There Should Be No forgetting - The Free Expulsion Of Religion

The Free Expulsion of Religion

Brownstone Institute

A new creed emerged in 2020 that divided society into true believers and heretics. Its adherents donned face coverings and regularly engaged in emotional self-flagellation. They put their faith in pharmaceutical products and unrelentingly sought to convert their neighbors. Those who questioned their dogma were cast aside as irredeemable. Just as the New York Times suggested the country “go medieval” on the CV, society returned to a Dark Age persecution of iconoclasts. 

The central powers banished dissidents while the United States’ capital city declared a holiday for its beatified leader. In Washington, DC, the Mayor renamed Christmas Eve “Dr. Anthony S. Fauci Day” in 2020. Mass media and cultural madness ushered in the nascent faith. Rev. John Naugle later observed, “Lockdowns were the catechumenate, masks were the religious garb, vaccines were the initiation.” 

The ruling class was not subtle on this point. New York Governor Kathy Hochul toldconstituents, “I need you to be my apostles,” urging them to spread her gospel on Covid vaccines. Lindsey Graham thanked the divine intervention of mRNA shots. Newspapers ran opinion pieces on why “Jesus would wear a mask.” Ibram X. Kendi proudly wrote in The Atlantic: “[My] dad likened me to John the Baptist, a voice crying out in the wilderness for racial data on the pandemic.” On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert parodied The Ten Commandments as a coronavirus warning to worship lockdowns. “Flatten the curve,” Colbert’s God told the audience. On Easter Sunday 2021, President Biden implored Americans to get the Covid vaccine, insisting it was their “moral obligation,” in a speech that did not mention Jesus once. 

Before March 2020, most Americans would think that monitoring church attendance, banning Easter services, and arresting hymn singers were practices reserved for Eastern-style totalitarianism. The Soviet Union persecuted Christians, and the Chinese have Muslim concentration camps, but Americans’ freedom of worship is enshrined in the Bill of Rights. The free exercise of religion precedes all other liberties in the First Amendment. Even in the 21st century, when the country had become increasingly secular, few could imagine that political leaders would launch a crusade against organized religion. 

Yet, that’s exactly what happened. And the assault on religious liberty was not reserved for the piously nonreligious in Santa Barbara or East Hampton. In 2020, Kentucky State Police arrived at an Easter service to issue notices that attendance was criminal. They recorded the congregants’ license plate numbers and issued warnings that violators were subject to further sanction. In Mississippi, police issuedcitations to a church congregation that hosted a drive-in service despite attendees remaining in their vehicles for the entire service.

In Idaho, police arrested Christians for removing their masks to sing psalms outdoors in September 2020. “We were just singing songs,” said Christ Church Pastor Ben Zornes. But that was no excuse for the sin of violating an irrational and unscientific cloth commandment. “At some point in time you have to enforce,” the local police chief explained.

The city later reached a settlement that paid $300,000 to Iowans arrested for attending the outdoor service. “[The worshippers] should never have been arrested in the first place, and the constitutionality of what the City thought its Code said is irrelevant,” wrote the local district judge. The obviousness of that statement – worshippers should never have been arrested for singing outdoors – reveals the intensity of the secular fervor that swept the country. 

Unsurprisingly, Andrew Cuomo was intolerant of citizens worshipping non-political deities.

He threatened upstate New Yorkers with $1,000 fines for attending “drive-in” services in May 2020. “We’re not trying to be rebellious,” said Pastor Samson Ryman. “We’re just trying to be safe and reach our community with the gospel of Jesus Christ in these difficult times when people are having anxiety, worry, different mental concerns, and they want to get some spiritual help, through the word of God.” On May 3, 2020, Ryman held his first drive-in service in upstate New York with 23 attendees in 18 vehicles. The next day, Cuomo’s police force issued a cease-and-desist letter.

In California, the Santa Clara Health Department used GPS data to monitor congregants at a local evangelical church. The government partnered with a data mining company to create a “geofence” (a digital boundary) around the church’s property, monitoring over 65,000 mobile devices to record any citizens that spent more than four minutes in the area.

Around the country, governors deemed churches “non-essential” and barred them from opening their doors. Meanwhile, marijuana dispensaries, liquor stores, abortionists, and lotteries received the protection of the arbitrary label of “essential services.” For most of 2020, Christians, Jews, and Muslims had no recourse against the totalitarian assault on their faith and First Amendment freedoms.

The orders that shuttered churches were not generally applicable ordinances. They were not blanket decrees that applied equally to all establishments. Instead, states adopted deliberately unequal systems of law: “essential” groups like Costco and casinos could host hundreds of customers at any given time while religious groups faced stringent restrictions or bans. The Supreme Court’s Covid docket demonstrated the disparate treatment that targeted churches nationwide.

Before March 2020, the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence was clear: The Free Exercise Clause “protects religious observers against unequal treatment.” That includes both “the right to harbor religious beliefs inwardly and secretly” and the “performance of (or abstention from) physical acts.” But the Covid creed quickly overturned centuries of legal tradition.

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