Comments on: subway preachers & showtunes

By: David W. Irish

David W. Irish — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:42:36 +0000

I just checked with the New York City Transit Authority, and they said that despite the first Amendment, it is unlawful to shout create a scene in a subway car, so these preachers are violating the law. if they shout and are persistant about shouting, they can be kicked off the train.

If you want to press this, tell the NYC transit police that the culprit is Rev. Frank Meyer from the Church of Christ, International. I researched this, and foudn that his ministry is specifically the one that organizes subway car preaching. He started his ministry in 1996, but I guess it grew recently.

The Church of Christ, international, is one of those extremist religious cults — evangelicals who live in communal homes, eating Ramen Soup and giving all their money to the cult, while a “shepherd” watches over the group home. They had some houses in the Boston area, where I’m from, and they still show up from time to time on street corners, but thankfully, no subway cars yet. Hope this info helps you, if you someday find that show tunes don’t shut them up. :)

By: LQ

LQ — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:39:52 +0000

Well, it was K.R. Munson that did it, but it was awesome.

… As for the trend: I saw a number of them during my time in NYC. Sometimes I muttered angrily or occasionally responded to an absurd claim. I could never quite get the courage to actually sing showtunes.

If this kind of behavior is on the rise, I wonder if the religios are particularly wrought up or excited about something? Some kind of full-moon effect for Christians? Or maybe the economic downturn is giving unemployed Christian fundagelicals more time to bother everyone else.

By: David W. Irish

David W. Irish — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:11:53 +0000

I just did a search on this phenomenon, and apparently, NYC has an epidemic of in-the-car preachers! People are complaining about it in dozens of blogs! Apparently, there is a whole organized campaign by a large evangelical church group to do this, and they try to cover as many different lines as possible! This is nuts!

My advice — get as many people who want them out to use their camera-phone to get pictures of these people, and send them all to the transportation authority, so that they can do something to ban the activity. That’s at least what they do in Boston — there are signs posted in the cars that if anyone is behaving suspicious, lewd, or is harrassing or inappropriately touching women, that you can send your camera-phone snapshots of them to the authorities.

By: David W. Irish

David W. Irish — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:57:38 +0000

Holy shit! New York is either 10 times more fun than Boston, or you guys have 10 times worse a street-preacher problem!

I’ve seen plenty of lame preachers masquerading as “street/subway performers”, but never had those bastards actually get onto the trains and start their crapola. They usually get a permit to be a “subway station musical performer”, and then just preach with a minimum amount of actual talent or music. They end up being more annoying than anything. As soon as I see my first subway-car preacher in Boston, I’m going to definitely follow your lead, but instead of Show tunes, I’d have to do Opera or Tom Lehrer songs.

By: Englishman in New York » Freedom to Preach

Englishman in New York » Freedom to Preach — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:59:57 +0000

[...] er I came across the showtune singing riders version of this encounter, which can be found here.