WASHINGTON (RNS) — Two groups with decidedly differing views of the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol marked the fifth anniversary of the day’s events on Tuesday, both appealing to what they argued were divine truths.
On Tuesday morning, at a vigil at Luther Place Memorial Church, a historic Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregation in downtown Washington, a dozen or so clergy assembled as the church’s pastor, the Rev. Karen Brau, recounted the story of the vigil held five years before. At the time, thousands of supporters of President Donald Trump rallied in Washington to protest, insisting the 2020 election was stolen — a false claim.
Two Trump supporters marched into the prayer circle, Brau recalled, and mockingly reenacted the murder of George Floyd. “This unjust and harsh interruption was designed to pull our attention away from the prayerful space we were inhabiting,” Brau said, adding, “It did not work.”
The theme of this year’s vigil was truth-telling, Brau told Religion News Service, an idea she traced to Scripture. “As we were bearing witness here that first time in 2021, we were part of a truth that was happening,” said the pastor. “I think the ongoing truth-telling — being able to, in some ways, hold the narrative for what is our experience and rooting that in God’s love and justice — remains relevant and necessary.”
Later on Tuesday, about 75 people who participated in the Capitol attack and their supporters gathered at the Ellipse, a green on the south side of the White House where Trump delivered his speech before the attack five years prior.
Cindy Young, who was convicted of four misdemeanors for actions she took at the Capitol before being pardoned last year by Trump along with some 1,500 other rioters, told the crowd their attacks five years ago were righteous. “We were chosen by God to lead this nation, this war against evil forces of our government,” she said.
Several speakers at the Luther Place event noted that Jan. 6 coincides with Epiphany, the remembrance of the visit recounted in the New Testament’s Gospel of Matthew of three Magi, or wise men, to the newborn Jesus. While none of the speakers mentioned Trump by name, many likened modern-day political powers to Herod, the king who, according to Matthew, asks the Magi to report back to him on Jesus’ whereabouts, in order to kill him. (Instead, says the Gospel, “they returned to their country by another route.”)
Vicar Jenny Alexander-Allen, who serves an ELCA church in Bowie, Maryland, celebrated the example of the Magi and their “quiet invitation to bear witness.”
“Five years ago, when this city trembled and truth was pushed toward erasure, many of us felt this same stirring,” Alexander-Allen said. “And now, as powers and principalities still work to soften the edges of that day, to draw us back into Herod’s orbit with its familiar distortions, that summons rises again among us. It calls us to remember with clarity, to resist the slow drift toward forgetting, to stay awake to the story.”
Bishop Phil Hirsch, the ELCA’s leader in Washington, said he hoped the event was a Christian example of operating as a “conscience to the government,” saying “we’re compelled to speak” by the government’s recent actions.
The Rev. Nichele Carter-Peterson, an associate minister at nearby Metropolitan AME Church, also spoke. Hers was one of at least four houses of worship in Washington whose signs were destroyed by members of the extremist group Proud Boys in the days before Jan. 6.
“Gracious God, we are here on a day when there is a convergence of celebration of the Epiphany and of mourning the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection,” Carter-Peterson said. “We come together remembering the gift of God made real in Jesus Christ amid all the turmoil and changes of the world, your love is steadfast, and your grace never fails.”
After Metropolitan AME’s Black Lives Matter banner was torn down five years ago, the church successfully sued the Proud Boys and was awarded the rights to the group’s logo. The church now sells T-shirts emblazoned with the logo alongside the slogan “Black Lives Matter.”
Faith was no less present at the Ellipse, where a speaker named Ben Pollock repeatedly held a Bible aloft to cheers. In an interview with RNS, Pollock said two of his children had served time in prison for their actions at the Capitol five years ago and that he had been “preaching in prisons for years.” He told RNS, “There was that inner small voice that called us to the Capitol that day. It was about truth, and it’s a truth that’ll set you free.”
The Bible that Pollock carried was the “God Bless the USA Bible,” a version that includes the Declaration of Independence and other U.S. historical documents along with the Christian Scriptures. The edition, inspired by country singer Lee Greenwood’s song of the same name, was endorsed by Trump when it was published in 2024, and the president has made money off its sale.
“Donald Trump promoted this because at one point in America, we all could say a prayer together — the Lord’s Prayer,” Pollock said. “It would be in unison. It didn’t matter what church you were belonging to. You knew that Lord’s Prayer out of this Bible. It did deliver us from evil, and it still will deliver us from evil if we’ll pray it.”
Earlier in the day, the Trump administration published a website defending the president and those convicted of crimes at the Capitol five years ago. Accusing Democrats of having “reversed reality” about Jan. 6, the site refers to participants in the Capitol attack as “peaceful demonstrators,” despite widely documented assaults on U.S. Capitol police officers that day.
After the rally, many at the Ellipse marched off toward the U.S. Capitol, as some had five years earlier. Marching with them was Enrique Tarrio, the onetime head of the Proud Boys, who was convicted of tearing churches’ Black Lives Matters signs down in 2021 and who was one of several Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy in the attack on the Capitol. Tarrio was granted a full pardon, while five other Proud Boys received commuted sentences from Trump.
In his remarks, Tarrio said he did not wish violence on those who he felt wronged him, but he repeatedly called for “retribution” against his perceived enemies, including lawmakers, certain Department of Justice officials and members of the press.
The group was heckled along the two-mile route by counterprotesters who called the marchers “Nazis” and “traitors” and accused them of committing treason. The marchers shouted insults back, sometimes bursting into chants of “USA!”
When the marchers arrived at the Capitol, they gathered under a tree and made plans to lay flowers around the building to remember Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police while participating in the Capitol attack. Attendees held photos of Babbitt, whose mother had addressed the crowd at the Ellipse and who has been cast as a martyr by some on the political right.
After singing “Proud to Be an American,” the group asked Pollock to lead it in prayer. As members of his group and counterprotesters continued to heckle one another nearby, Pollock called for unity, then attempted to lead the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer — but stopped abruptly at the line “deliver us from evil.”
“We can’t fight the evil in that building right there,” he said, pointing to the Capitol. “But God can. God can.”
A man standing next to him responded, referring to God: “He used us on J6, and he’s going to use us again.”
