Meagan Quinn doesn’t consider herself to be a crazy, radical, leftie activist.

The 32-year-old St. Paul resident and small business owner, said that wanting her most vulnerable neighbors to have access to food, an assurance of their human rights and an assumption their loved ones aren’t going to be kidnapped off the street … well, that doesn’t seem all that radical to her.

Quinn, who also previously lived in Minneapolis for 10 years, says she became active in social justice issues a decade ago after police shot and killed Philando Castile in St. Anthony, a suburb of the Twin Cities. After the shooting, she joined several organizations focused on human rights.

Next came the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a tragedy that motivated her to participate in local protests and eventually even led to her being detained once by police for participating in a gathering they wanted to disburse. She was never charged with a crime.

Then about two months ago, ICE began its occupation of Minnesota’s largest metro area and even its outstate areas; add in the horrific shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three; and it was then, Quinn said, she couldn’t just sit by and watch people suffer.

So she began volunteering at a small business that is collecting food and other necessities for those who are scared to leave their homes for the fear of being detained. And she’s also again been attending protests that she insists are peaceful.

“When you’re here, living it and seeing it … you know people who are being taken,” said an emotionally upset Quinn, trying to explain why she’s moved to action. “They’re people; they live here; they pay taxes; they have families.”

Lest you think that is coming from the mind of some indoctrinated radical, Quinn wants you to know that growing up in a northcentral Minnesota lakes town, which is no bastion of liberal politics, her parents raised her in solid Catholic teachings.

Not even later at the large, state-sponsored university she attended, were there professors who plied her with their socialist ideologies.

No, Quinn says, she’s just been interested in human rights since she was a teenager.

“It’s hard for me to understand how people find excuses as to why they think it’s OK to harm vulnerable people,” says Quinn. “I feel like it’s only human to want to protect people.”

As for the popular trope that she must be a paid agitator?

“I’m still waiting for my paycheck,” she quips, “and so are a lot of other people out there.”

In an hour long conversation, Quinn and I never once discussed faith, per se. I couldn’t tell you if she is still a practicing Catholic, or otherwise.

However, what I can tell you is that she espouses the gospel principles that as faithful people we should hold dear, much more so than what those in power at the highest levels of government are doing. Amen.

Devlyn Brooks is the CEO of Churches United in Moorhead, Minn., and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America serving Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at devlynbrooks@gmail.com.