Criminalizing evangelism?

You’ve probably heard about the Christians who were arrested last Friday night in Dearborn, MI and charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to give people copies of an English/Arabic Gospel of John outside the Arab International Festival. If not, here’s the video they took (though I’m not sure how, since their cameras were confiscated):

If you want to see a Muslim response to this, Allahpundit posted one, along with the above video; having watched it, I’d have to say he’s being exceedingly generous in calling that attempt at a response “singularly lame,” since it’s a collection of repeated assertions supported by non sequiturs and a brief video clip of dubious provenance and import.

I have to say, I have two reactions to this. On the one hand, from a constitutional point of view, I find this very troubling; while I certainly don’t support the “separation of church and state” read as government-mandated secularism, I’m also no believer in theocratic government—and in particular, the idea of agents of government aiding and abetting the de facto imposition of shari’a law in an American community is deeply problematic. Muslims are as welcome in America as anyone else—and they have to play by the rules, same as anyone else, that’s the deal. Our history has well established that “separate but equal” isn’t, that different rules for different groups is wrong, no matter the reason; Muslims have no more right to be insulated from the discord, dissent, and disagreement of a democratic society than anyone else. If they’re going to argue that their faith demands otherwise—well, in that case, we have a problem.

Considered as a case of Christian witness, though, I find this video very troubling in a different way. Though the professed purpose of the folks who made it is to share the gospel with Muslims, nothing about their actions actually seems to support that purpose aside from their copies of the Gospel of John. Rather, their actions in this case seem designed to test the Dearborn police; I’m not sure it’s necessarily fair to say they were trying to provoke a confrontation, but it certainly looks like they were trying to see if they would get one, and indeed that they were expecting to. From their comments during the video, and especially from the final section complaining about all the intersections where they aren’t allowed to hand out copies of the Gospel, it sure sounds like their real concern is not bearing gospel witness to Muslims, but the infringement on their constitutional rights.

Which I don’t deny, either as a real issue or as a fair complaint; as I say, I think there’s reason for real concern here. If in fact we’re starting to see Muslim communities in this country effectively seceding from the larger political and social structure, as many European countries have seen, that’s bad news. But it does make the whole thing more than a little disingenuous, in my judgment. It makes this supposed attempt at evangelism look like, not a true expression of Christian discipleship and witness, but a calculated attempt to use Christian practices to make a political statement—and that, as someone has said, is a kettle of fish of a different color.

The truth is that the life of Christian discipleship isn’t based on rights; as I’ve said elsewhere, in the Bible, “right” isn’t a noun, it’s an adjective. Christian doctrine certainly provided and provides the foundation and root for the political concept of human rights, and in its political implications, it requires us to stand up and defend the rights of others; but our contemporary insistence on standing on our own rights and insisting on our own rights against others is nowhere to be found in Scripture, and especially not in the example of Jesus. I can’t presume to judge the hearts of David Wood and the folks with him in that video, but from what I can see of his judgment, it’s pretty poor, and it looks to me like their priorities are out of whack.

In my judgment, what the folks in that video are actually advocating and bearing witness to is not the gospel, regardless of the texts they were holding; they showed none of the humility or willingness to meekly accept suffering for the gospel which Paul holds up as essential in Philippians 2, and most of what they had to say was about themselves. Rather, they were to all intents and purposes serving as advocates and defenders of a particular political and cultural position. In that role, it appears to me they succeeded, judging by the e-mails and blog posts I’ve seen. As evangelists . . . well, God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform (just read the book of Jonah), and I’m not going to say what his Holy Spirit can and can’t use—but the whole affair seems a lot more likely to turn the hearts of Muslims against Christianity than toward Christ. And shouldn’t that really be the bottom line?