Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, had heard the recommendations to hunker down from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and looked on as other major coastal states from California and Washington to New York and New Jersey issued stay-at-home orders. He went another way. Egged on by corporate lobbyists and inclined to defer to Donald Trump’s uninformed whims, DeSantis kept the state open for business as long as he could, refusing to tell Florida’s 21 million residents to hole up in their houses. His rationale—that “saving the economy” would save more lives—was “the dumbest shit I have heard in a long time,” said one Democratic state senator from Miami. By April Fools’ Day, after his state had recorded more than 7,000 cases of Covid-19 and 100 coronavirus-related deaths, DeSantis had to concede his failure. “Obviously in Florida, the tourism is totally shot right now,” he said, and then he ordered Floridians to stay put.

Unless they wanted to go to church. “I don’t think the government has the authority to close a church,” he said. “I’m certainly not going to do that.” DeSantis, along with the governors of at least a dozen other virus-saturated states, has declared worship services an “essential activity.” Never mind that mainstream Jewish, Muslim, and Christian denominations—the ones who’ve moved beyond Ptolemaic cosmology, at least—strongly recommend holding online services or just praying at home. A good number of rock-ribbed evangelicals insist that Jesus wants their butts on pews, socially distanced or not. On April 5, Palm Sunday, the Center Arena church in Orlando was soliciting money online while Pastor Rich Vera pranced around in person on a stage in front of scores of worshippers, “healing” people by smacking them in the face with his bare palm. (To be fair, Vera did spritz some hand sanitizer before he channeled the Holy Spirit.)

Besides the 12 states that have exempted religious gatherings from their quarantine orders, a half-dozen states still have no stay-at-home orders at all, and a few more are letting counties set their own rules. Taken together, in-person Easter services in these states could become “super-spreading events,” deepening the coronavirus crisis—and highlighting the extent to which religion and commerce override science across much of the nation.

But then, there’s also the potential for more conspicuous health violations by churches in the states and counties where stricter rules have been implemented. In Louisiana, a coronavirus hot spot with at least 12,000 cases and more than 400 deaths, Brother Tony Spell gave out “anointed handkerchiefs” to protect his flock of hundreds (as well as the bounty of his collection plates) at Baton Rouge’s Life Tabernacle. “We have a mandate from the word of the Lord to assemble together,” he said. Louisiana’s Democratic governor did not exempt church services from his stay-at-home order, so Spell has been charged with six misdemeanor counts of violating public orders. (Spell says he plans to hold Easter services, and police don’t plan to interfere.)

There are no such penalties for Vera or his contagion-based brethren across Florida—at least, not on the state level. While DeSantis hesitated, Florida counties clamped down: The Hillsborough sheriff arrested a Tampa megachurch preacher who’d flouted a county emergency rule by holding two widely streamed late-March services with a congregation of thousands. (After his arrest, the pastor agreed to shut his church “to protect the congregation, not from the virus, but from tyrannical government.”) But now DeSantis has overruled local directives, and church is back on the menu. Hillsborough County’s prosecutor insists that “the governor’s order does not override tougher local orders or affect the pastor’s arrest,” but the message from Tallahassee was clear: When science conflicts with political expediency in Florida, science loses. Science doesn’t fund campaigns.