2024’s Pride in the Park in Watertown

Aug 06, 2024

A year ago, the Rev. Dr. Christopher Ross, pastor of First Congregational UCC in Watertown, was present when neo-Nazis disrupted the community’s Pride in the Park event. That event prompted this reflection, published last August. What followed was a year of discernment, collaboration and action. Read on for Chris’ story.

Dear siblings in the Wisconsin Conference:

Let me tell you about Watertown’s 2024 Pride celebration the year after Nazis came to town and those who call themselves Christians stood with them.

In the aftermath of last year’s armed neo-Nazi presence at Pride in the Park, organized expressions of white Christian nationalism began to pop up around the community, often explicitly in response to Pride in the Park. As a result, I reached out to my clergy colleagues serving the other actively progressive congregations in the community—Immanuel ELCA, St. Paul’s Episcopal, and Ebenezer Moravian—and we, along with lay people from the four congregations, began meeting and strategizing about how to offer local Christian witness as alternative to the voices of Christian nationalism.

A group called “Building a Welcoming Watertown” was born. We began meeting regularly with staff from the WISDOM interfaith network. We explored ways we could offer a prophetic challenge. We even formed a Housing Justice Task Force to take on issues surrounding the lack of affordable housing in the community.

But at the same time these four congregations began coming together to do this work, the elected city government in Watertown took a different approach.  They sought ways to restrict future Pride events and their use of public spaces. Eventually finding a strategy that could pass legal muster, they decided to raise costs for the Unity Project of Watertown (the group that runs the community Pride event) to make it unfeasible for the event to happen at a city park in 2024. This move was grounded in excuses of the expense of providing protection.

The Unity Project needed a new venue for 2024. And so, they asked us at First Congregational UCC if we would be willing to host.

Now, I won’t lie—there was anxiety on the part of our congregation in hosting an event at which an armed hate group made an appearance the year before. But after Council deliberations and a special congregational meeting, First Congregational approved the building use request.

And I still won’t lie—anxiety remained for many in the congregation. Our moderator, Tom Rusch, leaders from the Unity Project, officers from the Watertown Police Department, and I began weekly meetings to work out the logistics for this year’s event. Based on last year’s numbers, we expected a maximum of 300 attendees. I preached a four-week “Preparation for Pride” sermon series that focused on scriptural passages like David and Jonathan’s marriage, the repeated affirmation of the diversity of all creation in the covenant sealed by the rainbow, how eunuchs and sexual others were welcomed by Jesus and the early church, and how the sin of Sodom was really about xenophobic mob violence.

On Saturday, July 27, well over 500 folks came through First Congregational UCC of Watertown, making it the largest Pride event in the city’s history. The parking lot remained full for most of the day. Many people visited the church for the first time, enjoying the drag performances in our sanctuary, seeing our giant rainbow banner emblazoned with “God is still speaking,” and knowing that such a statement of welcome holds true all year round. Many wanted to tell me about the step we had taken in healing religious trauma experienced by LGBTQ+ folks.

The event was the front-page story in the Watertown Daily Times on Monday morning, with the subheading: “No protestors. No nazis. No problem.”

As I wrote a year ago, we remain always called to be an ally to the outcast and religiously excluded. Such is what Christian public witness looks like.

The Rev. Dr. Christopher Ross,
Pastor, First Congregational United Church of Christ of Watertown