Last week, a sentence was handed down in a case that has taken more than three years to conclude. Rebecca Lavrenz – perhaps the most prominent of the 17 Coloradans arrested for participating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol – will not face jail time. Lavrenz, who has been dubbed the “J6 Praying Grandma” in right-wing social media circles, was convicted in April on four misdemeanor counts stemming from her participation in the Capitol attack. Instead of incarceration, the 72-year-old was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of house arrest, and a $103,000 fine. The judge also barred Lavrenz from using the internet during her six months of house arrest.
I have followed Lavrenz’s case with interest, not just because of the Colorado connection, but because of how Lavrenz – and the actions for which she has now been sentenced – overlap with another area of interest: Christian nationalism. A long-time student of controversial evangelist Andrew Wommack, Lavrenz is a graduate of Charis Bible College, an institution I have investigated at length in part because of its ties to militant strains of the Christian nationalist movement. Wommack, the school’s founder and leader, has made waves in recent years for declaring that another civil war would be “worth it” to return Trump to office, and boasting that his followers are “armed to the hilt.”
In a telling indication of how Wommack’s radical political positions are passed down to his students, Lavrenz was not the only Charis graduate arrested for participating in the January 6 insurrection. Fellow Charis graduate Tyler Etheridge was charged for his actions that day. Lavrenz’s son, Michael, also a Charis graduate, was present in D.C. for the day’s events but did not enter the Capitol and faced no charges.
Rebecca Lavrenz is not representative of everyone who was in the putsch crowd that day. She cannot speak for the militiamen or accerlerationists or Groypers. But she does make a fair exemplar of one large constituency in that crowd: the right-wing, white evangelicals who comprise most of the Christian nationalist movement in the United States. That constituency has grown in the three and a half years since Lavrenz stood unlawfully beneath the rotunda, and has increasingly latched onto the idea that Donald Trump was anointed by God to lead the country. In other words, there are more of them now than there were then, and their devotion to Trump has become even more religious.
The timing of Lavrenz’s sentencing is a bookend of sorts. She was arrested because of actions she took in response to the last presidential election, and was sentenced with less than three months remaining before the next presidential election. With the ranks and fervor of the Christian nationalist movement growing, and Donald Trump and conservative agitators already spinning up a rationale to cast doubt on the outcome of the upcoming election, though, the republic is not out of the woods yet – and, in light of that looming threat, understanding what brought people like Rebecca Lavrenz to Washington D.C. in January 2021 is more important than ever.
Thankfully, Lavrenz has not been shy about discussing her thoughts and motivations. The week before Lavrenz was sentenced, Andrew Wommack’s Truth & Liberty political organization and media outlet rebroadcast an interview between Lavrenz, Wommack, and Truth & Liberty executive director Richard Harris. In the video, which was originally recorded in June 2024 – after Lavrenz’s conviction but before her sentencing – Lavrenz, Wommack, and Harris discuss the events of January 6, and how Lavrenz feels that her deeply political brand of faith brought her to that point.
Her candor, sincerity, and complete lack of regret in the interview provide a valuable glimpse at the ideological and theological thought processes that might once again bring democracy under threat.
Rebecca and I have been friends for over forty years,” Wommack told the audience early in the show as he sat beside Lavrenz, who was wearing a navy blouse and a necklace of red baubles for the appearance. After Wommack and Harris rambled through upcoming programming notes for a few minutes and congratulated Lavrenz on her recent promotion from J6 Praying Grandma to J6 Praying Great-Grandma, the trio got down to the topic at hand.
“Tell us what happened,” Wommack prompted his old friend, who quickly launched into a scattered soliloquy about God and Marxism.
“Thank you so much for having me on, Andrew and Richard. I really appreciate it, getting my voice out, because that’s why I’m here – is because I feel like God wants to amplify my voice, so that the people of ‘we, the people of the United States of America’ can wake up to know what is really going on. Marxist ideology is, if you study Marx at all, his whole goal was to dethrone God.”
Lavrenz recounted her political awakening, taking Charis instructor Rick Green’s course on the Constitution and coming to agree that “the government should be limited, and the only things it’s for are roads and defense.” When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and basic public health restrictions were put in place, Lavrenz grew more radical. “In 2020, when everything was being taken away from us, I never wore a mask and I never would.” She got involved with the local Republican Party that year and started campaigning for Donald Trump. “I knew President Trump was the Cyrus that God had chosen in this particular time for our country,” Lavrenz told Wommack and Harris, referencing a Christian nationalist meme popularized by Truth & Liberty co-founder Lance Wallnau which portrays Trump as a figure akin to the Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great – essentially, a non-Christian used by God.
Then the election happened, and Trump lost. Or, as Lavrenz put it in the interview, “I thought, this is going to be a landslide. I knew it was. Then I woke up the next morning and it wasn’t what we thought. Something went wrong.”
“I agree,” Wommack said.
Lavrenz had passively steeped in Christian nationalist rhetoric from Charis instructors like Green, then increased her political engagement as a reaction against Covid mandates, and in the process came to believe that her chosen candidate was a divinely appointed deliverer. And then he lost. From that point, Lavrenz was on a glide path to the actions for which she would be arrested.
Going to D.C. for the January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally was the idea of Lavrenz’s son, Michael. Together, they carpooled the 25 hours to D.C.
“We got up and walked over there that day, and got there about 10 o’clock, and just met a lot of really neat people that I just felt loved our country, and that’s why we were there,” Lavrenz said of how the day started. “We were singing patriotic songs. There were people praying. There was a lady right beside me that was blowing a shofar, you know.”
“We were there because we were exercising our First Amendment rights,” she told Wommack and Harris. “I think the biggest thing that bothers me – and why I went – is because the people that we put in office, they’re there to represent us. We put them there, they serve us, we don’t serve them. And that’s why we went then. We wanted to be heard. And I don’t think they heard us. They thought they could deceive us in the election…And so we went there as we, the people.”
“How did you wind up going into the Capitol?” Wommack asked her. “What happened?”
Lavrenz recounts how she did not see Trump’s speech at the Ellipse (“I just really didn’t want to walk a mile and walk back.”), and, as a result, found herself near the front of the crowd at the Capitol down the Mall. “When I got there, Andrew, I was right at the very front line of where the barricades were,” she said. “I felt like I was positioned where God wanted me.” Someone set up a speaker nearby, blasting audio of Trump’s speech from a mile away.
“All of a sudden, this presence of God hit me,” Lavrenz recounted. “I couldn’t even stand up, it was so strong. I sat down and I just started crying, and I knew that I was crying for my country.” Wommack compared the moment to a passage in Romans 8 about “groanings too deep for words.”
From her position at the barricades, Lavrenz says she called her daughter, who was “at home taking care of things.” “I said, ‘I just have this sense that, if those doors open, I’m supposed to go in, to carry God’s presence.'” In Lavrenz’s telling, she had arrived at this conclusion before any attempted breach of the building had begun, before the riled-up crowd from the Ellipse had arrived at the building, before the chants of “hang Mike Pence!” echoed across the lawn. Before any of that, Rebecca Lavrenz had decided that God wanted her to enter the building.
“So did you step over a barrier? How did you get in there?” Wommack asked.
“I don’t know how [the barricades] came down,” Lavrenz, who had just claimed to be standing right at the line of barricades, told Wommack. “This is what I said at my trial. I said, I don’t know how they came down, but they came down. And when they came down, we all walked towards the Capitol.”
At one point in the interview, Harris attempted to get Lavrenz to confirm the right-wing conspiracy about “Antifa” or FBI agitators in the crowd, but she didn’t bite.
“Rebecca, did you notice anybody in that massive crowd that was trying to stir people up, trying to get people agitated? Because there’s been claims that there might have been either government-related agitators or left-wing agitators and stuff like that. Did you notice any of that?”
“I didn’t specifically,” Lavrenz replied. “People weren’t, you know, instigating towards me, but I’m sure they were on the periphery.”
Once in the building, Lavrenz was struck by the feeling of being in the right place at the right time. “I’m right where God wants me to be on this,” she recalled to Wommack and Harris. “I said, I will not let this country go down to Marxism, not on my watch. And that’s all I could think of.”
After bopping around in the rotunda, Lavrenz followed a crowd down a hallway, hoping to find members of Congress. “I felt like they were going to where the congressmen were, because, I thought, that’s why we’re here.” But Lavrenz’s crowd was thwarted. “The gentleman in front of me turned around, and I said, ‘Well, why are we leaving?’ And he said the congressmen had already left the building, so there’s no point.” After that, Lavrenz says she left.
Even after leaving the building, after learning of the violence on the news, the multiple deaths that occurred in the panic of the day, Lavrenz felt that she had done exactly what her God instructed her to do. She had no regrets.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d done anything wrong,” she said. “I got home and I was really excited that I did what I felt I needed to do.”
Rebecca Lavrenz, convicted for her role in an attempt to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States of America, still does not believe she did anything wrong. She believes that Donald Trump is God’s appointed savior for the nation, and she believes that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from him in defiance of God’s will. She believes that her Christian faith requires her embrace of far-right politics, and sees little if any difference between the two. You can dismiss her as “crazy” or “delusional” all you want, but her actions were not the result of a neurological malfunction. They were the result of sincere beliefs which Lavrenz shares with millions of other Americans.
She still holds those beliefs.
When prosecutors offered her a plea deal, Lavrenz fired the attorney who encouraged her to accept it. “I would have had to say I was guilty,” she explained to Wommack and Harris. “And when God says that He was proud of me, well, I’m not going to go against what God says…I would be violating my relationship with God if I said I was guilty.”
Rebecca Lavrenz is not dangerous. She is not, individually, a threat. She is a 72-year-old great-grandmother serving a sentence for crimes she committed, unlikely to make serious waves ever again. But the Christian nationalist movement in which she serves as a footsoldier remains a threat. The teachers who indoctrinated her continue to indoctrinate others. The prophets and evangelists at the movement’s helm continue to declare Trump as God’s anointed, and their followers continue to believe that God’s will will only be done if Trump wins. Their movement is serious about power – and, despite the failure of the January 6 putsch, they have already accrued too much of it for comfort.
That last fact is one Andrew Wommack is familiar with, and brought up in his conversation with Lavrenz.
“Is your lawyer going to be willing to appeal this?” the evangelist asked her.
“Yes,” she said, telling him that her case would be filed in the D.C. Court of Appeals.
“You have the potential of actually going to the Supreme Court on this,” Wommack mused. “And I think our Supreme Court now would probably overturn it.”
