(RNS) — Shortly after Cole Tomas Allen was identified as the armed man who sought to break into the White House Correspondents’ dinner, President Trump declared on Fox News, “He had a lot of hatred in his heart for quite a while. And he just, I don’t know. He just, it was a religious thing. It was strongly anti, anti-Christian.”

That’s from the guy who said at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, “I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them.” Be that as it may, the so-called manifesto Allen sent out 10 minutes before the disruption makes clear that he considers himself a Christian, feels compelled to justify his behavior in Christian terms and has some background in Christian theology to do so.

The guts of the manifesto are five “objections” to the kind of political violence Allen was about to attempt — objections that Allen goes on to provide “rebuttals” to, in a format that harks back to the scholastic technique famously employed by Thomas Aquinas in his “Summa Theologiae.” The first objection reads: “As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.”

The biblical reference here is to Matthew 5:39: “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Allen’s “rebuttal” is:

Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.

This tracks — up to a point — St. Augustine’s important “Letter to Publicola,” which justifies killing in self-defense so long as it is in defense of others and claims that Matthew 5:39 does not “make us neglect the duty of restraining men from sin.”

Allen’s fifth objection is also biblical, from Matthew 22:21: “Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Allen’s “rebuttal” — that as long as U.S. officials “do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered” — is in line with a tradition of Christian argumentation against New Testament injunctions to obey the government that dates back to the Middle Ages. 

Before the sign-off from “Cole … ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen,” the manifesto offers thanks to a range of people, beginning with “my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.”

All this is consistent with what we know of Allen’s religious past — his upbringing in a theologically conservative Protestant church, his leadership of the Christian fellowship at Caltech during his years in college. What it doesn’t prove is that his apparent violent intentions resulted from religious zealotry.

The term “zealot” derives from the name given by the Jewish historian Josephus to the Jewish fighters who sought to expel the Romans from the Holy Land in the first century. Since then, extremists who resort to violence in the name of God for what they consider a righteous cause are to be found in all three Abrahamic religions. In recent times, Islam has had its suicide bombers, Judaism its West Bank settlers and Christianity its killers of doctors who provide abortions.

The most famous religious zealot in American history was the abolitionist John Brown, who fought against proslavery forces in Kansas and was hanged after attempting to start a slave revolt by seizing the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. He was celebrated and vilified during his lifetime and continues to receive mixed reviews to this day.

“Mr. Brown, who sent you here?” a congressman from Ohio asked him after his capture at Harper’s Ferry. “No man sent me here,” Brown replied. “It was my own prompting and that of my Maker, or that of the Devil — whichever you please to ascribe it to.”

Abraham Lincoln called Brown an “enthusiast” who “broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them.” It remains to be seen to whom Cole Allen ascribes his commission.