How California churches helped eviscerate COVID precautions and harm public health
A Bay Area-based federal judge recently rained fire and brimstone on local officials over their long legal battle with a church that has flouted pandemic precautions, warning Santa Clara County’s lawyers to settle a case that had “mushroomed out of control” and was “not the hill you want to die on” given recent precedents. Local officials who tried to enforce COVID orders against scofflaw churches in Lodi and Los Angeles have already fared worse, coughing up six-figure payments to the congregations to conclude the cases last year.
These were the death blows of conservative California churches’ holy war on pandemic precautions, which vanquished bureaucrats and scientists by the grace of an ever more fundamentalist Supreme Court. The cases represent the last gasps of state and local governments’ best efforts to protect the faithful, their loved ones and their communities from the state’s most irresponsible religious leaders.
Three Easters into the pandemic, the far-right court hasn’t just dismantled regulation of high-risk behavior by houses of worship. A similar fate has befallen the broader effort to protect the public from communicable disease, a once-noncontroversial project that can’t be reconciled with rising national sectarianism. In many respects, this dark crusade against public health started in the pews of California.
A subset of right-leaning if not conspiracy-mongering churches have been challenging California COVID policies for so long that the clash first reached the high court nearly two years ago.
In May 2020, ruling on a challenge by a San Diego area church, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberal-leaning minority to narrowly uphold Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policy limiting indoor services to 25% of capacity at a time when multiple outbreaks were being traced to houses of worship. Because the Newsom administration was also limiting or prohibiting gathering in other demonstrably high-risk secular settings “where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time,” such as bars, restaurants, concerts and theaters, Roberts sensibly found that the policy did not run afoul of the First Amendment by singling out religious services. Nor, he wrote, was it a problem that “dissimilar activities” were treated, well, dissimilarly: Grocery stores, banks and laundromats, “in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods,” were subject to fewer restrictions.
This turned out to be the high-water mark of rational jurisprudence on this subject. Even as plenty of churches and other houses of worship were making do with remote and restricted operations along with countless secular institutions, then-President Donald Trump was seizing the opportunity to distort the restrictions into an attack on religion — more to the point, conservative Christians. And his latest and wobbliest addition to the court at the time, Brett Kavanaugh, was eagerly eliding the obvious dissimilarities noted by the chief justice to concoct a government assault on God and his followers. Kavanaugh argued in dissent that the restriction California applied to churches was not found in such allegedly “comparable secular businesses” — read: pits of godless iniquity — as “pet grooming shops, bookstores, florists, hair salons and cannabis dispensaries.” That’s right, cannabis dispensaries!
Trump’s first nominee to the court, Neil Gorsuch, employed the same tactic in subsequent rulings, comparing New York’s treatment of church services unfavorably to its reopening of “liquor stores and bike shops” and decrying California for failing to treat churches as it did “movie studios and manicurists.” That’s right, liquor stores and movie studios!
The difference from the first such ruling of the pandemic was that Gorsuch had become part of a majority striking down such restrictions as “tyranny against religion,” as the Southern California church put it. What changed? Certainly not the Constitution or the threat to public health.
Rather, the court did: The ascension of Trump’s third addition to the court, Amy Coney Barrett — who was, fittingly, announced amid a flurry of White House coronavirus infections — completed an ultra-conservative majority willing to take up the former president’s demagoguery and make it case law. Henceforward, the court would recast the pandemic as a conspiracy cooked up to crush Christianity.
That anyone even has to refute such a notion is preposterous. Recent declines in American Christendom, whose numbers have given way largely to the faithless, have no doubt made some religious leaders, and the politicians who count on them, nervous. But nearly two in three Americans still identify as Christian, making the United States by far the largest repository of the faith worldwide. In any part of America, going after churches is far from a politically appealing prospect.
Santa Clara County, which has led the state and nation in COVID precautions from the early days of the pandemic, isn’t doing legal battle with a church out of anti-religious animus. As the Mercury News recently reported, it’s also wrangling with an array of defiant secular concerns, including a gym, a massage parlor and a hookah lounge. California’s state and local governments harbor a bias against Christianity only insofar as they also have it in for hairdressers.
And yet the church cases were the beginning of a more ecumenical evisceration of pandemic policy. The high court went on to strike down the Biden administration’s workplace vaccine mandate, and policymakers in California and other states have largely retreated from similar efforts.
In the context of a country that has lost more people to the pandemic than almost any other, California has been a relative haven, with over 20,000 fewer deaths than the average national fatality rate would predict. In this pandemic and the next, however, even such moderate mercies are at risk from our escalating anti-enlightenment.