Yesterday it happened again!! I went to the closing arguments of Scott Harrison's trial for first degree murder in answer to the request of the family. I firmly believe that Scott has been framed. His family and others have suffered greatly by the state's decision to accuse him of a murder that he did not commit.

I met Kirsti, Scott's wife,and her family, outside the courtroom with other friends, including those who had at one time been part of the Mid-City congregation. The church -- individual friends of Scott from various congregations -- gathered outside in a circle, held hands, and a pastor from Kirsti's parents church led in prayer. It was a prayer for justice and strength for Scott and ourselves. I had my collar on, as I usually do when I go to court, to be visible as a clergy.

Before anything began with the closing arguments or reading of the special directions for the jury, the prosecutor surprised me when she suddenly complained to the judge about the "disgusting behavior" of those of us who had gathered outside the courtroom. Apparently, unbeknownst to me or anyone, the jury had been gathering outside the courtroom as well. The prosecutor accused us of jury tampering.

The judge then proceeded to agree with the prosecutor and threaten us with arrest if any such behavior took place again. She asked for all persons who were part of the prayer circle to look at her and speak that we understood her. Others did; I did not. She did not give any chance for us to speak, nor grant any legal reasoning for her threat. Honestly, I couldn't help but smile as I'd just been reading the Martyrdom of Polycarp and the judges behavior was so much like that of the Roman governor there.

The last little incident came when I was walking quickly out of the courtroom to meet my friend Craig Keen for lunch. As I walked, three persons related to the victim were walking out. All I heard was one speaking with a certain venom in her voice, "Psycho Christians." Whereas the prosecutor had interpreted our prayer in terms of a rational means of manipulation; the victim's family (for whom I have prayed much over the years, and would have invited to pray with us, for their suffering has been greater than all in the loss of their husband and father) saw it as an act of irrationality.

Three things here in terms of the way liberal political theory helps us understand this perspective. First, the prosecutors shows how our society understands prayer to be "functional" -- not about God, but a human attempt to manipulate the world around us. The prosecutor obviously understood the audience of our prayers to be other humans not God. Like many within and outside the life of the church, it is a functional atheism. Prayer is a human work for human ends that finds its useful function within the world around us. This is why "spirituality" has become so popular these days. It is a private experience within an individual that can help them cope with the world around.

Second, from the family's perspective it was "irrational behavior." Whereas I am sure that there would have been no problem privately bowing one's head and silently uttering prayers in the foyer, the fact that we gathered as the church, physically present in solidarity wtih Scott and the victim's family of the hideous murder 13 years ago, the fact that prayer was audible violated keeping prayer in its rightful place for it to be rational -- private and personal. Outside a courtroom, visibly present, audibly praying, if not a manipulative act for human ends, is an irrational act -- for the secular public world, common supposedly to all humans -- defines rational. To move the irrational into the rational realm is a "psycho" move.

Third, and most interesting is the judge's behavior. Her blatant coercive rhetoric to stop a group of Christians from praying together within a government building. Her behavior towards the prayer and her instructions to the jury correspond. Each jury member has to "not be influenced" by anything "but the facts." They have to leave their particular historical contingency behind (as if they can!), and become the isolated, autonomous rational person of modernity that the law presupposes and the coercive power of the state imposes. Our refusal to be autonomous individuals, ie, our insistence that we gathered in solidarity as the church outside and within the courtroom, even with Scott, directly threatened the myth and thus the legitimacy which the legal system is built upon. For the trial and closing arguments were not about truthfulness, but rhetorically imposing one's interest on the jury - the interest of the state or Scott's interest. The judge acts as arbiter of impersonal justice (the rules) to allow the "law" to function so that the autonomous rationality of the jurers can pick and chose through the competitive interests that the lawyers represent.

But the bald, coercive, direct threat of the judge surprised even me -- who expects the coercive power of the state. It is the sort of rhetoric that Talal Asad analyzes so well in Formations of the Secular. Asad analyzes the adoptation of modern secular categories in Egyptian law. He writes "the idea of religious toleration that helps to define a state as secular begins with the premise that because belief cannot be coerced, religion should be regarded by the political authorities with indifferene as long as it remains within the private domain. The individual's ability to believe what he or she chooses is tranlated into a legal right to express one's beliefs freely and to exercise one's religion without hindrance -- so 'religion' is brought back into the public domain. This freedom is qualified, however. The public expression of religious belief and performance of religion ritual must not be a probable cause of a breach of the peace, nor should it be construable as a symbolic affront to the state's personality. . . . the secular state, like others, is conceived of as a person who can be morally threatened" (p. 206).

What we encountered yesterday was the coercive power of the state in the judge that works very hard to make us individuals with private beliefs of our own choosing. That is not meant to be evaluative but descriptive. If we know that the liberal state is about primarly sustaining its coercive power over the bodies of Christians by making them individuals rather than members of the body of Christ, and individually members of it, we can develop together the skills necessary to resist this secularizing program of the state. We can make evident that the state is not about "freedom" at all, but about, rather, submission to its authority.

My quarrel with liberal political theory is thus not an abstract disagreement, but comes from my pastoral, embodied work. It comes when I can't talk with doctors about Mike Patterson's condition to get the information to love him better; it comes when I discover the state intimidating me not to pray for Scott when the state has isolated him from his family for over a year of his life; it comes when the state won't let us engage in the works of mercy except under its jurisdiction. But deeper, it comes from the ways the politics of liberalism form us to experience life in certain ways that make it difficult to live holy lives today, and then we make our experience as "natural."

Maybe some day I will get arrested. I don't look forward to the day, but if it comes, I hope it is for the right reasons, at the right time, in the right place.