Prosecutors say Robinson posted a video on September 15 in which he claimed God had instructed him to "use no discernment" and that "everyone who walks into that church is guilty." A second video, filmed in the archdiocese parking lot, allegedly showed him saying his instructions were to "leave no one breathing."
The FBI's national operations center flagged the videos and alerted the Shrewsbury Police Department. Archdiocesan offices were evacuated while officers searched the building with bomb-sniffing dogs. No explosives were found. Robinson is being held on a $10,000 cash-only bond, according to prosecutors.
Brecht Mulvihill, communications director for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, said the safety of the men and women who serve there matters most, and that the archdiocese prays for an end to the hatred and threats of violence spreading on social media.
A voice claiming God, and a voice that is not His
Set that claim next to what it produced, and the trouble comes into focus. A man says God spoke to him. What God supposedly said was: kill without judgment, spare no one, treat every soul who walks through a church door as guilty before a word is spoken. My friend, that is not confusion about God's will. That is the plain opposite of it, dressed up in His name.
Scripture does not leave a man to sort that out by feeling. It gives a test.
"For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints." (1 Corinthians 14:33)
Peace, not terror in a parking lot. Order, not a mob turned loose on the innocent. Whatever voice told Jeremiah Robinson to leave no one breathing was not the voice that hung the stars or numbered the hairs of a man's head. A spirit that sends threats against people gathered to worship is a spirit working against the very purpose worship exists for — to bring sinners near to a holy God, not to scatter them in fear.
The apostle John gave the church a warning for exactly this kind of moment:
"Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world." (1 John 4:1)
Try the spirits. Test the claim against the character of God as He has already revealed it — not against what feels urgent, not against what a man convinces himself in isolation, not against a phone screen and an audience. Every voice that tells a person to abandon discernment is, by definition, not asking that person to draw nearer to truth. It is asking for surrender to something else.
There is a second danger worth naming honestly: how easily fear like this hardens a heart against the church altogether. A bomb threat against a cathedral, a threat phoned in against any house of worship, tempts people to think the danger is religion itself, or that safety lies in staying home. It does not. The answer to a false and violent claim about God is not less of God — it is more of the true one, known through His Son, who never once told a follower to strike down the innocent.
Christ said the opposite of what Robinson allegedly claimed to hear. He said:
"Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God." (Matthew 5:9)
That is the family resemblance of the true children of God — not a willingness to threaten, but a willingness to seek peace even with those who wrong them. No court has yet weighed the full truth of what happened in Ste. Genevieve, and that judgment belongs to a jury, not to a newspaper. But the deeper judgment the story forces on every reader does not wait for a verdict: what voice are you listening to, and have you ever tested it against the God who is not the author of confusion, but of peace?