A useless seat at a rotten table

Plus: screen-free church, peak population, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post. Just this once, in the spirit of election season (I guess??) I have decided to be unusually generous with the paywall placement. Nevertheless, if you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading to read the whole thing and support my work:

---

A take I haven’t written elsewhere

A useless seat at a rotten table

(via)

A British Christian named Adam Smith-Connor was convicted this month for the “crime” of praying silently in the vicinity of an abortion clinic and repeatedly declining to walk away. He was not on private property or trying to enter the clinic. Per the Alliance Defending Freedom UK, an organization defending him, he wasn’t even facing it. Nor was he harassing anyone. He was just praying in his mind.

For that, he’ll pay a fine of around $11,700 and could go to jail if he reoffends within the next two years.

The law Smith-Connor violated was not technically a restriction targeting religious expression. It was a public order measure that in this case was used to establish a multi-block buffer zone limiting speech and assembly near the clinic. This rule is viewpoint-neutral (as I understand it, a pro-choice person doing exactly the same thing could, in theory, face exactly the same consequences). But it’s so broad and censorious that it goes well beyond the kind of time, place, and manner restrictions on speech deemed constitutional here in the States, and this conviction suggests U.K. courts have interpreted it in a similarly broad and censorious spirit.¹

I share this story to make two points, one positive and one negative.

First—and this may be the closest I’ll ever come to chanting USA! USA!—the positive: America is better about this stuff.²

We do not prosecute people for offensive tweets or in-home conversations or YouTube clips, as governments in the U.K. have repeatedly done. U.K. defamation laws are also quite different from ours (theirs are worse). And Smith-Connor, whose case is not the first of its kind, would not have been convicted if he lived here.

Granted, the U.S. is not entirely free of controversies like this one. It’s not perfect. But the situation is markedly different due to our First Amendment. In 2014, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that a similar but more tailored law about buffer zones around abortion clinics wasn’t tailored enough. The justices ruled the law violated the First Amendment, and they didn’t even need to apply strict scrutiny to get there.

Next, the negative. It’s nonsensical that an ostensibly free society would have a law and conviction like this for anyone of any faith. It’s downright ludicrous to see it happening to a Christian in a country with an established church.

I mentioned last week that I recently read Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies, by N.T. Wright and

Michael F. Bird

. I’ve profited from both writers’ work, especially Wright on eschatology, but this isn’t my favorite example of either man’s writing. That’s mostly not because I disagree with it, though—with one major exception.

It comes in a chapter on the “church between Jesus and Caesar” and shortly after a section about the church’s “unholy alliance” with empire. Constantine, Crusades, all that. Naturally, Wright and Bird must address separation of church and state, not least because their Baptist friends tell them “ad nauseam” that the Church of England “is a political abomination,” perhaps “a rehash of the Constantinian corruption.”

So they present a brief case for an established church (or, at least, a case against something like our Establishment Clause, the culture that attends it, and the theology that endorses it), which I share here in full:

We are no fans of theocracy, nor of the divine right of kings. Yet when we hear that complaint, we always have a standard answer. Yes, you want to avoid the evils of Constantine and Christendom. Instead of seeking influence in the halls of power, you want to be the angry prophet on the margins speaking truth to power. All well and good.

But what happens when the power listens? What happens when the power or the people ask you to sit on a committee, contribute to an investigation, run a programme, advise on policy, or serve as a chaplain? That kind of absolute separation of Church and State is fine if you want to be a critic making snarky criticisms on the sidelines. But if you want to change the game you need skin in the game.

The people who change history must make history. If you want to build for the kingdom, then you have to build something: relationships, alliances, advocacy, food banks, para-church ministries, youth clubs, foreign aid programmes. You need to be in the room where it happens.

This is defensible in the abstract. It’s not where I land, but reasonable Christians can disagree. When placed next to this conviction story, however, I find it rather less compelling. If that is all an established church gets you, then power has not listened. It has granted you a useless seat at a rotten table. It has let you play-act.

If I’m wrong, and that seat isn’t useless, every priest and bishop in England should be hounding officials up to the king himself until this law is repealed. The Catholics are mad—but they aren’t England’s established church.

As for that church, I want to be clear that it’s possible I’ve missed something (I’ll update here if I’m alerted to it), and that I’m sure many Church of England members and clergy are deeply troubled by this story. Still:

I tried other search variants and skimmed the press releases page. Didn’t find it.

As you may know, I am a member of an Anglican church, but my church’s denomination (ACNA) is not in communion with the Church of England. In that any division among Christians is to be mourned, that’s a sad thing. But for the sake of ACNA as an institution, I’m not so mournful, especially when I read a story like this. Not my circus, not my monkeys!

There’s still a lot of the Baptist (not to mention Anabaptist) in me.