Short Take: How should churches respond to government restrictions on their meetings?

John, what is your thought on what churches should be doing right now in that situation when they know they have a first amendment right to assemble, freedom of religion, and all these things that the state is telling them, no, you can't do this, you can only do it in a very, very limited way, and a church is caught between the idea of, well, we want to be obedient to the state and we want to be good citizens, but we're also having our first freedom liberties infringed upon.

Yeah, that's a wonderful question, and I think it's all about a matter of balance. If there's a pandemic that requires everybody to be home, then because we're Christians and we love our neighbors, then we stay home too, even if that means participating in worship service online or on TV or something like that, because no one's allowed to go out. But when we see the government allowing people to go to casinos and to marijuana shops and to buy lottery tickets at the grocery store and to protest in the streets and burn down buildings, but they don't allow more than 10 people to gather in a church, then something's wrong and we need to stand up for that.

And when you do that, two things will happen. Your great state of Minnesota, the Minnesota Catholic bishops stood up and said, no, we're going back to mass. And when they did, the government stood down and it allowed that to happen. That's one possible outcome. The other outcome is that the government gets its back up and says, well, no, we're going to go to court over this. And when that happens, then attorneys like at Alliance Defending Freedom will stand up and represent those churches, those religious leaders, those people, and make sure that their constitutional rights under the free exercise clause are protected. We've won 14 lawsuits in the last two months across the country challenging discriminatory governmental practices with respect to the pandemic and churches just like you've described.

And I'm sure there's going to be more of those in the days ahead. So yes, we do have to show respect to our civil governmental leaders. I think the church has been more than accommodating and allowing them to shut down churches over the last couple of months. But as things start to open up, churches cannot be treated worse than everybody else. And if they are, then we need to stand up and do something about it and we will win.