When anti-ICE activists interrupted a church service in Minnesota this week, chanting slogans and confronting worshipers mid-service, the act itself was troubling, but what followed was worse. A livestream showed former CNN anchor Don Lemon, rushing into the church to confront the pastor and defend the disruption as an exercise of “freedom of speech.” He implied invoking the First Amendment was enough to excuse intimidation inside a house of worship.
It isn’t. And claiming otherwise doesn’t demonstrate the Constitution; it distorts it.
“It’s shameful to interrupt a public gathering of Christians in worship,” Pastor Doug Wilson told Lemon in the video. “I have to take care of my flock.”
“There’s a Constitution and a First Amendment, and freedom of speech and freedom to assemble and protest,” responded Lemon.
It does not grant activists the right to commandeer private property, interrupt religious worship, or intimidate people in sacred spaces. Given recent news of violence against worshipers, the incident was understandably terrifying to the parishioners in Minneapolis. Treating the First Amendment as some sort of moral hall pass for disruptive and bullying conduct undermines religious liberty and the protection we have to allow free expression.
North Carolina’s recent history offers a useful contrast and a warning.
For more than a decade, North Carolina has experienced its fair share of protests by progressives’ political industrial complex. Back in 2010 and 2011, when Republicans were elected the majority party in the state legislature, Moral Mondays brought demonstrators to gathered weekly, challenging the new majority and its public policy agenda. They marched, chanted, and confronted power directly, but they did so in public forums: outside the General Assembly, on capitol grounds, and inside government buildings open to the public.
When Moral Monday protesters crossed legal boundaries, they planned for and accepted arrest as part of their protest. They did not claim that the First Amendment exempted them from the law. They understood that civil disobedience, by definition, carries consequences.
What they did not do was interrupt private worship services or intimidate congregants in their own sanctuaries. Even with the clear use of religion in Moral Monday’s political posturing there was a shared understanding that the city of Raleigh’s brick and mortar churches were not their own props to be co-opted for activism. Regardless of your opinion on the value or leadership of Moral Mondays, such boundaries demonstrated at least some level respect for the Constitution and for fellow North Carolinians.
That distinction matters, especially as national culture-war politics increasingly spill into local institutions here in North Carolina. In recent years, churches have found themselves under growing pressure to conform to political demands on immigration, sexuality, voting, and public health.
The line between persuasion and coercion has blurred, trapping civil society and putting worshipers at odds in the pews. As of this writing the US Department of Justice is investigating the incident for possible violations of the federal FACE Act, or Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994.
North Carolina’s laws have long treated churches as protected spaces, particularly during the Cooper-era COVID lockdowns when courts stopped executive branch limits on indoor worship. Also, in North Carolina it is a Class 2 misdemeanor to block access to a place of worship. Still, Don Lemon’s framing is dangerous if allowed to be a precedent. If “freedom of speech” justifies storming a Christian church in Minnesota, then it must also justify disrupting mosques in Raleigh, synagogues in Charlotte, or temples anywhere else in the state. Once that door is opened, no house of worship is safe.
North Carolina lawmakers have confronted this logic before. That’s why special protections exist around polling places, schools, medical facilities, and religious services. These limits are not attacks on free expression; they are acknowledgments that certain spaces must be shielded from intimidation.
Those who claim otherwise are not exercising the First Amendment. They are hollowing it out to turn disruption into a blunt instrument. The framers understood that liberty depends not only on rights, but on respect and responsible restraint. The right to speak freely does not erase another person’s right to worship freely.
