Street preacher challenges Christmas festival’s ban on gospel

Arizona resident David Hoffman has shared his faith in Jesus at an annual Tucson neighborhood Christmas celebration for around a decade. But last year, police banished him and others with religious messages to a designated “free expression zone” outside the festival grounds.

On Thursday, Hoffman asked a federal judge to block the city’s policy and declare it unconstitutional. In the Oct. 2 complaint that kicked off the lawsuit, he contends that the restrictive policy Tucson police enforce violates both his constitutionally guaranteed free speech and the free exercise of his religious beliefs. A religious freedom expert says the city doesn’t have a strong constitutional case.

Hoffman heads Kingdom Enterprises, a Tucson-based ministry whose website says its mission is to “impact this world through the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” For the past decade, he has regularly attended the Winterhaven Festival of Lights, when the midtown neighborhood lights up with holiday displays and amplified Christmas music. Hoffman and others hand out gospel tracts on streets temporarily closed to cars and attempt to engage people in conversations about Jesus.

But last year, he ran into problems with the Tucson police. When he entered the festival area in December 2025 to talk with people about Jesus, officers informed him that his religious messages weren’t allowed—even in one-on-one conversations. One officer told him that festival organizers, who had to obtain a permit from the city to hold the festival, determined what was allowed in the festival, and police officers were simply enforcing the permit conditions. Four police officers escorted him to a “free expression zone” located outside the festival and away from the route most people use to enter the neighborhood event.

The city’s policy, formulated as a part of the permit process, prohibits “religious, political, or issue-based leafleting” inside the festival area. Signs near festival entrances warn that “law enforcement may remove anyone violating” the policy. But Hoffman’s attorneys contend that relegating his speech to a small area away from festival visitors effectively silenced his voice.

“Noise, including from traffic on Fort Lowell Road, forces Hoffman to shout and raise his voice, undermining his conversational style,” the complaint contends. “Sequestering Hoffman and those with him in a small zone away from the festival demeans them in front of the same people they are trying to reach.”

Hoffman’s website features a few videos that focus on negative reactions to his preaching. “Lesbian ‘Witch’ Has a MELTDOWN During Street Preaching” says one. “Ballot Chaser Exploded!” says another. Another proclaims “I Was Shocked When They Were So Closed Off.”

But he told me that very few people were actually hostile to his proclamation of the gospel. “We preach with grace and truth, so we do call people to repentance in our evangelism, but we also don’t operate carnally or aggressively,” he said, adding that many have given their lives to Christ as a result.

The 34-year-old evangelist traces his call to street evangelism to his conviction in sixth grade that he needed forgiveness. “I remember just lying in my bed, and I understood that I was guilty,” he said. “And God spoke to me, and He said, ‘I didn’t just die for everybody. I died for you.’ And the gospel clicked.” He believes in gospel proclamation because of the Great Commission and historical precedent, pointing to how both the First and Second Great Awakenings occurred when the gospel was proclaimed.

First Liberty attorney Garrett Bell, who represents Hoffman, said that the city’s policy went far beyond permissible time, manner, and place conditions on free speech. He said that the city must meet a very high burden to justify a content-based restriction on speech in an unrestricted public forum—something he argues it can’t do here.

Bell said that if festival organizers want to restrict people with certain viewpoints or opinions from their event, they need to make it private. “They can … charge for admission and put up significant fencing and guardrails to filter people coming in,” he said, adding that having a city-issued permit doesn’t change individuals’ rights. “Completely open, it remains a public street with constitutional protections.”

The city did not have any compelling reason to restrict his client’s free exercise of his religious beliefs, said Bell. He said Hoffman demonstrated a violation of his free exercise of religion because his conversations were motivated by his religious beliefs, his beliefs were sincerely held, and his beliefs were substantially burdened by the city’s action. “Evangelism is a central tenet of his faith,” said Bell. “He’s called by his faith to share the gospel, and so then telling him that he can’t do that is a significant burden on his free exercise.”

Brad Jacob, a constitutional law scholar at Regent University School of Law, predicted a short-lived lawsuit. “This looks like blatant content-based speech restriction by the government, and I think they’re pretty clearly going to lose as the thing stands,” he said. The city could have imposed a reasonable restriction, like controlling the volume of messages or requiring religious speakers to reserve an area within the festival on the same basis as nonreligious speakers, said Jacob. But that’s not what happened here, he added.

WORLD reached out to Tucson officials for comment, but a city representative said the city does not comment on pending litigation.

Bell said that First Liberty advised city officials of the constitutional violations in December 2025 but never obtained a response. By asking the court to intervene now, he hopes to obtain a court ruling before the festival occurs again this December.

For Hoffman, a ruling can’t come too soon. “A lot of people are living in brokenness,” he mused. “A lot of people are living in separation from God. So we go to events like Winterhaven that have a lot of people because that’s the greatest opportunity to reach the most people with the gospel.”

—WORLD has updated this story to remove a reference to an apparently outdated policy on allowed expressive activity at the festival.