City-Funded Worship Show A Go

An atheist taxpayer will have to step aside and let Michael W. Smith come through, according to the city council, which has decided to let a city-funded Christian concert move forward.

Smith is scheduled to play the Draper Amphitheater July 24, but the mayor and city council canceled the event after one man threatened a lawsuit. A day later, the city, having already paid a $21,500 deposit for the worship artist, decided it did not want to forfeit the taxpayer funds. It originally decided to cancel because it didn’t want to risk spending public money on a lawsuit, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

A Utah evangelical group said the cancellation amounted to an assault on religious liberty, and the city apparently agreed. A councilman told the paper it had nothing to do with the added media attention brought on by the cancellation.

“As we thought about it and analyzed it, we don’t feel like we’re promoting a religion,” Draper Councilman Troy Walker told the Tribune. “We feel like we’re putting on a performance like we do every summer.”

About 700 tickets had been sold when the city originally pulled the plug. Gregory Johnson, president of Standing Together Ministries, called the cancellation “awful.” Johnson also works with Warrior Worship Ministries, the nonprofit that is acting as concert promoter, according to the paper.

He said that “one person’s personal disagreement with a venue” equated to “a violation of my religious liberties and others’ religious liberties and discrimination.”

He did add though, that even if nonbelievers have a problem with taxpayer money going to a religious concert at the shed, they can always “have a meeting there, God bless them” because any group should be allowed to use the amphitheatre.

The paper could not reach the man who threatened the lawsuit.