When the State Tells You How to Run Your Church Service: Analyzing Coronavirus Guidance Documents on Religious Services

Dwight Newman, QC is Professor of Law & Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Rights in Constitutional and International Law at the University of Saskatchewan and a Munk Senior Fellow (Constitutional Law) at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute

Does the coronavirus pandemic justify the government telling churches how to run their worship services?

Some state governments in the United States and provincial and territorial governments in Canada seem to have thought so during the reopening phase of the pandemic, setting a concerning precedent of relatively detailed governmental regulation of religion. Other governments, facing the same coronavirus pandemic, have managed to engage with religious institutions more respectfully, furthering health goals without imposing detailed requirements on religious services.

In this post, I discuss some striking examples of how coronavirus guidance documents on religious services have differed in ways that show differing levels of respect for principles of state non-interference in religion. While the pandemic situation can obviously justify some steps that would not normally be taken, the different approaches illustrate that governments have had genuine choices about whether to interfere more or to interfere less with religion. The choices they are making have implications in relation to the precedent for future interference.

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Attention: Physical Presence for Court and the Catholic Church

Matthew Cavedon is a criminal defense attorney in Gainesville, GA

Moving the world onto Zoom was not as dramatic a break from history as you might think. After all, it’s been 170 years since Marx & Engels wrote that “[a]ll that is solid melts into air.” In many ways, then, moving everything onto actual Wi-Fi is just another blip in a centuries-long trend of airier and airier “modernization”—that is, of more abstraction, of the move away from place and flesh and time into a new world of idea and identity and the instant. Why, then, does it feel so sad? Americans are not handling the COVID-19 pandemic well. A third of us are experiencing stress and anxiety. Why? Shouldn’t we be ready for this next stage of human evolution, away from conference rooms and handshakes and hugs? For at least twenty years, some say, we have all been “chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs.” And yet we don’t seem to have assimilated very well.

Two sanctuaries of resistance to the technology trend—the courtroom and the Catholic Church—help explain why we can’t just effortlessly float off into the cloud as a species. Both have only grudgingly gone online in recent months, even as much of the business world breathlessly predicts that couches are the new offices. This is because both are expert in focusing attention. And that requires forming consciousness through the senses in ways that virtual reality does not allow.

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Religious Freedom and Gender Equality: Reflections on the Recent UN Special Rapporteur’s Report

On February 27, 2020, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief released a new report dedicated to the interplay between religious freedom and gender equality. In this report the Rapporteur addressed gender-based violence and discrimination in the name of religion or belief.

Mr. Ahmed Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief
© UN Photo/Amanda Voisard

Talk About: Law and Religion asked scholars and lawyers representing academic and human rights institutions from the United States, Spain, Turkey, and Germany to reflect on this report by analyzing its achievements and its most controversial points. While each contributor welcomes and appreciates efforts from the UN Special Rapporteur to combat harmful practices (e.g., FGM, gender violence, forced marriages, or depriving women and girls from education etc.), most also criticize some of the approaches reflected in the report, such as the report’s conception of the nature of religious freedom and religious autonomy. They also call for more nuanced discussions, both theoretical and policy-oriented, as a precondition for advancing both the freedom of religion or belief and non-discrimination as mutually reinforcing rights rather than mutually exclusive rights.

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