The city of Chicago settled with four Wheaton College students who were barred from evangelizing in the city’s Millennium Park in 2018. The case prompted the city to change park regulations to allow evangelism and other public discourses.
The City Council approved a $205,000 settlement Wednesday, which includes $5,000 each for the students as well as attorneys’ fees for the five-year litigation.
“I’m grateful that the gospel is being preached at Millennium Park again,” Caeden Hood, one of the Wheaton students, told CT. Hood graduated from Wheaton and is currently studying at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “We are ready to work with the authorities. … It is very good. We simply do not want the proclamation of the Gospel to be hindered.
A group of Wheaton students would come to Chicago every Friday, on the subway or on street corners, and strike up conversations, hand out tracts, or preach in the streets. Sometimes they went to Millennium Park, one of the city’s most popular parks with the famous “Bean” sculpture.
City rules prohibited “making speeches” and distributing literature in most of the 24-acre park. In 2018, park security asked Wheaton students to stop handing out tracts, which they did, but in subsequent interactions, security also stopped them from evangelizing. Four students – Hood, Matt Swart, Jeremy Chong and Gabriel Emerson – consulted with a Wheaton professor who contacted a Christian law firm, Mauck & Baker.
Attorney John Mauck had previously handled cases of religious land use, particularly for black churches in Chicago that were excluded from their spaces. He became one of the architects of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, a federal law that prohibits using land use law to undermine religious exercise. The Wheaton students had no money to pay a constitutional law attorney, but the firm took on the case at its own expense.
The firm filed a federal lawsuit in 2019, alleging violations of students’ free speech and free exercise of religion. Others who have had their own confrontations with park security over collecting signatures for referendums in the park have joined the suit as intervenors.
Disputes that took place over the years and with delays due to the pandemic.
At an evidentiary hearing in the case in 2019, Scott Stewart, executive director of the Millennium Park Foundation, said the park was different from other public parks because it was designed as a series of artistic “rooms.” – an argument that the park was not a “public forum” where the First Amendment would apply.
At the hearing, Stewart admitted that someone could distribute the novel Moby Dick but not religious literature in the park, and another park official, Ann Hickey, said that speech banned in the park depended on ” the intention “.
Based on that testimony, federal Judge John Robert Blakey ruled in 2020 that the park was applying “vague provisions in a discriminatory manner” and issued a preliminary injunction.
Blakey wrote that the park was clearly a public forum protected by the First Amendment: “It is free, open to the public, and serves as a public thoroughfare. »
“Indeed, if ‘careful design’ were enough to transform the nature of the forum, any park with a statue could lose its First Amendment protections,” he wrote. “The law excludes this absurd result.”
In 2020, the city issued new rules regarding parks, but the court said those rules may still “fail to meet constitutional requirements.” THE rules now clarify that they do not “restrict First Amendment activities on park sidewalks.”
Mauck told CT that students had an earlier opportunity to settle, but that a condition of settling was no evangelism near the Bean. The students refused because the Bean is a very important gathering place.
The compromise they made with the city was that evangelism near the Bean was allowed, but not the distribution of literature. And in areas where literature distribution is permitted, people can gift literature once, but not again.
“We live in the real world. We have to compromise. But I don’t think Scripture allows us to give up other people’s right to hear the gospel,” Mauck said.
Street preaching is culturally uncomfortable in the United States, but not in many other parts of the world, those who evangelize say.
Public evangelism “is setting us back in ways it never would have done five, ten or twenty years ago,” R. York Moore said in a statement. Interview 2019 with CT on the students’ case. At the time, Moore was the national evangelist for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA.
“As social perception and political restrictions continue to suppress the proclamation, Christians will ultimately have no choice but to pay a higher price for the proclamation – either as violators of the law or as as subversive,” Moore said.
Hood, one of the Wheaton students, said he “laughed around” during his first year at Wheaton, but decided to “pursue God wholeheartedly” during his second year and had joined the evangelization team. He began reading the Bible more often.
“I began to see the way the Bible speaks about the Word of God,” he said. “Jesus said: What you have heard from me, proclaim it from the rooftops. Jeremiah talks about hearing God, and he can’t hold it in anymore. He said it was like a fire in his bones. … Stuff like that gave me a sense of confidence. He had never preached in public like this before, and it was “a little uncomfortable…I tend to have trouble getting attention.” But he became more comfortable with time.
The case also brought public attention to the students. Mauck had warned the students, as he does with most of his clients, that the city might drag out the case for years as a legal strategy, and asked them if they would “hang in there” as plaintiffs.
“Usually they don’t understand how much this can weigh on them and cause anxiety,” Mauck said. “In this case, it helps that we have four (Christian) brothers who know each other and can encourage each other.”
The case dragged on for years, but the four men held on. Two of the others are in seminary at Mid-America Reformed Seminary, according to Hood. Hood still evangelizes in Florida, where he is in seminary, and says others evangelize where they currently live.
“That’s all that matters to me at the end of the day,” he said.