What really happened in Minneapolis?

A moment for public theology

This past Sunday, the ordinary worship of Cities Church in Minneapolis was disrupted by a group of anti-ICE protestors. If you’ve seen the clips then you know, actually, that doesn’t quite capture what really happened.

Some (pundits mostly) have framed what happened in political or legal terms: one group of citizens exercising their right to freedom of speech and another exercising its rights to privacy and the free exercise of religion. We are simply dealing with another case of mediating between equally protected and constitutionally guaranteed rights for which there are existing legal codes and precedents to adjudicate such matters. Sure, a law was probably broken here and a wrong committed there, and yes, it’s messy and uncomfortable, but this is the way we make progress in a liberal democracy.

But I don’t think that’s what happened either—not really anyway.

Remove all the secularist gloss and examine the facts at face value: One group with a particular vision of the good based on certain metaphysical claims used force and intimidation to impose their will on another group with their own vision of the good based on different metaphysical claims. Now the state must decide: Whose vision of the good will it defend? Whose metaphysical claims will it stand behind?

This is important because it’s a mistake to think that what transpired is merely a matter of the right to peaceful assembly on private property. The stakes are much higher.

Remember that Christian worship is never merely a private act, as James Wood articulated so well in a recent piece at First Things. When Christians gather to worship, they are, at least in part, publicly declaring Jesus Christ’s reign over all things including both church and state.

However, part and parcel of the church’s public witness is that critical distinction between sacred and secular—one based on particular metaphysical and theological claims, like, for example, the common dignity of all, the universality of human depravity, and the special offer of forgiveness in Christ.

Such claims by the church, when acknowledged and privileged by the state, shape a public moral order. In America, the fruit of Christian public theology has been a level of toleration and freedom for dissenting views. But as authors like Joshua Mitchell have pointed out, when the state no longer stands for those claims, either out of some false duty to neutrality or by adopting altogether new claims, there are downstream consequences.

The mistake is to think that one group is doing religion and the other is doing politics and the solution is building an impenetrable wall between the two. Both are doing public theology. And I don’t think you have to be Christian to realize that, of the two on offer last Sunday at Cities Church, only one fosters the conditions for the free and dignified life while the other will invariably lead to a depraved future of servitude and tyranny.

What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think you can fully appreciate what really happened in Minneapolis unless you understand that it is, on some level, a religious conflict between two competing public theologies vying for the same coveted space in the public moral order. All that remains is the question of who will win. Now is the time for public theology.