[LMT Online] A Houston group that projected the message “Jesus was a migrant” onto the walls of several Houston buildings says leaders of Lakewood Church summoned police to remove its crew from a public sidewalk.
Over three hours Sunday evening, members of Indivisible Houston projected the message onto a wall at Discovery Green park and on buildings including Second Baptist Church, the City Hall Annex, the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, the George R. Brown Convention Center and Lakewood Church. The incident prompted a Reddit post that’s gone viral.
“Right now, we are in the middle of a government shutdown over a racist fantasy from the president,” Daniel Cohen, the president of Indivisible Houston, told the Houston Chronicle, referring to President Donald Trump’s demand for money to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border.
“A lot of families are under fire from the same kind of ideology that is inherent in the story of Christmas and they are going to church to hear that story.”
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According to Cohen, the only problem the group encountered was at Lakewood — the nation’s largest church, housed in a former basketball arena on U.S. 59.
At Lakewood, Cohen said, group members stood on a public sidewalk projecting the image for about 30 minutes. A security guard and two police officers arrived and asked the crew to leave, Cohen said.
“The guard said the sidewalk is part of the highway and private property,” Cohen said. “Then he asked, ‘How would you like it if someone took photos of your house?’ “
The group left quietly, Cohen said, and no arrests were made. No problems were reported at the other locations.
Donald Iloff Jr., a Lakewood Church spokesperson, said, “We don’t want stuff projected on the church that we don’t project, but other than that we have no comment.”
Indivisible Houston is part of Indivisible, a nationwide movement of thousands of volunteer-led local groups that engage in progressive advocacy and electoral work.
“We are autonomous, although part of that movement,” Cohen says. “We also helped plan a response to the firing of Robert Mueller and to family separation. We’ve projected messages encouraging early voting including a message saying ‘democracy dies without voters’ earlier this year.”
