I have one reason to maintain the chapel space at the MU: comedic entertainment. I have no data, but I would wager that the space has very low utilization, possibly just higher than the Abstinence or Students for Prohibition club rooms.

Yet every few years some socially just student wrings hands and words about how having such a space is discriminatory, as if there are non-Jewish and non-Christian students fretting over the chapel’s chains of oppression; the oppressed cry out, “I could have been the best, I could have been a contender, if had not been for that damned chapel.”

Aside from this pseudo suffering, we have entertaining constitutional issues to wrestle with. The Constitution does say, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” With few constitutional lawyers or religious scholars reading the Daily or attending MU board meetings, all parties are free to spew legal and religious generalisms.

But the fun does not end there, eventually the vacuous argument that “if you don’t recognize or service all religions equally then you should recognize or service none” is always launched forward like an intellectual nuclear bomb. The reality that all things are not equal and nobody wins despite the outcome adds the exture and tension to justify keeping the chapel in perpetuity for the sake of high comedy!

Sadly, this comedy will eventually end. As budgets get tighter, the fact that the chapel is not self-sufficient revenue stream will bring forth a repurposing of the space, possibly as office space for a student chapter of the Separation Clause Society. In closing, I apologize in advance to the members of the Humorless Student Support Group who most certainly found the preceding arguments offensive.

Trevor Riedemann

ISU Alum