“I’ve never stayed at home on Easter morning before,” is a comment that I heard from several people over the weekend over text messages, Zoom calls, and around the dinner table. While staying at home during Holy Week may have been a first for many of us, a much more troubling first awaited church goers in multiple states in the past week.
As churches have worked to find creative ways to worship together and hear the preaching of the word while keeping members of their congregations safe and honoring governing authorities, many churches throughout the country have opted for drive-in church services, which enable people to stay in their cars and maintain social distancing while still gathering together as a church body. Unfortunately, the reasonable precautions taken by churches did not prevent government officials in multiple states from targeting and discriminating against churches during Holy Week.
In Louisville, Kentucky, On Fire Christian Church had planned to have a drive-in Easter service when Mayor Greg Fischer singled out specifically targeted drive-in church services, claiming that preventing people from gathering together six or more feet away from each other in parked cars was necessary “in order to save lives” and vowing to have police officers take down license plate numbers of church-goers, with Governor Andy Beshear supporting this move. On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Justin Walker blocked Mayor Fischer’s order. Oral arguments were heard yesterday. Although his order on hold, Fischer is still urging churches not to hold drive-in services, even as elsewhere in Kentucky on police and firefighters gathered in their parked vehicles in a hospital parking lot in honor of healthcare workers.
Greenville Mississippi saw similar government overreach when police issued $500 tickets to congregants who attended Temple Baptist Church’s drive-in service on Wednesday of last week. Temple Baptist was running their church service using local radio frequency. According to a complaint filed on their behalf by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), everyone stayed in their cars with their windows up. ADF has pointed out that just down the road, restaurant diners were waiting in their cars to be handed their orders, noting that “the only difference in these two situations is that the church had followed CDC recommendations even more closely.” Yesterday, the U.S. Justice Department filed a Statement of Interest in support of Temple Baptist Church.
There have been cases of churches displaying a complete disregard for safety and holding large, in-person gatherings despite warnings from federal and state authorities. In Louisiana, Tony Spell, leader of Life Tabernacle Church held a service with over 1,300 people on Sunday, and has even said that he intends to cover up confirmed cases of COVID-19 in his congregation. Such actions are truly irresponsible and are an example of belligerence, not an exercise of freedom of religion.
But a drive-in church service is not the same kind of thing as an in-person gathering of hundreds or thousands of people. A drive-in service requires no direct human interaction and no carries no reasonable risk of person-to-person spread of the virus.
When in-person gatherings for any purpose are being prohibited, this is not an instance of discrimination against people of faith, but a temporary measure that is being applied equally in the interest of public safety. On the other hand, when a religious gathering that does not involve any sort of person-to-person interaction is being forbidden and church members are being targeted by the police, even though other drive-in gatherings are allowed, this is an example of discrimination, and it is exactly what happened in Kentucky and Mississippi over the weekend.
Churches have an obligation to act in a responsible manner during a pandemic, both by respecting governing authorities and by doing their part to slow the spread of the virus. This does not mean that government officials have the right to target churches when they are acting in a safe and reasonable manner. If restaurants and businesses are allowed to offer curbside pickup, churches ought to be allowed to offer drive-in services. Government officials in Kentucky and Mississippi were completely out of line in their actions, and Judge Walker and the Justice Department are right to stand up for religious freedom.
