Two recent stories highlight a growing trend in American culture – Christians losing their jobs or being arrested for being Christians in public. The Sentinel reports on one man arrested in a public park:
Video reviewed by The Sentinel shows multiple police officers confronting a group of Christians at Rebel Art Fest, an annual event at Potawatomi Park advertised as open to the public, while the group held signs and distributed literature about the abolition of abortion. The police directed the Christians to exit the park, asserting that the event was private because there were a certain number of vendors offering their services at the property.
The group of Christians complied and moved across the street which bordered the park. Gulley walked with the group away from the vendors but remained on what appeared to be the edge of the property, asking for an ordinance number that communicated the requirement before he crossed the street with the rest of the group. The officers, one of whom admitted that he did not know the ordinance number, then handcuffed and arrested Gulley for criminal trespassing.
The Stream reports on a young man who was reading Scripture near a “Pride in the Park” event:
That Saturday, Marcus set up a small speaker with an attached microphone and began reading Galatians 5. In a viral video that records the arrest, policemen can be seen yanking the microphone out of Marcus’ hand with little to no warning. Within minutes, Marcus was handcuffed and walked out of the park. “I was reading a passage from the Bible about love, and I was arrested,” Marcus said. “No reason, not given any warning, not told anything about my amplification needing to be turned down. I was arrested and taken into custody simply for reading the Bible on the sidewalk.”
If you take a little time to go through new media sources, you will find more reports than you might imagine of Christians being censured, canceled, fired, or arrested, for being Christians in public. These are stories of two men who stood in parks publicly proclaiming their message. Other stories involve men and women who posted online and ran afoul of the wrong people at their jobs. The reports are growing.
At a point like this, the thoughtful person is forced to wonder what makes the depravity of Pride events more important than the public reading of the Bible, or what makes the child-sexualizing sacrament of Drag Queen Story Hour so popular, or the need to kill babies in the womb so much more important than silent prayer on a sidewalk. The values that built our culture so far have been jettisoned with prejudice in just the last handful of years.
A cultural shift is well under way, and what is called the “mass formation” is all around us. The psychology of the masses is not very encouraging when we learn that entire cultures have changed in less than one generation to hating what it once loved and loving what it once thought was unthinkable. Powerful people not only make use of propaganda, but also exploit our fears and loneliness to create an atmosphere of anxiety and craft the mirage that only they (and their new way of seeing things) can fix. Then, for instance, police officers allow drag queens to expose themselves to children in parks and arrest Christian evangelists.
But the next issue is just as important: Will the Christian stay faithful? While we are still called by Christ to go to the nations and make disciples, teaching them to obey everything he commanded us to do, we are also responsible for holding to the faith when it becomes harder to do so. God ordained that there would be enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, so we cannot be overly surprised when it is so. The puritan, William Secker, says in his book, The Consistent Christian, "Shall we cease to be professors because others will not cease to be persecutors?" Proverbs 24:10 admonishes us, “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.”
Our witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ involved our words, our deeds, and our lives. Speaking to hundreds or thousands about the saving grace of Christ is evangelism. It turns out that martyrdom is also an act of bearing witness to Christ. We (in the American culture) are not being killed for our faith, but we are now “on the outs” with cultural trends and power. But the people around us still need witness-bearers, even if it means they do not like us.
As I used to put it when we preached through Acts, “The church needs to be different from the world for the sake of the world.”