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About a month ago, during church, I got a text from my wife:

I was curious why they were talking about taxing religious people in Gospel Principles, but figured I could ask her after church.

It turns out, though, that the discussion had nothing to do with taxes; instead, a missionary in our ward had said that we were moving to a two-hour block supplemented by home-centered study in preparation for a not-too-distant future when it would be illegal for us to meet together at church. And my wife explained that no, that wasn’t going to happen.

We laughed about it, but didn’t think too much of it. After all, 18-year-old boys are susceptible to outlandish ideas (I was one, once upon a time). And my wife had countered him, so no harm, no foul.

Fast forward to this last Sunday, when I received this email from a friend:

One random missionary spouting off conspiracies is one thing; if my friend is getting it from normal, nonmissionary people, though, it would appear to be a thing.

Now in the past, I’ve asserted that the church won’t lose its tax exemption. (I’m right, btw.) And it inevitably gets the pushback that things are different this time, and that history and policy and IRS incentives have no bearing on the future. And I realize that, if I baldly assert that the government isn’t going to ban Mormons from meeting publicly, I’ll get that same pushback. (I’d be right, btw.) So I though I’d so something slightly more fun: I want to discuss the steps it would take for the U.S. government to ban religious meetings.[fn1]

Our starting point has to be the First Amendment to the Constitution. It provides that

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, …

Does the proscription on Congress prohibiting free exercise mean that it can’t ban religious meetings? Well, yes. But it’s really hard to find caselaw to support that, because, as far as I know, Congress hasn’t ever tried to do that. But we can find caselaw that indirectly says so.

In 2016, a district court in New York heard a religious liberty case with a particularly unsympathetic defendant. The defendant had been convicted of possession of child pornography a number of years earlier. As a term of his release, he wasn’t allowed, among other things, to access computers or associate with children under the age of 18. He violated those terms and, as a condition of bail, the magistrate judge forbade him from attending church where minors were present.

The court held that this condition unconstitutionally infringed on his free exercise rights. Any curtailment of free exercise rights has to be done “by the least drastic means.’ While forbidding him from contact with minors was permissible, preventing him from attending church wasn’t.

Now admittedly, this is a district court case. But it relied on Supreme Court precedent holding that, while prisons did not have to provide clergy for all prisoners, they had to offer comparable opportunities for religious practice.

If the government can only limit a convicted sex offender’s and a prisoner’s access to church services through the least drastic means, the government would have to have a really compelling reason to shut down non-prisoner, non-parolee church attendance.

Not that it matters, because the Free Exercise rules pretty clearly prohibit prohibiting religious meetings, but, in case we’re worried about being singled out, but the government can’t single the Mormon church out and forbid us, and us alone, from meeting. And there’s also an Establishment Clause tucked into the First Amendment. While Establishment Clause jurisprudence is chaotic and unsettled, there are a couple things it clearly does. “The clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” So under the Establishment Clause, Congress couldn’t pass a law just forbidding Mormons from meeting at church.

(The Free Speech and Freedom of Assembly Clauses also probably erect a barrier to such discriminatory laws, but you get the idea.)

But we can get around all of these impediments. We would just need to amend the Constitution to remove the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses! (And maybe the Free Speech and Freedom of Assembly ones.) And how do we amend the Constitution?

Well, the amendment has to be passed by two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate, then approved by three-fourths of the states. (Quick math: that means 67 Senators, 290 Representatives, and 38 states.)[fn2]

Can we get that many? Well, the vast majority of our Congresspeople are religious (or, at least, religiously affiliated): only one says she is religiously unaffiliated. And even if religiously unaffiliated means anti-religious (it does not), that doesn’t even pretend to approach the two-thirds-in-each-house requirement.

Congress is more religiously-affiliated than the general American population, but even among the rest of us, nearly 80% claim some type of religious affiliation.

So is the government going to prohibit U.S. Mormons from attending church meetings? I mean, sure, it could happen, but given the constitutional obstacles, I’m going to say the chances are really, really, really slim. I don’t see anybody clamoring for it. I don’t see a Congress or state legislatures who want to do it, or whose constituents are demanding it of them. And I don’t a Supreme Court (oh yeah, didn’t mention them yet: all are religiously affiliated) that’s would let such blatantly unconstitutional laws pass without such a constitutional amendment.

Which is to say, whatever the reason for the two-hour block, it wasn’t to get us ready for a day in which the government banned church attendance.

[fn1] I apologize that this post is 100% U.S.-centric; I suspect that similar analysis would apply to a large percentage of countries in the world, but I don’t have any expertise on the religious or constitutional law of most of them. But feel free to add the steps it would take in your country in the comments.

[fn2] It’s worth noting that merely amending the federal constitution would likely not be enough to allow governments to ban Mormons from attending church. Most, if not all, state constitutions also protect religious liberty, though the details and language differ from state to state. So, while the First Amendment applies to state governments as well as the federal government, even with it gone, states would have to deal with their own constitutions. Also, at least 21 states have mini-RFRAs, which provide an additional legislative level of religious protection.