For several weeks now, churchgoers — and journalists — have been waiting to see what would happen at Easter, Passover and Ramadan.wisely,

We don’t have all the answers, yet. But it’s clear that in the overwhelming majority of cases, Christians in North America and around the world will be observing Holy Week and Easter at home, watching small teams of clergy and musicians celebrate the holiest rites of the Christian year while striving to follow the fine details of “shelter in place” orders.

In my own church — Eastern Orthodoxy — we will celebrate Pascha a week after Western Easter. Clergy in the Diocese of the South (Orthodox Church in America) just learned that our Archbishop Alexander has (I believe) set strict standards (.pdf here) for his parishes all across the Sunbelt. People will stay home through it all — Holy Week and Pascha — watching five-person teams of clergy and chanters do as many of the long, ancient rites as they can. Click here for Rod Dreher’s poignant post on that, which includes:

Did you know that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the one built over the site where Jesus died, was buried, and was resurrected, has been closed for the first time since … the Black Plague, in the 14th century? The right way to see this is that we Orthodox Christians are being asked to make an absolutely extraordinary sacrifice for the life of the world — so that this plague which has killed, and will kill, so many, and will have reduced so many to poverty, can be defeated. As the old-school Catholics like to say about sacrifice, we should, “offer it up” as an extreme sharing of Christ’s passion. We will know in a way we never have the meaning of the crucified Jesus’s words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

All of that loomed in the background as “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I recorded this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in).

For the most part, we tried to look past that story and down the road at the long-term legal implications of other religion-beat headlines caused by the coronavirus crisis.

I am referring to the small number of evangelical Protestants who have been rebelling against government orders to “shelter in place.” Julia Duin and I wrote about the coverage of some of these cases here (“About Rodney Howard-Browne and what happens to Easter, Passover and the hajj during a plague“) and then here (“All megachurches are not alike: NYTimes noted Howard-Browne arrest, but didn't leave it at that“).

What happens if — as some are planning — clashes between a few churches and state officials end up in court?