the school must have also been OK with it. No one stepped in to stop it. So, a “nice man” who believes deeply in the Bible handed the book to kids, fifth graders and younger.

To many people, having this man and his Bibles in school is confusing.

Why are some people uncomfortable with Bibles in school? They are thinking about our American freedoms.

Short history lesson: Many of these freedoms come from the words in the Constitution. If you ask me, the most important ones of all come from one specific part called the First Amendment. This part of the Constitution gives us the freedom to say how we feel. The freedom to tell stories like this one. The freedom to choose our own friends. The freedom to protest.

Those Bibles in school make people think about another First Amendment right. The freedom to choose our religion — or no religion at all.

Our country’s laws say students, while they are at school, must be free from pressure to be religious. People who work for the government, like the principal, must avoid using schools as a place to pressure those students about religion. Also, very young students, like the elementary school in Belleville, must be even more distant from religious pressure.

Let’s get back to that nameless parent. What was the small thing that the parent did? And why was it such a big deal?

What that parent did was simple and enormous at the same time. They spoke up.

The parent was at East Elementary and saw the Bibles being handed out that day. Because they understood all of those American freedoms, they reported the mistake to a famous group of lawyers, and that group of lawyers made sure people all around Kansas heard about the mistake. The school district completed an investigation. Kansas Reflector reporter Anna Kaminski and others wrote stories that thousands of people will read.

That single voice made a big difference. Through this situation, thousands of people will get a reminder about what is OK and not OK. Many people will have talks about what is legal and illegal. And many adults will get a reminder about what they can and cannot do. A big difference indeed.

When one group of adults isn’t looking out for your American rights, another group might be close by, poised to protect you. After all, sometimes adults make mistakes. And sometimes the only person watching is another adult.

We, as adults, should be there with our brave voices. After all, we constantly tell you to listen to adults. And trust adults. And obey adults. We find lots of ways to say it. We say, “Respect your elders,” or, “Listen to your teachers,” or, “You need to learn to obey.” Should we expect 10-year-old children to know and protect their First Amendment rights? Nope, that is a job for adults like this heroic parent. (Or perhaps the teachers should have stepped in.)

Sure, in some situations, students — especially students in high school and college — speak up on their own. They see mistakes that adults make in schools and they speak up. Maybe someday, you will be the strong voice when you see an adult do something wrong in your school.

I love stories starring students with brave voices. I think they are so great that I have a whole list of them. A student who heard about kids being beaten up and wrote a story about it. A group of students who spoke up about the lies told by their newly hired principal. A student who found the embarrassing truth of the person her school was named for. A student who sued her school for not allowing her to cover an important story. These students acted as boldly as adults when they spoke up.

Some people might say it’s OK to speak up when you see something wrong. Me? I say it’s heroic to speak up. A brave voice makes a big difference.

All of this, because one parent spoke up.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

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