MAGA Dude Who Shot Up, Burned Michigan Mormon Church Called LDS 'Antichrist,' Surprise!

More of that 'guns and religion' stuff that goes so well together.

Detail from the classic Chick tract, ‘The Visitors.’ Spoiler: by the end, Janice has shaken the faith of one of the LDS missionaries!

The MAGA guy who killed four people and injured eight others in an attack on a LDS church in Michigan Sunday ranted to a political candidate just days before the attack that he considered Mormons “the antichrist.” Kris Johns, who’s running for City Council in Burton, Michigan, said that he didn’t immediately make the connection between news of the shooting and fire at the church and the weird guy he’d encountered while knocking on doors less than a week earlier, at least not until he saw TV coverage of cops surrounding the shooter’s house and recognized it.

The man was outgoing, polite, and “extremely friendly,” Johns said. And his animosity toward the church didn't seem violent, he said — “it was very much standard anti-LDS talking points that you would find on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook.”

The gunman, Thomas Sanford of Burton, rammed his pickup truck (with huge US flags) through the doors of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc Sunday morning, then got out and fired into the congregation with a semiautomatic rifle. He also set the building on fire, leaving authorities unsure whether more victims would be found until the search of the gutted church was completed Monday afternoon. Sanford was killed in a shootout with responding police just shortly after the attack began.

Donald Trump, never one to waste the opportunity to blame the Left, immediately insisted on his fake version of Twitter that “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America. THIS EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE IN OUR COUNTRY MUST END, IMMEDIATELY!”

Of course, the fundamentalists who believe that Mormons are dangerous heretics, as Sanford apparently did, according not only to Johns, the City Council candidate, but also the shooter’s friends, would argue that no real Christians were harmed, not even the youngest victim, a 6-year-old Sanford shot in the arm, or the boy’s father, Ben Phelps, whom Sanford shot in the abdomen. Both survived.

Johns said that Sanford had been friendly when he went to his door September 22, unlike some neighbors who didn’t want to talk to a candidate. Johns noticed the Trump campaign sign still on a fence at Sanford’s house, although partisan politics didn’t come up in their conversation, which lasted 20 minutes at most.

Instead, they talked about their children, and Sanford wanted to know if Johns supported the Second Amendment, which Johns does. Sanford also told Johns about his time as a Marine in Iraq, his fight to put a meth addiction behind him, and how he moved for a time to Utah, where he fell in love with a woman who was a devout Mormon.

Johns said Sanford asked him whether he believed in God. He responded, “yes.” Johns told the Free Press he's Christian and a member of a local non-denominational church.

“From there, the conversation takes a very sharp turn,” Johns said.

He said Sanford began asking him open-ended questions about Mormonism, first asking how Johns felt about the religion. And the more questions Sanford asked on the topic, the more pointed they became, Johns said. He said Sanford asked him about the Mormon bible, the role Jesus plays in the religion, the history of the LDS church and Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of Mormonism and the LDS movement.

After a while, Johns said, Sanford reached his main point, which was that the LDS church is “the antichrist.” After realizing Sunday that the guy was the shooter, Johns said he spoke with both the FBI and Michigan state police. He also has spoken to several media outlets, including this brief CNN interview.

Even though the relationship in Utah was over a decade ago and Sanford returned to Michigan, got married, and had kids, you definitely didn’t want him to get going on the topic of Mormons, friends told The New York Times (archive link too).

Peter Tersigni and his twin brother Francis Tersigni knew Sanford since childhood, and told the Times that Sanford was excessively willing to share his thoughts on Mormons, even when it wasn’t appropriate, like at Peter Tersigni’s wedding, even.

“He got this whole fascination with Mormons, and they are the Antichrist, and they are going to take over the world,” Francis Tersigni said. […] “All he could talk about was Mormons,” he said. “I was like, dude, nobody wants to hear about this stuff.”

The FBI is investigating the attack on the church in Grand Blanc as “targeted violence” but says it is still determining a motive, which is methodical and proper in a major investigation even in cases like this, where media reports are pretty damn suggestive. What still isn’t clear — and may never be, because mass killers aren’t the most orderly thinkers — is whether Sanford may have been seeking revenge for the murder of Charlie Kirk by a guy who was raised LDS. Maybe, but it might also simply be that all the news from Utah and the mention of that assassin’s LDS upbringing simply triggered Sanford’s deep hate of Mormons.

Dime store philosophizing about the Michigan shooter’s disordered thought processes aside, the fact that many Christian nationalists don’t accept Mormons as equally Christian may signal the dissolution of a political marriage of convenience, as John Stoehr argues at The Editorial Board. As long as the Religious Right was still on the outside, many evangelicals were willing to accept conservative Mormons as part of the culture-warring coalition that sought to ban abortion and roll back LGBTQ+ rights. Even Mike Huckabee, who in 2007 was “just asking questions” about whether “Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” later apologized — once the old Chick-tract slur was out in the open — and by 2012 was supporting Romney politically, if not theologically.

But now that rightwing Christian nationalism — and particularly the nutso “Seven Mountains Dominionist” variety of it — is largely running things in the GOP, it seems entirely likely that at least some of the most nutso ones may become more open in saying the rightwing religious tent is getting a little smaller. Since the attack on the church in Grand Blanc, there have certainly been no shortage of social media posts saying yes, violence bad and liberals are all violent, but also insisting that Mormons are a “heretical cult” that must never be mistaken for real Christianity. Fringe stuff like that certainly has a way of filtering up to the leaders, and it will be interesting to see if Trump’s cult begins to more openly consider Mormons as no longer useful players in Sparkle Fascism.

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[Detroit Free Press (archive link) / ABC News / NYT (archive link) / The Editorial Board]

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