UNSCHEDULED NOTES
These are not part of any planned series or regular feature. They are written in the moment—brief essays, reflections, or meditations prompted by current events, unexpected questions, or sudden insight. Think of them as pastoral margin notes: words that interrupt the schedule because life itself has interrupted us.
FOR THE CITY THAT SHAPED ME:
Minneapolis, Moral Outrage, and the Rule of Law
Pastor Mark Anderson
Minneapolis is my hometown. My family roots, on both sides, reach back into the immigration waves of the nineteenth century. I attended college there for a time and went to seminary in St. Paul, just across the Mississippi River. My years in pastoral ministry included two congregations in rural Minnesota. What follows is not written against Minneapolis, but from within it, out of affection, familiarity, and a sober sense of what this place has carried, both quietly and loudly.
Since the 1960s, a certain radicalism has run through the city like an underground river. Sometimes it surfaced loudly: marches, occupations, slogans painted on walls. I remember being at Coffman Union at the University of Minnesota in 1967 when the Students for a Democratic Society spoke to huge rallies and called for open revolution.
Sometimes, thankfully, the desire for change moved more quietly: in cooperatives and collectives, in neighborhood councils, in classrooms and churches. Minneapolis learned early to distrust complacency, to believe that progress requires collaboration and friction. That instinct did not arrive accidentally. It grew, as it always does, out of real injustices, real exclusions, real betrayals of trust.
But radicalism in Minneapolis has never been only theatrical. It has also been earnest, almost painfully so. Minneapolis radicalism has tended to assume that attention itself is a moral duty, and that failure to feel intensely is evidence of moral failure. Which brings us to the contemporary axiom:
“If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention.”
This is not merely a slogan; it is a theory of perception. It assumes that reality discloses itself most truthfully through rage. If you are calm, measured, or uncertain, you must be ignorant. Or worse, you may be complicit. Outrage becomes the credential of awareness.
That is dangerous.
Attention disciplined by rage narrows perception. It simplifies reality until only one moral emotion is permitted. And once that happens, complexity collapses into certainty. The world divides cleanly. Motives flatten. Procedures feel suspect. Deliberation appears cowardly. Law begins to look like delay or even tyranny, and restraint like betrayal.
The current moment has made these dynamics painfully visible. The presence of federal immigration enforcement in and around the city has introduced fear into ordinary routines, fear that is not abstract, but local and embodied. Families alter their movements. Businesses lock their doors. Neighbors watch for one another. At the same time, protest has surged, fueling all of this by genuine alarm and moral urgency. And then a protester dies.
Details remain disputed, and the full truth will take time to surface. That fact does not erase the grief or the fear, but it should slow our rush to moral finality while the city is still reckoning with what has occurred.
This is where the rule of law enters the conversation, often as the most unpopular participant in the room. Law is not merely procedural, but symbolic. It represents the idea that no single group, emotion, or moment gets to define justice absolutely. That is a hard truth for radical movements to accept, because it limits their sense of moral sovereignty. To speak of law and restraint here is not to speak over those who are afraid or already hurting, but to insist that their suffering be taken seriously enough to be handled with care rather than haste.
The rule of law does not submit itself to ideological purity. It cannot. Law is not designed to mirror our best moments or our highest moral clarity. It exists precisely because human judgment is unstable and because today’s certainty may be tomorrow’s regret. Law insists on process. Passion wants immediacy. It insists on standards when movements want meaning. It insists on restraint when moral righteousness wants speed.
At the same time, law itself stands under judgment. It can be bent by fear, captured by interest, or hollowed out by habit; it deserves neither blind trust nor moral immunity simply because it follows procedure.
But law is not morally evasive nor is it a competitor to justice. It is justice’s uncomfortable discipline. It refuses to ask only who is right and insists also on how power is exercised, who decides, and what happens when roles reverse. Law assumes that even good causes can do damage when unbounded, and that even righteous anger can become coercive and destructive when unchecked.
The tragedy is that outrage often confuses itself with moral seriousness. But real seriousness is not intensity; it is endurance. It is the willingness to remain accountable when the slogans have faded and the costs remain. Law exists for that long view.
The city stands again at that familiar crossroads: between moral urgency and institutional restraint, between the demand to act now and the responsibility for everyone to act justly. Outrage may wake us up. But it cannot govern us. And it cannot see everything.
Listening to one another, therefore, is not passivity; it is discipline. It is the willingness to let reality remain complicated when simplicity would feel purer, to refuse the temptation to convert attention into rage. Attention that does not harden into outrage may look like indifference from a distance, but in truth it is the more demanding posture.
Minneapolis has always known how to shout. The question now is whether it still knows how to listen, especially to those structures, like law, that exist not to sanctify our anger, but to help us all survive it.
If there is a word the church can offer in a moment like this, it is not a strategy or a slogan. It is a posture. Faith enters by naming fear without baptizing it, by acknowledging anger without enthroning it. It reminds us that we are answerable not only for what we oppose, but for what kind of people we become in the opposing.
I offer this as one who loves the city that gave place to my family and shaped me. Our prayers do not resolve complexity, and they do not excuse injustice. Prayer does something quieter and harder: it places our certainty, our grief, and our anger before a mercy we do not control. It teaches us to ask not only whether our cause is righteous, but whether our hearts are being shaped toward life or toward ruin. In a city that knows both protest and prayer, the most faithful act may be to hold grief honestly, seek justice patiently, and entrust what we cannot yet resolve to a mercy larger than our anger.
