The question: Is restriction of church worship gatherings a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s religious freedom guarantees?

The answer: Nope.

Some faith congregations in America are claiming that temporary new government edicts enacted during the current coronavirus pandemic to ban large public gatherings, including at church worship services, discriminate against religion.

No, they don’t. They discriminate against anything that might be an ally of COVID-19, the coronavirus strain that has to date sickened more than 3 million people worldwide and killed nearly 210,000, including nearly a million who it made ill and more than 56,000 it killed in the U.S.

Church gatherings have proven to be a formidable ally of the novel new virus, as a number of hot-spot outbreaks have been traced to church services. So, it’s a clear public-health, not religious, issue.

Religious leaders have claimed that members of non-church organizations, such as retail pharmacies and grocers, have been allowed to stay open when churches have not, which they say is discriminatory. However, public health officials say worship groups tend to be larger than new laws allow and include behaviors, such as singing, which are especially conducive to spreading the virus in wider spaces than other joint activities.

Two church groups have sued the state of Kansas over its new temporary rules banning church worship services, but Gov. Laura Kelly pointed out that several coronavirus outbreaks have been traced to such religious gatherings, NPR News reported.

“That executive order had absolutely nothing to do with religious freedom. It had everything to do with protecting the health and safety of Kansans,” Kelly told NPR after religious groups sued over her executive order barring religious assemblies of more than 10 people.

The only way such an order would be discriminatory against religion and thus unconstitutional is if it gratuitously privileged other groups for arbitrary reasons. But only “essential” businesses and organizations — e.g. food banks, drug stores, hospitals and grocers — are given exemptions to the rule.

Churches, which provide sustenance to people’s “immortal souls” but not for their fundamental survival, as food and drug stores do, do not then qualify as essential in this context, although true believers might argue the point.

However, a federal district judge in Kansas issued a temporary restraining order a week ago overruling the governor’s order, thus allowing churches to open. Gov. Kelly said it is being appealed.

Thus far in the religious push-back against coronavirus restrictions on worship services, the Kansas judge’s support of religious freedom over public health is an anomaly. Previously, courts In more than a half dozen other states rejected arguments that closing churches violates religious freedom principles; only two decisions backed religious freedom over health.

Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has joined in lawsuits supporting virus laws in various states, said such unwarranted favoring of religion over others is dangerous in the current environment.

“The government can’t sanction putting people’s lives at risk in the name of religious freedom. That’s just not religious freedom,” Laser said in a public statement. “It’s religious privilege, and it’s the government saying that some of us have to pay the ultimate price to support other people’s religious beliefs.”

One of the dubious concepts at issue here is that religion is not only formally privileged in American society by the Constitution, but that this unique status also bestows special universal dispensations in U.S. culture — giving it, in the minds of believers, a kind of super license.

There is no such thing. The American government in all its layers is a secular entity that derives ultimate power “from the people” over the overall society, including religions and churches in official public life. And nothing is more official that public-health emergencies.

The Constitution does not give religion veto power over secular government. Faith cannot hold temporal reality hostage.

So, if any gatherings considered too large and without “essential” merit by government are then banned, it is none of religion’s business but to obey.

Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, so to speak, and to God what is God’s.

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