Thoughts from the Pastor
1/19/2026
This week, Curran offers an article written by Rev. Cameron Trimble, UCC Clergy
The Cost of Courage
A Meditation by Rev. Cameron Trimble
January 14, 2026
Yesterday, six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned rather than participate in a Justice Department effort to investigate the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by an ICE agent during a protest. Their departure names something many of us feel but struggle to articulate: there comes a point when staying means consenting to a lie.
What happened to Renee Good was not only an act of lethal force. What followed was just as devastating. Within hours, federal officials worked to recast her as a threat—a “terrorist”—despite video evidence that contradicted that claim. Her identity as a mother, a wife, a community member, a witness to state violence was erased and replaced with a category easier to govern, easier to dismiss, easier to justify killing.
Civil rights attorney, Sherrilyn Ifill, roots this in history:
Remember when the New York Times describing teenager Mike Brown who was killed in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 as “no angel”? Or when then-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2000 released the sealed juvenile records of Patrick Dorismond, a 26 year-old Black man killed by police, saying of the victim “he was no altar boy.” (For good measure Dorismond, it turned out, had attended the same Catholic high school as Giuliani had in fact, once been an altar boy).
So it was no surprise that within an hour of Ms. Good’s killing, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described the victim as a “domestic terrorist.” The disgraceful FOX News host Jesse Waters, smugly described Good as “a self-described poet, with pronouns in her bio...[who]… leaves behind a lesbian partner.” In MAGA world that is how they signal to their base to turn off the empathy - that this white woman is not worthy of your sympathy – not worthy of protection.
Sometimes no adjustments are necessary. In all cases when there’s video, you are asked to disbelieve what you can see with your own eyes.
This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.
When power feels threatened, it often responds by collapsing complexity into legibility. A grieving widow becomes an enemy. A witness becomes a danger. The violence of the state becomes “self-defense.” This is not harmless propaganda. It is a ritual of erasure, a way of stabilizing authority by rewriting reality itself. History has a name for this pattern. So does theology.
Across religious traditions, truth is not simply factual accuracy. Truth is relational. It is fidelity to what is real, especially when reality is inconvenient or destabilizing. In the Hebrew scriptures, truth—emet—is bound to faithfulness and justice. To distort the truth is not only to lie; it is to sever the moral fabric that makes communal life possible. The prophets understood this well. They warned that societies collapse not first through invasion, but through the normalization of falsehood.
James Baldwin named this danger: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” What we are witnessing now is a refusal to face what has been done and an effort to punish those who insist on seeing clearly.
This is why the prosecutors’ resignations matter so deeply. Their courage was not performative. It was costly. They chose professional loss over moral complicity. They refused to participate in a system that demanded obedience at the expense of truth. In doing so, they reminded us that conscience is not an abstract ideal. It is a practice. It has consequences.
The spiritual crisis of this moment is not only the violence itself. It is the attempt to make that violence morally invisible. When the state trains us to distrust evidence, to doubt witnesses, to accept official narratives over lived reality, it asks us to surrender our moral imagination. When we do, the cost is not borne equally. It is borne by those whose lives are already treated as disposable.
This is why courage now looks different than it once did. It is not heroic posturing. It is staying aligned with reality when distortion becomes policy. It is telling the truth when silence and complicity is rewarded. It is refusing to let grief be rebranded as guilt or resistance as threat.
We are here because too many systems failed to hold power accountable. But we are also here because some people refused to go along. They remind us that repair remains possible because people continue to choose integrity over fear.
The cost of doing what is right is real. So is the cost of not doing it.
Today, we honor those who stood down rather than stand falsely. We grieve the life taken and the truth distorted. We recommit ourselves to the slow, necessary work of refusing erasure, of holding reality with tenderness and resolve, even when it breaks our hearts.
This is what moral courage looks like now. This is the work before us.
We are in this together,
Cameron
