Will You Go to Heaven When You Die?

            Imagine yourself enjoying a nice leisurely day of shopping when all of a sudden you walk past a man who approaches you asking “will you go to heaven when you die?” You politely ignore him and keep walking, uninterested in his view of religion, but feel slightly annoyed that he is trying to impose his views on you. Maybe you make a comment while walking past a security officer, hoping that the situation will be taken care of. After all, why should you be subjected to someone else’s view point, you came to the mall to shop, not to listen to someone preach. The mall cops kindly ask the man to leave the premises, and to go through the proper procedure in order to be allowed to solicit on the property. When he refuses, they arrest him on a defiant trespassing charge.

            David Wells, of Oakhurst, NJ was the man arrested in the Monmouth Mall. He is a born-again Christian, and a retired cop. A large part of his faith is to evangelize and spread the word of the Lord. While this may seem inconvenient to the passerby who holds a different religious view and is uninterested in hearing what he has to say, for Wells he would not be acting on his faith if he did not try to convert others. The best place to do this is in a public setting such as a shopping mall. However, the fact that this is a privately owned mall allows some restrictions on the assumed freedom of speech.

            Wells himself cited the New Jersey Supreme Court ruling “New Jersey Coalition Against War in the Middle East v. J.M.B. Realty Corporation” as evidence that he should be allowed to distribute pamphlets in the mall. This case concerned a group of Persian Gulf War protestors who had requested permission to hand out pamphlets in a mall and were denied. In this case the Court ruled that their freedom of speech was being inhibited. However, what Wells failed to recognize was that even in this case the Court recognized that the privately owned mall could impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. The Monmouth mall did in fact allow solicitation and offered to make a reasonable accommodation had Wells simply sought a permit. Wells admittedly did not take this extra step. He did not see reason to; in his own words, “I was just talking to people. I wasn’t amplified, I wasn’t street preaching on top of a soapbox. I was just approaching people one on one.”

            What makes this case even more interesting is that not only is free speech a concern, but also Wells’ right to freely exercise his religion. Regardless of whether or not the mall owners have the right to censor his speech by requiring Wells to apply for a permit in order to “solicit” in the space, should they be able to hinder his free exercise of religion? This seems to resemble the 1940 Supreme Court case Cantwell v. Connecticut, in which Jehovah’s Witnesses were given an exemption from an anti-solicitation law because their evangelical practices were central to their religion and they were not harming anyone in a public sphere. There has not been a more recent case that would overturn this if the exact conditions occurred; in fact the Court has become even more sympathetic to religious freedom that overlaps with the freedom of speech. However, at what point is evangelizing not considered a central part of the religion and would protecting the right therefore be less important? Does the fact that a mall is technically a private sphere change the implications?

            I do not think that the courts should be able to decide which religion evangelizing is important in, because that leaves the minority religions in a very vulnerable place to be judged harshly by the majority. However, I also think that even if the courts held the centrality of evangelizing in a religion to high importance in determining a case like this, born-again Christians would probably be recognized as valuing the evangelical ideals almost as much as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Therefore, I think that if this case makes it to a trial, the Court should go off of precedent in the Cantwell decision and rule that David Wells was wrongly arrested and that prohibiting him from spreading his evangelical message in a mall is violating his right to freely exercise his religion. I do not find the argument that a mall is a private setting compelling, because although that may technically be true, the atmosphere is one of a public space.

            Although I do acknowledge the fact many shoppers may find the solicitation inconvenient, it is important to remember that even if they are the majority, the minority has a constitutional right to freely exercise his religion. The majority does not have a constitutional right to avoid any inconveniences. What do you think?