With the afternoon sun blaring down and armed only with a message, Adam Britt took 10 steps across an invisible threshold on April 2 and up to the front lines of a culture war.
He was immediately taken prisoner.
“If I have to suffer for other people to be happy, it’s not such a big deal compared to what other people are doing and going through,” he said.
Minutes later, 20 police officers surrounded him and three others, bound them with handcuffs, and loaded them into a paddy wagon.
Just hours before, Britt, 20, and a couple dozen of his contemporaries boarded a tour bus from a Days Inn in Ringgold, Ga., a tiny community situated at the midway point of the foothills that mark the Georgia-Tennessee state line. Britt is a member of the Soulforce 2007 Equality Ride, a bus tour of U.S. Christian colleges with anti-gay curricula, admission and disciplinary policies.
The two Soulforce buses, which split their terrain by the Mississippi River, are loaded down with young men and women who span the diversity of gender, sexuality, race and religion. For most, they are linked only by the power of their mission, which is as much about quelling anti-gay discrimination as it is about staking a claim for gay men and lesbians in mainline religious denominations.
Their efforts haven’t exactly been well received.
With the bus and passengers loaded up, the riders leave Ringgold en route to Lookout Mountain, Ga., and Covenant College, the 10th school and the halfway point of the group’s two-month journey.
Despite months of conversations and pleas with school administrators, Soulforce and its activists were barred from the campus without exception. Covenant College representatives did not return calls for comment and would not speak to Southern Voice at the site of the protest.
Since nearly every moment of the Equality Ride is planned, riders who are aren’t aware of their status as interlopers at their destinations are unfazed when they find out. They’ve been through this before.
“The Louisville court date on the 18th has been canceled for now,” East Bus co-director Katie Higgins told her group, which applauds lightly at the news.
In Louisville, 12 riders were arrested for a sit-in protest at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The next day, three were arrested for a sidewalk demonstration at the University of the Cumberlands in Williamsburg, Ky. And before the riders made their way to the eastern seaboard, they dealt with arrests in Oklahoma, Texas and Mississippi.
The bus, which is emblazoned with Soulforce insignias and gay-positive messages, pulls up a long, winding road to the Covenant College entrance. Police officers met the group at the edge of Lookout Mountain to offer a guided escort through the tiny hamlet. Ten deputies with the Dade County Sheriff’s Department are on hand to apparently guard the school and its students from the Soulforce riders.
After disembarking onto the street in front of the school, a Covenant employee and the cops warn the students not to set foot on the school’s property.
“If you step on the grass, you will be taken to jail,” a uniformed police officer said.
The riders immediately spring into Plan B — forming a line and staring steadfastly ahead at the growing crowd of cops in front of them.
Bram Wispelway, a 23-year old rider and recent Princeton graduate, opens his pocket Bible to the third chapter of John.
“It’s a passage about welcoming the brothers in Christ who may seem like strangers to you,” he explained.
More officers arrive, followed by newspaper and television crews. Gradually, a curious — or brave — few Covenant College students trickle down the hillside campus to meet their would-be guests. Conversations between the two sides are pleasant, but most quickly make the turn to what both sides consider a very important question, whether or not being gay is a sin.
“I still think it’s a sin, but by all means it’s ridiculous to think it’s outside the grace of God,” said freshman Chris Canche.
Canche was happy to meet the riders, but said he thought the administration was wise to prevent the demonstration from entering the campus.
The day winds through cheerfully. Students and riders form the type of connections that young people who are sandwiched together form. A welcome wagon troupe from the school brings down box lunches and water. A Metropolitan Community Church from nearby Chattanooga brings in more food for the kids, who are only distinguishable by the polo shirt and khaki pants the riders wear.
Despite easy rapport between the two sides, the day is accelerating and the sun is beating down. The friendly atmosphere will be shortly breached when four riders cross the thin line that separates them from the campus.
Rachel Loskill, a 21-year old rider from Michigan, has been arrested twice before on the tour, but is still a little nervous about crossing the line.
“It makes it a little easier to know that I have such support,” she said.
Like Loskill, Bronwen Tomb, 23, was locked up during stops at Oklahoma Baptist University and after the Louisville sit-in. She is nervous, but defiant.
“It’s absurd! This whole situation uses technicalities to prevent something as simple as private conversations with the students,” she said.
After a quick huddle with co-director Jarrett Lucas, 21, who will join them, the volunteer trespassers read aloud from a document they wrote, a “New Covenant for Covenant.” It asks campus administrators to reconsider the school’s anti-gay policies, and chides the school for disallowing the riders’ visit.
And then, silence.
The four riders simply walk onto the grass with copies of their message, and are hastily dragged away by police. Students are silent, and visibly stunned by the sounding clink of the police van cage shutting.
Despite the seemingly minor nature of the misdemeanor trespassing charges they face, the riders will stay in jail overnight. The police tell logistics coordinator Dean Genth, that no judge is available to set bail. As Genth and a local Soulforce supporter take off to the courthouse, the riders join hands in front of their new friends and start singing hymns.
Regrouped in a coffee shop in nearby Chattanooga, the riders make arrangements to pack up their jailed friends’ belongings before the bus departs the next morning. Two riders volunteer to hold vigil outside the jail overnight, and the entire group plans to meet in the parking lot for a prayer service and symbolic meal.
“You get weathered by it,” said Jamie St. Ledger, who volunteered with the first Equality Ride in 2006.
After a stop at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. — one even
