Freedom from (Airline) Religion – The Catholic Thing

Earlier this month, Orlando-based evangelist and social media influencer Whitney Lynn posted a video of herself offering a brief preaching session as passengers prepared to debark an airplane in San Diego. Below the clip – in which most people seemed either oblivious or trying to ignore her – Lynn wrote: “I just love a captive audience.” On 30 July, Lynn was even bounced from a San Diego-bound jet for her sermonizing (something she labeled “spiritual warfare”).

Lynn is not an outlier. As a recent Washington Post article reports, airplane preaching is a real phenomenon, and one that seems increasingly common in our world of self-described “influencers” and trending social media. As a former evangelical, I think there’s something uniquely Protestant about the temptation to turn a plane into an impromptu pulpit, a temptation that reminds us of an important difference when compared to Catholic evangelism.

Certainly, Christians are called to share their faith (1 Peter 3:15), and Jesus has strong words about those who prove themselves ashamed of him. (Luke 9:26) Few Christians possess the preaching talents of Venerable Fulton Sheen or Fr. Mike Schmitz, but we are all supposed to exhibit the courage to talk about Jesus, even if we sound stupid or provoke ridicule. Sometimes the least effective rhetorician can still be an effective evangelist. (1 Corinthians 1: 17; 2:1–5)

That said, there are plenty of reasons to be prudential about when and where we talk about our faith. If you’re a businessperson trying to make a sale, it would typically be unwise to urge your prospective client to accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior. If you’re coaching a youth sports team, parents probably don’t want you explaining the rosary. Our First Amendment rights give us wide latitude to discuss our faith in just about every forum imaginable. But that doesn’t mean we always should.

On a commercial passenger flight, you ain’t going anywhere. You’re in an unusually vulnerable position, different from, say, walking down the street or even entering a place of business. As Ms. Lynn told the Washington Post: “They have no choice but to hear the truth.”

Given an experience that is already uncomfortable, I think I prefer my flights “preaching free.” I paid to get somewhere relatively fast, not for a religious “TED talk.” Moreover, consider the precedent this sets. As the WaPo acknowledges, airline policies “generally require passengers to obey the instructions of flight crews and avoid offensive, annoying or disruptive behavior,” but “do not specifically address preaching on flights.”

If the evangelist is free to get up and offer a sermon, that by extension would mean passengers are potentially subject to any impromptu lecture, whether from evangelicals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, democratic socialists, or transgender furries.

Will there be a designated emcee to offer oversight and supervision during these boarding and deboarding lecture series?

As you might expect, unreligious (if not anti-religious) people who don’t like being preached to have made a big stink about impromptu airplane evangelism. “That would be my nightmare,” one person commented in response to these airline sermons; “Can’t even walk away.” Another person wrote: “I would open that emergency exit.”

That response is absurd, but I can understand their annoyance. It’s one thing when people authentically try to share their faith in a setting where people have the freedom to walk away (as, I’d argue, Catholics should regularly seek to do). It’s another thing when it’s about manipulatively “influencing” someone in a setting where he has no choice but to listen to your pontificating.

Which, in the case of Ms. Lynn, includes antagonizing federal officers at the airport simply trying to do their job and investigate allegations of public disturbance. (To their credit, they handled her with admirable professionalism).

This illuminates a salient difference between Protestantism and the Catholic faith. Though the dramatic individual conversion was not a common feature of the early Reformation, over the centuries Protestantism, especially its evangelical varieties, has come to be associated with the idea of a singular, dramatic moment when a person “accepts Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.”

This was not Luther or Calvin’s intent, but it seems inevitable, given the emphasis that the Reformers placed on the conscience of the individual Christian reading his Bible. Hence the altar calls, invitations to pray, and the old “anxious bench” of nineteenth-century American revivalism. Through such invitations, many evangelicals believe, individual people can not only convert but experience the power of the Holy Spirit.

Now, that’s certainly possible. We would be foolhardy indeed to tell an omnipotent God what He can and can’t do. And certainly there are plenty of stories of authentic people having these kinds of conversion experiences that really did change their life forever (and a bit more cynically, plenty of stories of people having those experiences over and over and over again).

As Catholics, we believe that, ordinarily, God’s grace works through the sacraments. Baptism, Confession, and Confirmation – these are the privileged moments that can elicit an objective conversion experience in the faithful, by convicting us of our sins and granting us the grace to change and enter more deeply into life in Christ.

And, also ordinarily, they are prefaced by religious instruction and spiritual preparation. But the idea of preaching the Gospel to a complete stranger, inviting them to make a decision, praying over them, and then everyone going their merry way – that is not the Catholic faith, but an individualist, consumerist approach to evangelism.

Which, however admirable the intention, is exactly what influencers recording their impromptu sermons on airplanes looks like (one of her videos had 3 million views on Instagram within 24 hours of its posting).

Is the influencer leveraging these viral social media incidents to sell the product that is herself, or laboring to build Christ’s Kingdom by sharing her faith alongside them (and, hopefully, helping them to find and commune with Christ’s Church?) Perhaps they’d argue both. And that’s precisely the problem.