This past week was quite the drama-filled battle of church vs. state fought out in, of all places, Louisville/
Here you had a mayor saying one thing, a governor saying another, the nation’s oldest Southern Baptist seminary weighing in and members of Congress jumping in with angry tweets and phone calls. And a federal judge jumped into the drama, as well.
The Louisville Courier-Journal did yeoman work — with one or two small holes — in covering this battle that began with an announcement on Good Friday that cops were going to be taking down license plates in church parking lots and plunking quarantine notices on car windshields.
But there was a ton of confusion as to who was in charge.
Louisville Metro Police officers will be writing down the license plate numbers of those who attend church services over Easter weekend, Mayor Greg Fischer said Friday.
Fischer has asked Louisvillians to forgo in-person gatherings, including drive-in services, to lessen the spread of the coronavirus. He said the license information would be given to the city's health department.
"If we allowed this in Louisville, we'd have hundreds of thousands of people driving around the city Sunday, and boy, the virus would just love that," Fischer said.
Really? Is that what Louisville is like on a typical Easter? (Also, note the phrase “including drive-in services.”)
This is where the reporter should have pointed out there’s never “hundreds of thousands” of locals driving about the city on a Sunday morning.
Dr. Sarah Moyer, the city's public health director, said knowing who was at gatherings, such as in-person church services, can help the department notify those who might have been exposed if an attendee later falls ill.
"If we have a case, we have a list of names of who needs to quarantine and isolate," she said. "And it'll just make our investigation go quicker, as well."
Kentucky’s governor issued a similar order Friday, saying in-person attendance at religious services was forbidden — but not drive-ins.
So you’ve got two standards being pushed here by public officials who didn’t check with each other first. That confusion lingered over the online firestorm that grew out of this conflict.
Now, the newspaper didn’t draw an immediate comparison between crowds at churches vs. liquor stores but an earlier piece on a local TV station noted there’s definitely been allowable automobile queues for those who wish the comforts of the bottle.
As the news hit the fan, there was quite the explosion from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky whose phone calls back home ended up in a restraining order the next day.
A federal judge has rebuked Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer's call on churches to forego drive-in services this Easter weekend to slow the spread of the coronavirus, calling the move overly broad and unconstitutional.
"On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter," wrote U.S. District Judge Justin Walker in a temporary restraining order issued Saturday.
Somewhere in there, McConnell put in a call to Walker.
On Fire Christian Church, in Louisville, sued Fischer and the city on Friday, arguing the mayor's direction on drive-in religious services violated Constitutional rights and their religious liberty.
Walker, who was appointed to the bench last October, banned the city from "enforcing; attempting to enforce; threatening to enforce; or otherwise requiring compliance with any prohibition on drive-in church services at On Fire."
Churchgoers there "face an impossible choice," the judge wrote: "skip Easter Sunday service, in violation of their sincere religious beliefs, or risk arrest, mandatory quarantine, or some other enforcement action for practicing those sincere religious beliefs."
The skirmish in Louisville was all part of a national debate on whether and why church services are considered intrinsically more dangerous than other gatherings. Note that the overwhelming majority of religious leaders have supported “shelter in place” orders. Also note that the small number of drive-in services are attempts for churches to meet — while observing social-distancing standards.
In an article published Saturday, USA Today gave a good overview of the issues at stake:
In Kansas, that battle has reached the Supreme Court. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly filed a lawsuit Thursday after a Republican-dominated legislative panel overturned her executive order banning religious and funeral services of more than ten attendees during the coronavirus pandemic.
Republican Senate President Susan Wagle painted the executive order as an attack on Christians. "Now, during Holy Week for Christians, she is closing our churches," Wagle said on Twitter. "We are doing our part to slow the spread."…
The Kansas Supreme Court met over video conference Saturday for the first time ever, and opening arguments in Gov. Laura Kelly's suit were broadcast on YouTube.
So much for anyone working for the court getting to actually observe Holy Saturday.
While both Kelly and the state's Legislative Coordinating Council agree on the importance of social distancing to prevent spread, the panel argues that the state does not have the constitutional authority to ban large gatherings of worshipers.
Attorney General Derek Schmidt echoed the panel's views in a memo Wednesday, encouraging residents to voluntarily comply with the order but discouraging law enforcement from enforcing the order. "Because no Kansan should be threatened with fine or imprisonment, arrested, or prosecuted for performing or attending church or other religious services," Schmidt wrote.
As it turned out, the Kansas supreme court decided Saturday night that the Republican panel did not have the authority to overturn the governor’s order, The Washington Post reported. It then included this interesting tidbit:
On Tuesday, she expanded the order to limit religious services and funerals, saying that 25 percent of the state’s coronavirus outbreaks have been tied to religious gatherings and that the risk of a spike in cases tied to churches during Holy Week was “especially dangerous.”
So that’s all religious gatherings, even those that seek to obey the laws?
Where did the governor get such info? Probably from pieces like this one, also in the Courier-Journal — blaming a church revival for the spread of the virus.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — On March 15, a church revival held in the heart of Western Kentucky to radiate joy and love unintentionally passed around something far more sinister — the novel coronavirus.
Like a pebble tossed in a pond, the virus rippled throughout the region, helping turn the area within weeks into a hot spot for COVID-19 — and giving Hopkins County the second-highest infection and death rate in Kentucky.
One large get-together, one unguarded moment, and an entire region can become infected.
Here’s an earlier article on this revival. Read the piece carefully and notice the detective work reporters had to do to find out details from a group that clearly did not want to talk with the media. Someone made a lot of phone calls to put that story together.
Kentucky is not the only place to experience exceptionally bad luck from a revival meeting. A similar gathering of Nazarenes on March 7 on the Navajo reservation in Arizona has resulted in an alarming spike in deaths among Indians there and in New Mexico, as described in this New York Times piece.
Anyone who has spent any time on the Rez, as I have, knows that conditions are Third World quality, medical facilities are sparse, the distances are vast and people tend to live in close quarters in their hogans and other housing.
So, what happened on Easter Day? Some people did defiantly meet in person anyway, the Courier-Journal reported. As state troopers patrolled the parking lot of one Baptist church, worshipers went inside.
There are some delicious details here — although reporters did not dig out what kind of Baptist church this was. Southern Baptists? Independents?
Kentucky has a fair share of Baptist flavors, so this is a detail folks need to know.
Even so, it's clear that Maryville's pastor, the Rev. Jack Roberts, has no intention of ending in-person services, despite the deadly pandemic, putting his church among a handful of others across Kentucky that have rebuffed Beshear's wishes.
Roberts arrived at the church Sunday morning to find several piles of nails dumped at the church entrances to the parking lot. He said he wouldn't tell his congregation to follow or defy the orders that Beshear announced Friday in his ongoing effort to hold down the spread of COVID-19.
The virus has killed 97 Kentuckians and infected more than 1,800.
"Everybody has to do what they feel comfortable with," Roberts said. He did cover his own license plate, as did several other parishioners.
It didn't matter. Troopers took down the VIN numbers instead.
I’m curious how many people typically attend this church and if the 50 people there comprised the entire congregation.
Although it turns out that this Maryville church was an independent Baptist congregation, there was a response from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary right there in Louisville.
Sure enough, its president, Al Mohler, had a lot to say about this issue on Monday morning. The transcript is here and it definitely deserves a read. It’s crucial that he draws a line, again, between churches that are fighting social-distancing standards and those that are attempting to cooperate in ways that resemble secular gatherings that the state is allowing (as in anything that produces a parking lot full of cars containing people).
But across the nation, since the middle of March, we have seen governors, we've seen mayors, we've seen county commissioners and county health departments issuing policies that on their face are clearly unconstitutional, compromising and subverting religious liberty, which after all is not just one amongst other enumerated liberties enshrined in and respected in the United States Constitution, it is actually the first liberty as our founders understood.
Thus, Mohler then explained that his real beef was with the mayor’s interdiction of drive-up services and how the shelter-in-place laws aren’t being applied in secular settings.
But telling people that they can drive-in their cars to the window of a liquor store, but they can't park their car with the windows up near another car in order to hear a message or a worship service, well, that's fundamentally unacceptable. In Mendocino County, California, the public health authorities even mandated that churches that are video streaming their services cannot include singing in the service…
Martin Luther once commented that singing the great hymns of the faith would drive the devil to distraction. Evidently, he couldn't even have imagined the Mendocino County health department in California. He would also have responded to that order with language that this Baptist cannot employ.
Here’s a few questions that all this coverage has brought up. Passover was last week as well and many Jews gathered privately in homes. Was law enforcement threatening any of their gatherings? Were sheriff’s deputies examining license plates on cars parked outside of Jewish homes? If not, it’s understandable why Christian groups felt targeted.
Ramadan, also a very social holiday, starts later this month. Will communal gatherings for iftar, the meal eaten at sunset at the close of the daily fast, be watched over by police?
I wondered how the sheriff’s deputies patrolling the parking lot at the Maryville church felt about carrying out these orders. Wish someone could get them to talk.
This topic will continue to be rich motherlode for journalists for awhile. Think of it: The First Amendment, lawsuits, cops in church parking lots; the possibilities are endless.