Washington Wednesday: Pressure points

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 21st of January. So glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Washington Wednesday!

DON LEMON: So this is what the First Amendment is about, about the freedom to protest. I'm sure the people here don't like it, but protests are not comfortable.  

MAST: We want to begin today with a story that hits on the First Amendment rights of Americans to exercise their religion: a first-person account of what happens when a congregation is interrupted by protesters in their sanctuary, during a worship service.

CALEB PHILIPS: The congregation just really loves each other and is so welcoming to newcomers.

MAST: Caleb Philips works at a Christian radio station in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He began attending Cities Church in Saint Paul with his girlfriend several months ago. This past Sunday, the Southern Baptist church’s Pastor Jonathan Parnell planned to preach on John 13.

PHILIPS: …the passage where Jesus says “A new commandment I give to you that you love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.”

EICHER: But as Parnell began, a woman in the back stood up and began shouting. Sound here comes from footage shot by former CNN news anchor Don Lemon.

PHILIPS: She starts going off on this rant about how one of our pastors is employed with ICE and we should be ashamed to have a pastor like that on staff, and there's no excuse for this, and we're fake Christians and all of these things.

EICHER: Other protestors, seated around the sanctuary, also stood up to chant slogans.

PHILIPS: A couple of the dads got up and kind of started trying to shout down the protesters. Pastor Jonathan actually made a pretty valiant effort to shout them down over his mic, saying, "shame on you, shame on you." Which I think that they all should be ashamed. But we pretty quickly realized that, you know, fighting fire with fire wasn't really going to work out.

MAST: Some families with children left the building, while other members faced off with the protestors.

PHILIPS: We were either praying, singing, or reading Scripture. I myself, I stood up and started reading the Psalms directly at the protesters… Psalms about the power of God, about how wickedness will not prevail.

MAST: Eventually, church staff shepherded members into a nearby room and emptied the sanctuary of protestors…who Philips says were gloating about shutting down the service, but worshipers did return that night.

PHILIPS:. Pastor Jonathan addressed everything, and he preached his sermon the same way that he would have that morning, telling us that the way that we will show these people Jesus Christ is through our love for one another, and that that is the most important thing.

MAST: Joining us is to talk about it now is political scientist Hunter Baker. He is a WORLD Opinions Contributor and provost at North Greenville University. Good morning Hunter!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning!

EICHER: Well Hunter, let's begin with First Amendment principles here. In his livestream, Don Lemon played the part of a journalist enjoying ample First Amendment protections, repeatedly asking these church goers whose worship service had just been invaded, what they thought about the rights of the protesters. Didn't they have the right to protest? After all, we've got the First Amendment, et cetera and so forth. It's all the way through the interviews that he conducted. 

But I want to get your take on this idea of the bounds of protest, so I'm going to ask you to put your J.D. hat on this morning and talk about what they are and how, how thoroughly those lines were crossed.

BAKER: When it comes to free speech protections and other types of protest, typically, we understand that those things are regulated by time, place, and manner. And the place that we're talking about is a church. This is private property. A church is not a public park, it is not a government building or the area surrounding a government building. It is a private place where people are invited to come and to join or observe the service there. So this is not the typical place where you would see a protest. 

I don't think that a court would protect this as a venue of protest, but I just want people to think about what life would be like if it worked this way. I mean, what if protesters anytime could enter into your place of work and perform this kind of disruption on it? Or, what if any given conference that you might go to, people might come storming in and start disrupting the conference? It would be intolerable, and this, this is not really the nature of the kind of protest that is contemplated by the First Amendment. 

What it really reminds me of, and I'm going to, I'm going to sound extreme here, but it reminds me of the fascists of the early 20th century who would go places and try to intimidate people through their noise, through their violent behavior and seeming instability. 

So no, this is not protected protest and we shouldn't want it to be.

MAST: Well let’s switch gears here to talk about why those protestors were out: the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the Twin Cities. We talked to Minnesota state legislator Kristin Robbins. She says her state is in crisis and that what happened Sunday stems from state and city officials who don’t want to allow ICE to work as it was designed to, say at courthouses or at the airport.

ROBBINS: We need to focus on allowing ICE to do their jobs and pick criminals up at the courtrooms so that they don't have to go through our neighborhoods. And for these protesters to go target a person who they think is an ICE officer in their place of worship, it's just unconscionable. I would hope that everyone on both sides of this issue would realize that that is a bridge too far and stand up against it.

Hunter, if you watched that video, there did appear to be multiple officers outside the church Sunday by the time the protest quieted. But by all accounts, none of those officers went in to disperse the crowd. So law enforcement called, but no discernible action.

So talk about what happens when laws aren’t enforced as intended, and what’s at stake for the average American?

BAKER: We're really seeing a decline of our political culture, and we see it in a lot of different ways, but in this particular instance, I think that law is being corrupted by politics. It's sort of an immediate callback in my mind to the Jim Crow South where the police would not protect African Americans, would not give them the benefit of ordinary law, not just with regard to segregation, but with regard to protection from the standard crimes, you know, things like assault and battery and murder and things like that. 

And here we see these people who are entitled to protection from local law enforcement, who are there, and they do not receive it. But we need to remember that law exists for everyone. The law is supposed to be much more politically insulated than it seems to be in this case, and I think that office holders, specifically of the type that we see in Minnesota, are failing us, because they really seem to be encouraging people to break the law or to stretch the law. 

And the other thing that I want to say is, so we have this federal law a lot of people are pointing to, the FACE Act, which is a weird law, right? It's a law that protects people seeking an abortion and protects people engaging in religious worship. Very odd piece of legislation. I don't like this over federalization of law, we already have perfectly good laws against trespassing, assault, and things like that, and local police could enforce those laws. But again, you're going to see the FACE Act come into play, because just like I mentioned with the Civil Rights era, the local police have become unreliable, and so you see people looking back toward federal law. It's not ideal, it's much harder to use in the moment, but that's where we are.

EICHER: Well Hunter, President Trump set to speak shortly at the World Economic Forum in Davos—in Switzerland it will be early afternoon Swiss time when he speaks, or about 8:30 a.m. Eastern time here in the U.S., so that's coming up. Allies have been bracing for what he may say on Greenland, on trade, on the future of U.S. leadership abroad. And even before he takes the stage, the tone of the summit already set yesterday by sharp warnings from other world leaders.

Let's listen to a little bit of these very pointed remarks. Here’s Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, speaking yesterday. He said that if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values ... the allies will have to adjust. Sovereignty, Prime Minister Carney said, will no longer rest on rules but on the ability to withstand pressure.

CARNEY: Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons — tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

MAST: Likewise the president of France, Emmanuel Macron ... if you saw pictures from yesterday ... he's got a blood vessel rupture, so he showed up in some pretty stylish mirrored shades, he looked sharp, sharp like his rhetoric, criticizing what he called “bullies” and you know who he meant, even if he went unnamed.

MACRON: It's clear that we are we are reaching a time of instability, of unbalances, … I mean a shift towards autocracy, against democracy, more violence, more than 60 wars in 2024, an absolute record, even if I understood a few of them were fixed… . It's as well a shift towards a world without rules, where international law is trampled under foot. This is as well a shift towards a world without effective collective governance, and where multilateralism is weakened by powers that obstruct it or turn away from it, and rules are undermined.

EICHER: Alright, so I'd like to rewind to Carney’s characterization of a “rupture in the world order.” Hunter, what do you think? Do you think this is about Greenland specifically, or is it a kind of a generalized fear, do you think, that U.S. guarantees and alliances are just weakening?

BAKER: I think that it's all tied up together. I can't ignore the fact that Trump has been pressuring NATO since 2016. He has been pushing them to carry more of their own weight militarily, he has been pushing them to spend more on defense and not to free ride on American protection, and so that sets up an interesting dynamic. When you're when you're paying all the bills and you're bearing all the burdens, then other people kind of have to listen to you. 

But we're in transition phase. Trump has wanted the U.S. to be more of a normal nation on the international stage, and so that's happening. So we are forcing them to pay more and to do more, and so that means that they may want to resist when we start pushing. And especially in a situation like this, because it's just hard to understand. It is clear that we have the right and the ability to do what we need to do in Greenland. We can have military bases, we can set up missile protection, we can do all kinds of things. We do not have to acquire Greenland to do that, and yet he is, he is really pushing in that direction.

MAST: You know Hunter, Davos is often caricatured as a gathering of global elites, but it is also where norms get articulated. So how much does it matter that these warnings are being delivered there, in that setting, rather than quietly through diplomatic channels?

BAKER: It shows that there's a lot of frustration. I can't believe these, you know, these men, you know, publishing each other's messages on social media, these sorts of things, it's, I mean, this is so far outside of any kind of diplomacy that I've seen in the past. And what that shows is they're trying to win the battle over public opinion. I think that they think that they can make progress by showing that Trump is a bad guy, by showing how far outside the lines he is coloring. 

But ultimately, I want to say this, I'll put my credibility on the line, I'm going to agree with Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce. He says there is going to be a reasonable resolution of this thing. It will be resolved reasonably. I agree with that. I continue to persist in my feeling that Trump is going to push it as far as he can possibly push it, and then probably arrive at a reasonable sort of a solution. So that's what I think.

EICHER: You know, you've read all the presidential books, and there's the public rhetoric, and the back channel conversations, you know, you had these politicians who spoke so kindly out in public and then behind closed doors it's like this hardcore thing. It's almost like we're saying, "well, with Trump, all the hardcore stuff is public, but the nice Trump happens behind the scenes." It's a little counterintuitive.

BAKER: I think that's exactly right. I had a friend who used to say that Trump is kind of like the professional wrestlers. You know, he kind of gets up and he gives his big monologue, and then behind the scenes is a much more reasonable sort of fellow. We'll see.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is a WORLD Opinions commentator and political scientist. Hunter, thanks so much.

BAKER: Thank you.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.