Conflicts between Religious Liberty and the New Public Health

Jeffrey B. Hammond is Associate Professor of Law at Faulkner Law
Michael J. DeBoer is Associate Professor of Law at Faulkner Law

 

In the United States, governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have brought into focus conflicts between religious liberty and public health objectives and directives. State and local governments have utilized familiar and long-established public health measures to combat this pandemic, including orders mandating business closures, isolation, quarantine, testing, and contact tracing. These measures have had significant effects on religious believers and their places of worship. Apart from these public health orders’ disruption on routine worship assemblies, the orders have disrupted other important religious services, including baptisms, Eucharistic celebrations, weddings, funerals, last rites, and pastoral counseling.

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Hands-Off Religion in the Early Months of COVID-19

Samuel J. Levine is Professor of Law and Director of the Jewish Law Institute at the Touro Law Center

For decades, scholars have documented the United States Supreme Court’s “hands-off approach” to questions of religious practice and belief, pursuant to which the Court has repeatedly declared that judges are precluded from making decisions that require evaluating and determining the substance of religious doctrine. At the same time, many scholars have criticized this approach, for a variety of reasons. The early months of the COVID-19 outbreak brought these issues to the forefront, both directly, in disputes over limitations on religious gatherings due to the virus, and indirectly, as the Supreme Court decided important cases turning on religious doctrine. Taken together, judicial rulings and rhetoric in these cases illustrate ways in which the hand-off approach remains, at once, both vibrant and vulnerable to critique.

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Redeeming Justice

Terri Y. Montague is a certified mediator with earned JD and MTS degrees from Emory University

 

In Christian tradition, Jesus Christ climaxes God’s redemptive love and action. Through Christ, God righteously restores and fulfills human being in and for community. Otherwise, unrighteous humanity tends towards a senseless existence that leaves the church groaning under the burden of a faithless mortality; humanity groaning under the burden of a heartless society; and Nature groaning under the burden of a ruthless humanity. In the logic of “Redeeming Justice,” the present pandemic and justice movements cohere and redemptively work together for good to advance and culminate promised restoration by restoring right relations and just action – in the church, in society, in Creation. This construct helps us to recognize and partner in God’s righteous reign in the world.

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