By Sydney Byerly
The Indiana Citizen
September 5, 2025
Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, in a series of social media posts this week, described the deadly shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as both a spiritual conflict and evidence of what he called the dangers of “trans ideology.”
Since taking office earlier this year, Beckwith — a pastor who describes himself as a Christian nationalist — has leaned heavily into religious rhetoric, frequently framing political debates in biblical terms. The Republican’s latest remarks drew hundreds of responses online, split between praise from supporters and condemnation from critics who accused him of politicizing the tragedy and spreading misinformation.
Beckwith’s comments were in line with many conservative political commentators who seized on the shooter’s identity in the wake of the August 27 killing of two children and wounding of 14 more. The shooter was a 23-year-old transgender woman who legally changed her name from Robert Westman to Robin Westman in 2019, court documents show. Minneapolis police said Westman kept journals that included racist, hateful and violent rhetoric and images.
The lieutenant governor’s comments also fit within a broader Republican effort to limit transgender Americans’ rights. President Donald Trump’s administration is considering proposals to limit transgender people’s rights to own firearms, CNN reported Thursday. Trump has also signed executive orders barring transgender people from military service and requiring transgender prisoners to be transferred to facilities that correspond with their gender assigned at birth.
In his first post about the Minneapolis shooting on Tuesday, Beckwith shared his description of the attack as part of a cosmic battle between good and evil. He cited Satanic messages discovered alongside the shooter’s journal entries. Videos of those journal entries were posted on YouTube and have since been taken down; Minneapolis police said they believe the videos, and journal entries, are authentic.
“This isn’t about gun policy — it’s about the spiritual war for America’s soul. … Christians offer hope, prayer, and resurrection while the left offers only despair, mockery, and death,” Beckwith said.
Beckwith went on to characterize the shooting as evidence of “a spiritual battle between good and evil,” before reposting X posts alleging a pattern of transgender mass shooters.
One post included a quote from Fox News host Jesse Watters: “The left WEAPONIZES trans kids, turning them into culture warriors, and they’ve been turned loose against the Church, schools and Trump. You see it, I see it.”
In conjunction with his religious framing of the shooting, Beckwith reposted a graphic claiming a pattern of nine mass shootings from recent years committed by transgender individuals.
However, according to The Violence Project, 98% of mass shooters are male. Reports from The Gun Violence Archive show that fewer than 1% of the more than 5,300 mass shooting perpetrators over the past decade were transgender. For school shootings, that figure is about 2%.
Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting and national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, said rhetoric like Beckwith’s distracts from addressing the nation’s gun violence crisis.
“For far too long, our nation has been subjected to an avalanche of gun violence — tragedies that could have been prevented with lifesaving, common-sense gun laws that certain lawmakers block at every chance,” Wolf said. “No child should go to school fearing for their life, and no community should have to bear this pain again and again. And let’s be clear: scapegoating an entire marginalized community in a moment of such intense national grief is wrong, dangerous, dehumanizing — and does nothing to keep American families from having to bury their children.”
Wolf added that the Minneapolis shooting should be seen in the context of a broader, preventable epidemic of gun violence.
“The American people deserve real solutions, not the demonization of their neighbors,” he said.
Later Tuesday, Beckwith repeated his message, posting: “The Trans Ideology is KILLING Our Children!”
In the lengthy post, Beckwith referred to the Minneapolis suspect, identified as transgender, alongside several other cases, claiming those are “just the tip of the bloody iceberg.”
He went on to argue that the incidents were not isolated, but the “inevitable result of a culture that drugs confused children with experimental hormones, mutilates kids’ bodies with irreversible surgeries, fills unstable teens with rage for ‘culture war’ battles, [and] creates a population of mentally unstable people primed for violence.”
Beckwith endorsed conservative writer David Greenfield’s call for “TRANS CONTROL NOW – not gun control!” and concluded: “We don’t need gun control — we need to control the REAL problem: the transgender ideology that’s destroying our children’s minds and bodies.”
The posts quickly polarized audiences. Supporters praised Beckwith for “speaking the truth” and standing firm on what they described as Judeo-Christian values. They argued that prayer remains a vital response to tragedy and condemned critics who ridicule faith.
But backlash was just as strong. Some commenters accused him of exploiting a school shooting to push both religious and anti-trans narratives, while ignoring evidence-based policy solutions. “If prayer worked, kids wouldn’t be gunned down in schools,” one critic wrote. Another cited the New Testament book of James — “faith without works is dead” — to argue that action must accompany belief.
Emma Vosicky, executive director of GenderNexus, an Indiana-based nonprofit that supports and advocates for transgender and nonbinary people and their families, echoed Wolf’s concern of using a tragedy to advance a political agenda.
“It’s always a sad day when anyone manipulates the death of school children to advance an agenda,” Vosicky said. “An actual concern about disturbing patterns would result in postings about how males commit approximately 98% of all mass shootings or how the U.S. gun crime rate is 26 times that of other high-income countries. The only culture war is what has been instigated by folks who are angry and fearful regarding the beautiful differences among people. The only ideology is when a state blatantly ignores evidence-based medical science regarding the complexity of sex and gender in order to enforce the personal beliefs/needs of those with power.”
Sydney Byerly is a political reporter who grew up in New Albany, Indiana. Before joining The Citizen, Sydney reported news for TheStatehouseFile.com and most recently managed and edited The Corydon Democrat & Clarion News in southern Indiana. She earned her bachelor’s in journalism at Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism (‘Sco Griz!).
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
