I have listened respectfully to what you have to say. And I ask you to search your heart and ask yourself what sort of unfathomable hate led you to do what you are guilty and admit you are guilty of doing. And I have an answer for you. It may not satisfy you. But as I search this entire record, it comes as close to understanding as I know.

It seems to me you hate the one thing that is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose. Here, in this society, the very winds carry freedom.

                                             — Judge William Young, US District Court, in Sentencing Richard C. Reid

This should have been a short story.

The idea came to me nearly 15 years ago when I was traveling England, when I was full of ideals and optimism and an innocent trust that those who held differing views had good intentions. That their goal was to help others become independent and secure, to forge a better, freer world. I was far more tolerant then, in the new sense of that term.

At the time, those who most vocally force their opinions on America – the education industry, the special-interest groups, and the media – had begun to mainstream the visceral condemnation of all those who disagreed with them. Though dominated by the Left as they have been for decades, their condemnation even through the conservative ’80s maintained some semblance of respect. The vitriol had remained largely at the fringe of most sociopolitical organizations. Part of the mainstreaming of vitriol involved branding their opponents with the most pejorative of the –ist labels that the could apply as epithets: sexist, racist, nationalist, imperialist, capitalist.

It was at this time that I came upon a disturbing scene in London.

Leicester Square is on London’s West End and close to Trafalgar Square with Nelson’s Column, St. Martin’s In the Fields, and the National Portrait Gallery. It is only a few blocks from Regent Street, the heart of upscale retail, and Piccadilly Circus. There is a statue at Piccadilly Circus commonly referred to as Eros as it is of a cherubim shooting arrows. It was actually erected as a monument to the philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury and symbolizes Christian charity.

The Square encloses a small park with a statue of Shakespeare. Statues of Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Hunter, and William Hogarth stand at each corner gate. Each represents a cornerstone of Western culture and the contributions England has made to civilization.

Newton represents the objective mind of reason found in the sciences. Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, the importance of education, especially the critical analysis at the heart of classical studies. The celebrated surgeon John Hunter, through his dedication to healing and comforting, the value we place on the sanctity of life. And William Hogarth, the renown painter, the creative analysis through art of society, man’s place in society, and man’s place with God.

Leicester Square is also the center for cinema and nightclubs. While the clubs lack character and intimacy, they offer dancing and a place to meet people from parts of the world tourists may never be fortunate enough to visit.

One night in my travels I went to the Hippodrome. It was one survivor from what had been a chain of music halls and theaters in the early 20^th century. It started as a circus then became a music hall and a cabaret before it was converted into a nightclub. In that sense, it reflected how London had grown from a city of neighborhoods with local entertainment into an international city.

That night I danced with a girl named Kristiina from Finland and afterward we chatted in broken English and broken French. We talked about the history of Finland, its evangelical Lutheran background, its struggles to remain independent by fending off the Soviets during WWII and the Cold War.

As we talked and I became familiar with her life and her country, a distant and mysterious country I’d never visited and probably never would, I was overcome not by the strangeness and vast differences between two such varied lives from distant countries but by their similarity.

I left the club elated yet already carrying in my heart that persistent sadness that there are those we meet and wish we could be friends with all our lives yet who we know we’ll never see again.

Leicester Square was mobbed as it usually was on Friday and Saturday nights. I wandered around the Square then sat on a bench trying to determine whether there were a short story somewhere in the evening when I was roused from my reverie.

“Jesus has the answer!” a British voice boomed behind me. “You have questions? Jesus has the answer!”

I turned around and saw a man standing atop a box. He was dressed in black and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. He was fair and wore a pointed goatee and mustache. His hair was parted on the side and most of it was combed back except for a few strands that hung down over his eyes. He thwacked his thumb against a Bible as he spoke.

“Don’t look out there, look in here! Who else would die in your place?” he shouted. “And who else died and conquered death to prove that he is the Son?”

“Your time is almost up,” another man shouted about ten yards to his side. He was a thin black man with a white shirt and tie. He also had a Bible but was holding it in one hand and waving it over his head.

“Your time is almost up, and you’re wasting your last few minutes wandering,” he said. “After you die it is too late! You must accept Him now, while you live!”

I left the bench and walked over to listen to them. In an instant they were swarmed. A band of about fifty men in Arabic dress surrounded and separated them. I thought at first they must all be Arabic, but as I looked I realized that most of them appeared to be British.

They pressed in upon the evangelists and began shouting them down, waving their arms and milling around and taunting the two evangelists. It was difficult to understand what they were shouting. Part of the purpose of the verbal assault must have been simply to drown out the message of the evangelists.

A short British man in full Arabic dress stood along the inner edge of the crowd surrounding the evangelists. Suddenly he leapt toward the black Christian and in a squat danced around him like a monkey, swinging his hands low and making monkey faces. His face was disproportionately large for his short stature and he had big lips and an elastic face that contorted easily. He imitated a monkey probably better than he was aware. He paused periodically to look back at his comrades to ensure that they were laughing at his antics. They laughed and nodded so he continued.

When the crowd stopped laughing at his mockery, he jumped in front of the evangelist and shouted at him in a cockney accent, spraying him with saliva and shaking his blunt fist an inch or so from his face.

This went on for ten minutes with unrelenting intensity. The Christians kept thwacking their Bibles and shouting their phrases while the crowd kept trying to intimidate them. The situation seemed to be on the verge of a brawl and I began to look around for the bobbies.

The short man rushed toward the evangelist. As he did, the evangelist raised an open hand defensively. The short man did not stop in time and ran into his hand.

“Jesus save this man!” the evangelist shouted, taking advantage of the accidental touch.

The short man stepped back and measured him off with one arm while cocking his other fist.

A few hands reached out from the crowd and pulled him back by the shoulders. He cursed and twisted trying to free himself so that he could smash the evangelist. His headdress twisted and fell to his shoulders revealing a shaved head.

The two Christians signaled one another that it was time to leave. When two bobbies finally approached from Covent Gardens, the swarm scattered in an instant as though they had never been there. The two Christians walked away together.

As I watched them walk up a side street together, I regretted that I had not stepped in to let them know they were not alone, that I was there with them. I’d watched the mayhem as an impartial observer having decided to jump in to help the evangelists if it became a brawl. Yet I regretted that I had not come to their aid by speaking up, for I realized that it is by waiting for the climactic brawl that those who are fighting the good fight every day often feel alone and abandoned and give up.

It is impossible to know what would have happened had I and others joined with the evangelists. Perhaps it would have escalated into a brawl. But more likely the dialogue would have been much more civil. Bullies tend to back down when their target poses a challenge.

The hatred in the short man’s face burned in my memory for years. I could not understand how he had come to be so hateful. And I could not understand why those in the crowd were so intimidated by the free expression of two evangelists that they organized and turned out en masse to harass and silence them.

How had men raised in a culture of liberty so similar to mine not only cast off their culture but come to view that culture as the enemy? How had their spirits been so poisoned with venom?

Was it merely that they were poor and had been misled as to the cause of their poverty and whom to blame?

Were they simply malcontents looking for a group to join that would attack or accost others?

Had their sense of belonging and nationhood been robbed of them, leaving them clinging to that which most seemed like a brotherhood?

A. von Hayek captured at least part of the source of that hatred in The Road to Serfdom:

The resentment of the lower middle class, from which fascism and National Socialism recruited so large a proportion of their supporters, was intensified by the fact that their education and training had in many instances made them aspire to directing positions and that they regarded themselves as entitled to be members of the directing class.

In failing to become members of the Directing Class, petty tyrants are forced to despise the liberty of those they wish to rule.

Regardless of how they’d come to such a fear of and thus a loathing for those who enjoyed liberty and disagreed with them, they vividly demonstrated that it is the more cultic arm of a group that appeals to the weak, the frightened, the lost, and the hateful.

I was going to write a short story that blended the poetry of coming-of-age with the prophetic literature that sometimes attends a chance peak behind the curtain at the puppet master of worldly events. For I was certain that I had seen that night the first shots of what would be a worldwide confrontation, perhaps not on the scale of the world wars, but a world torn by battle.

I never wrote that short story for fear of being branded with an–ist label. I’d been silenced by those shaking angry fists in the air and blaming all the ills of the world on America and Western culture.

I was among those many Americans who just wanted to get along, who acknowledged that I didn’t have all the answers, that others had ideas and beliefs worth considering and changes that perhaps we needed to make. We just wanted to get along and so we took the blows like a faithful dog who takes a beating not knowing what he did wrong but assuming the beating is justified.

In one sense, America is an evangelist herself. In all her actions – the aid she gives to other nations, the dictators she has shed her own blood to overthrow, the wealth she shares with the world by spreading a market-based economy, the traditional virtues she seeks to preserve, and the creative energy and joy of life she enables because of her freedom – all of this is a constant testament to America and the blessing of traditional Western culture and above all, to liberty.

It is hard to believe that many people in other countries and in our own country have been so led astray by the guilt of comfort and success, by intellectual dialectics and moral relativism, and by the utopia promised by collectivists, that patriots find themselves backed into a corner defending liberty. But that is where we are.

Who would have ever believed that we would have to defend the struggles of the Founding Fathers against charges of greed, racism, and oppression? Who would have ever believed that freeing countries from brutal dictatorships would be called imperialism?

Against cults that seek to be left alone, we need only defend ourselves and families that we are not drawn in. But against cultists and extremists that wish to conquer or destroy those who disagree with them, we must unite to defend not only ourselves, but our culture and our liberty – not only for us, but for future generations.

While America evangelizes incidentally, we as individuals can no longer stand by as casual observers. If we do, eventually America will give in to her enemies.

We must overcome our timidity and our comfort and speak out even if we are surrounded and accosted and branded by epithets. We must stand against threats to our cultural heritage and especially to our liberty, for that is what our enemies despise most and seek to destroy.

Yet each patriot must not only respond defensively but arise as an Evangelist of Leicester Square proclaiming the blessings of liberty.

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