Desecration in MN and Ecclesiology of Public Worship

The recent disruption of a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, by anti-ICE protesters has prompted familiar legal arguments. Commentators invoke the FACE Act, which prohibits interference with an individual’s right to worship. They appeal to Paul’s exercise of Roman citizenship. And they protest the intrusion into a “private” space. These arguments have their place. But they begin in the wrong posture—at least theologically. To defend worship as a matter of privacy is already to concede a central liberal assumption: that Christian worship is a private affair. To adopt this frame is to neutralize the church’s public character. It is, as Peter Leithart puts it, to embrace liberalism’s “heretical ecclesiology.”