From his pulpit, Bishop Patrick Wooden recently weighed in on the now notorious disruption of a church service in Minnesota by anti-ICE agitators and Don Lemon.
While delivering a sermon to his congregants, Bishop Wooden cautioned activists generally and Lemon specifically against attempting to violate the inviolate character of worship at his church.
The cleric made it clear in no uncertain terms that the authorities are the last people about whom Lemon and his fellow partisans would have to worry. Rather, it is Wooden and his congregants who should inspire fear, for the kinds of tactics endorsed by Lemon and on display in that Minnesota church would be met with a response that would not bode well for the latter.
Given the racially-charged dynamic of the attacks against ICE, as well as the attack against the predominantly white congregants of the church in Minnesota, it is worth noting that both Bishop Wooden and his flock happen to be black.
While some have criticized Wooden for explicitly advocating violence in the cause of protecting his church from those who would assail it, he received overwhelming support from the hundreds of people who enthusiastically commented on the YouTube video of his sermon.
“Protest” is a term that tends to have positive connotations in the American imagination, and those who engage in protest are generally thought to be civic-minded, even patriotic. Protest is supposed to be a lawful means by which citizens seek to facilitate changes in law and policy.
In glaring contrast, blocking traffic, screaming in people’s faces, violating property, hurling obscenities, disrupting services, and physically battering law enforcement officers and civilians alike are actions that, while all-too-frequently framed in terms of “protest,” are not protest at all, for they are lawless. They are exhibitions of coercion, intimidation, and, yes, violence.
The people who Don Lemon accompanied were not protesters, for they engaged in coercion, intimidation, and violence.
Violence never occurs in a vacuum or emerges from the ether. It exists on a continuum. It appears to be the case that no one within that church was assaulted. This, though, only means that the violence hadn’t yet gotten physical. It hadn’t yet gotten hot. Still, violence there was as it is obvious that the belligerents intended to inspire a visceral fear in the hearts of every man, woman, and child in attendance.
Houses of worship are supposed to be sanctuaries from the tumult of the outside world. They are held by their members to be sacred places. It wasn’t just those in attendance who felt the violence of having their church besieged, the violence of having the trespassers scream expletives at them, the violence of having their family members demonized, the violence of the sheer callousness on the part of the trespassers to the sight of their children crying and being comforted by their parents.
Everyone who saw that appalling spectacle from their homes—including Bishop Wooden and his congregants—felt it as well.
The tactics of the church “protesters” differed from the gangster who collects “protection” money from the business owners who he extorts only insofar as the church violators weren’t nearly as subtle as the gangster. In both instances, though, violence is the subtext.
The violence for which Bishop Wooden advocated in his sermon is obviously defensive. His point was clear: Anyone who attempted to invade his church, the House of God, and attack his community had better be wiling to pay the cost of doing so, because such activity will come at a cost. And that cost will be exacted by Bishop Wooden and his flock.
Legally, ethically, Scripturally, and theologically, the position of Wooden and his congregants is wholly justified. As Christians and American citizens, they have the right to protect themselves from those who disclose an intention to harm them. That the belligerents in Minnesota were politically motivated is neither here nor there: Anyone who screams in the face of a stranger, i.e., within a distance sufficiently close to strike and, thus, potentially kill, can and should be regarded as an imminent threat to the well-being of the person accosted. Even if, subjectively speaking, the bellicose don’t intend to harm a hair on the head of their target, human beings cannot and cannot be expected to divine the “true” intentions of strangers who aggress against them. The threatening actions of a person are all that one has to go upon.
If a person breaks into my home, where my child lives, and begins calling me every name in the book while screaming his lungs out, I have every right to neutralize the threat before it can materialize against me.
One needn’t be a Christian, or even a supporter of ICE and this administration, in order to recognize that had the pastor and his congregants in Minnesota given the anti-ICE belligerents the Patrick Wooden treatment, they would’ve been wholly in the right.