The raft of litigation concerning church shutdowns has been driven largely by evangelicals, many of whom have said that they do not agree with state regulation of public gatherings throughout the pandemic.
Since April, a series of churches have sued state and local governments because of restrictions on gatherings. The first wave of litigation came after many churches were not allowed to celebrate Easter and focused primarily on churches’ desire for drive-in services. The second wave rolled in as April ended when a number of states lengthened their shutdowns through May. The third wave, which does not consist of litigation at all, concerns a series of movements clamoring to reopen churches without government approval.
In each wave, the churches and religious leaders pushing back against state orders have been evangelical or Christians otherwise unaffiliated with a traditional denomination. And even before churches began suing, evangelicals were already the most likely to disapprove and to disobey state-issued stay-at-home orders.
A survey taken in late March by the Religion News Service found that evangelicals were the most likely to continue with in-person services during the pandemic. In states with no stay-at-home orders, more than 30% of churches still met in the early weeks of the pandemic. In states with complete bans on large gatherings, that number was just as high. At that time, evangelicals were also much more likely to say that churches should disobey orders if congregants believed they were unconstitutional, the survey found.
Nearly two months later, public opinion is in much the same place. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center in early May found that evangelicals, more so than all other Christians, say that states are not easing restrictions on public gatherings quickly enough. While on the whole, 68% of Christians said that states were opening too quickly, evangelicals were almost evenly split on the question, with 48% saying that states needed to hurry up.
Conversely, the Christian groups who were the most wary of reopening were black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics, with nearly 80% and 70%, respectively, saying so. Incidentally, many people in these communities are also among those at the highest risk for contracting the coronavirus.
Evangelicals are also the most likely to say that church services should be allowed without any restrictions and to say that banning all religious services is unconstitutional, according to May polling from the Associated Press and the University of Chicago Divinity School. This opinion, while still a minority voice even among evangelicals who wish to reopen, is a strongly held one, evidenced by the waves of lawsuits.
Churches did not sue governments until the weeks surrounding Easter, the holiest day of the year for Christians, celebrated this year on April 12. But as many elected officials, including President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, urged religious people to stay home on Easter, frictions began to develop between states and churches.
In the first major incident, which took place in Mississippi, Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons issued an order in the week before Easter, aimed directly at several Baptist churches attempting to hold drive-in services. One of the churches threatened to sue on Holy Thursday. The other actually did sue on Good Friday. Both held services on Easter Sunday, in defiance of the order, which they said violated the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The issue, however, was resolved in the next week when Attorney General William Barr issued a statement of interest supporting the two churches. Barr wrote that churches cannot be singled out, especially when businesses have been treated with relative leniency. Simmons lifted his restrictions on the churches soon after.
Barr’s intervention in Mississippi overshadowed a nationwide trend of churches, mostly evangelical, who also sued state governments for disrupting their Easter services. On Good Friday, On Fire Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, asked a federal judge to grant it the ability to hold Easter Sunday services. The judge, Justin Walker, now up for consideration for a appointment to the D.C. Court of Appeals, granted it on Holy Saturday.
Other churches were not so fortunate. Because of stay-at-home orders, many churches had to cancel or truncate their Easter services. And in the weeks following, many sued. Three California churches sued Gov. Gavin Newsom on Easter Monday. Later that week, churches in Tennessee, New Mexico, and Kentucky sued their governors. The following week, more churches filed suit, with several more churches in California and one in Virginia claiming their Easter services were disrupted by unlawful orders.
The drama went the other way, too: Days before Easter, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly sued the state legislature for attempting to block an order which would essentially prohibit Easter services. Kelly was able to assert her authority to issue executive orders — but not before several churches were able to win restraining orders, which allowed them to hold services free from restrictions.
By the end of April, churches kicked off the second round of lawsuits, in part emboldened by the Justice Department’s second intervention on the issue. Here, officials threw their support behind the Lighthouse Fellowship Church, the evangelical congregation in Virginia which sued Gov. Ralph Northam for prohibiting them from holding an Easter service.
The Justice Department’s statement supported in-person church services on the grounds that churches must be treated equally to businesses that have been allowed to remain open during shutdowns.
In the second wave of lawsuits, churches made similar arguments. On April 29, an evangelical church in Illinois sued Gov. J.B. Pritzker and vowed to reopen whether the governor allowed them to or not. In early May, two churches in Maine, three churches in Michigan, and 10 churches in Oregon sued their governors, making similar resolutions.
And in the past week, that resolution has developed into a movement, led by a coalition of evangelical churches in California that have stated that they will reopen on May 31, regardless of whether or not they have the green light from Newsom. They are preceded by ReOpen Church Sunday, an initiative organized by Mat Staver, a religious liberty attorney and former dean of Liberty University’s law school. Other evangelical churches have already begun to stage their own rebellions, such as Metro Praise International in Illinois, whose pastor Joe Wyrostek told the Washington Examiner that reopening without a lawsuit was his “passive resistance.”
By contrast, no major Christian denomination has filed a lawsuit against a state or local government during the shutdown. The Catholic Church, Episcopal Church, and some leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention have even gone so far as to encourage their members to cooperate with governments, and, in some cases, have aligned themselves with government policies on shutdowns.
On Thursday, the Catholic Cardinal Blase Cupich in Chicago defended Pritzker’s stay-at-home order and criticized the churches who are reopening in opposition. Cupich said that in his view, the interests of public health trumps worries about the temporary suspension of constitutional rights.
“People do have freedom of religion, the right to worship, and so on,” he said. “And yet, it’s not an absolute right if the public good, and public health, is jeopardized as a result.”
