Gabriel Olivier is a professional evangelist in Mississippi, albeit not a particularly original one. Olivier employs the confrontational model of street-preacher “proclamation evangelism” made famous by hundreds of similar “evangelists” haranguing college students on campuses all across America. He carries signs made familiar by that guild — including a professionally printed version of the infamous “Your Sins Condemn You To HELL” sign listing all the sins he is certain everyone he encounters is guilty of.
The most notorious practitioner of this confrontational street-preacher tactic was the late Fred Phelps. Olivier learned at least one lesson from Phelps, which is that you can always raise the profile of your ministry by filing lawsuits.
Olivier’s latest suit is headed to the Supreme Court: “Mississippi Street Preacher Who Called Concertgoers ‘Jezebels’ Asks US Supreme Court to Revive Case.”
You might expect this to be a First Amendment case of some kind, involving Olivier’s right to harass concertgoers out of Satan’s clutches, but it involves gnarlier legal issues arising from the court’s 1994 ruling in a case called Heck v. Humphrey. It’s not about Olivier’s right to free speech, but about his right to sue over a case after he’s already been convicted. I am not a lawyer and I won’t pretend to fully understand how this case relates to Heck or whether or not that earlier decision makes sense.
Anyway, Olivier was convicted back in 2021 for refusing to stay in the designated protest area outside of the Brandon, Mississippi amphitheater because he wanted to get right up close to tell concertgoers that they were “Jezebels” and “drunkards” right to their faces.
The Mississippi Free Press story linked above does a good job summarizing Olivier’s history protesting/evangelizing at the Brandon amphitheater and sketching out the legal questions at stake in this case. But it leaves out what I think is also an important cultural and legal detail: What was the concert?
I mean, this was 2021 in Brandon, Mississippi, so it seemed unlikely this was Marilyn Manson or Ghost or Gwar or any of the other acts that generally have a symbiotic relationship with the cottage industry of street-preachers who order signs like the one in the picture above. If that were the kind of concert Olivier tended to protest against that would be one kind of story.
In that story, sometimes, the street-preacher in question is a true believer who’s earnestly seeking to save lost souls. Why they’d choose to try to do that by emulating a model of “evangelism” with a decades-long track record of producing approximately zero converts is another question, but I can at least entertain the possibility that such a street-preacher may actually be what he claims to be. In that story, the street-preacher might be operating in something akin to good faith.
But this is a different story. Because, as it turns out, the concert at which Gabriel Olivier was arrested for condemning concertgoers as nasty drunken Jezebels was a Lee Brice concert.
If you look at the “controversies” section on that Wikipedia page for the country music artist you’ll see there isn’t one. Brice is about as inoffensive and a-political and innocuously mainstream as you can get after nearly 20 years of success in the business. He’s known for good-hearted, earnest songs like “I Drive Your Truck” or “I Hope You’re Happy Now” — a sweet, wistful duet with Carly Pearce that’s sort of a pop-country version of “Better Things.”
He seems nice (like, genuinely, not in the internet-sarcastic sense). This is the kind of guy who writes songs with titles like “Love Finds Everyone,” and “You’ll Always Be Beautiful,” and “Only God Could Love You More.” I mean, it just seems like if you fill the Brandon amphitheater with 7,000 Lee Brice fans, you might find a few Jezebels and murderers and haters of God, but probably fewer than you would with just a random control sample of 7,000 people.
I’m sure that Gabriel Olivier would respond to that by quoting Romans 3:23 (in the KJV, of course) — “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” — and he’d pound on that word “all” when he quoted it. And he’d then launch into a stern Calvinist lecture explaining that every sin was equally detestable unto God, and that Lee Brice is damned unto the fires of Hell just as surely as Marilyn Manson and Taylor Swift. Et cetera, et cetera.
But that response has nothing to do with why Olivier chose to pick this battle. His choice to picket and protest and evangelize against Lee Brice fans wasn’t his attempt to illustrate the Calvinist understanding of Romans 3:23. It was, rather, something else he learned from Fred Phelps — an escalation intended to grab more attention and the opportunity to keep the grift going through litigation.
That’s what led Phelps to escalate from protests targeting gay bars to protests targeting military funerals.
What I’m suggesting is that this story — and this case — is not about Olivier’s free expression of his faith, but about his right to act in bad faith. I appreciate that courts are reluctant to make this distinction (even though they have no such reluctance when it comes to conscientious objectors to military service) and I appreciate why they are reluctant to declare themselves competent to make it. But I still think it matters.
• Lee Brice isn’t the only country artist in the crosshairs of religious whackadoodles: “Zac Brown Band accused of ‘Satanic ritual’ at show: ‘Evil does not hide anymore.'”
“The Zac Brown Band opened up its ‘Love & Fear’ residency at the Las Vegas Sphere Friday night and promptly freaked some folks out with the visuals.”
This is your generic post-Super Bowl-halftime-show story, with all the usual suspects freaking out in all the usual ways and finding the most hostile and occult ways to identify everything as hostile and occult.
Among other things, the band has been accused of “loosh harvesting,” which refers t0 … No. Never mind. I already regret the 10 minutes I spent trying to understand the bizarre conspiracy that entails and I do not wish to impose such a regrettable experience on any of you. Just take my word for it that this incoherent conspiracy is A) full-on bonkers, B) light years away from anything remotely Christian or biblical, and C) gaining in popularity among Good Christian People whose nominal religion was long-ago replaced by Satanic baby-killerism.
• December is a fundraising month here at the blog because I am desperately trying to turn around our dire financial situation before it forces me to resort to the Phelps/Olivier street-preacher grift in the hopes of getting caught-up on the mortgage and maybe also someday getting our leaking roof and the ‘vixen’s aching teeth fixed. Here is my PayPal link, and here is my Venmo: @George-Clark-61. Thanks.
• The title for this post comes from Todd Snider’s “Ballad of the Kingsmen,” which is the true story of the FBI’s investigation into whether or not the lyrics of “Louie Louie” are obscene and/or Communist.
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