Consider This from NPR - How The Pandemic Has Changed Worship In America And The Debate Over Religious Freedom

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Two Easters have now come and gone since the pandemic began, and the need for restrictions has not gone away. It has faith communities wondering when things will get back to normal. NPR's Lee Hale reports on how faith leaders have approached worship differently since the pandemic began.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

On Easter Sunday, a group of about 30 gathered in the parking lot of Christ Episcopal Church in St. Helens, Oregon. The congregation had communion together for the first time in more than a year, worshiping alongside chirping birds and passing traffic. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. In our church, communion is a really big thing. Jamie Sanders is the priest at Christ Episcopal Church. From the front steps of the chapel, she handed out the bread and wine in small plastic cups. Typically, they would all drink from the same cup, which Sandra says she misses. Everyone is around in one circle sharing what we believe to be sacramentally and spiritually Christ. And you don't get that on the Zoom call.

There are a lot of elderly people in the congregation. Many are vaccinated or planning to be soon. But until now, they've been playing it extra safe, meeting only on Zoom. And Sanders says she still agonizes over that decision. It doesn't substitute for a hug for someone who is widowed and lives alone. And there's another thing that has made Zoom Church uncomfortable for Sanders. I have a speech impediment and I'm self-conscious about hearing myself on video or recorded things. Knowing that the sermon is being streamed can take her out of the moment. It makes it harder for her to feel prayerful as she preaches, all of which makes

meeting in person for communion for the first time in more than a year especially meaningful, even if it's in a parking lot. Consider this, the pandemic has changed the way Americans worship. It's also changed the conversation around the freedom to worship. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Monday, April 5th. Support for this podcast and the following message come from TrackPhone Wireless, giving you control over your wireless plan. There's no contract, and unlimited talk and text smartphone plans start at just $20 a month.

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And a look back at some of Chadwick Boseman's essential performances. All of that in around 20 minutes every weekday. Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. Remember last year, just a few weeks into the pandemic shutdowns, when former President Trump suggested that Easter Sunday could be the day the country reopened. Easter is our timeline. What a great timeline that would be. Of course, two Easters have now come and gone, and the need for pandemic restrictions has not gone away. It's got faith communities wondering when things will get back to normal. But at least one pastor in Rochester, Minnesota, has never really had a normal.

Hey, Autumn Ridge Church. I'm Rick Henderson, your brand new senior pastor. On March 9th of last year, Rick Henderson officially took over as lead pastor of a non-denominational congregation. It had more than a thousand members, and this was his first message to them. Jesus said that the defining characteristic of those who follow him is love. And as we process all the latest recommendations from the CDC and our local medical professionals, we're doing our very best to be prudent and loving. NPR's Lee Hale takes the story from here. Henderson says shutting down in-person worship was the right thing to do, but not ideal as

the new guy taking over for a pastor who had been at the helm for over 30 years. There are many books written about this, and every single one of them says, don't do anything for at least 18 months. Keep everything the exact same. And we changed everything the first week. At every stage of the pandemic, Henderson says he's followed state and federal guidelines. If ever there is a time that honoring elected officials means compromising our faith, we're going to go with our faith over honoring elected officials. We just haven't been put in that position yet. But one pastor who says he has been put in that position is Che Ahn of the Evangelical Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California. I believe that Jesus is the head of my church and our church and the church universal,

not the civil government. Ahn says he initially complied with California state requirements and paused in-person services. But then he grew frustrated as he saw businesses like liquor stores operating. The church was not declared essential from the beginning. And I believe with all my heart, the church has been essential for 2,000 years. Of course, there are some sound public health reasons to avoid in-person worship. Sitting close together and singing are effective ways to transmit a respiratory virus. But Ahn believes it was his decision to make.

So he opened his doors and he sued California, going all the way to the Supreme Court. We have to demand that the government is more precise in the way that it restricts these fundamental rights. Asma Uddin is a religious liberty lawyer and writer. While she doesn't condone ignoring government regulations, she is glad that the Supreme Court has forced some states to loosen and clarify guidelines. This precedent is something that's going to be applicable in the future to other states of emergencies where the government thinks it can just come in and take away our rights without being precise about it. Udine says it's easy to group faith communities into two big categories, those who follow local laws and those who defy them. But the reality is more complicated. Take the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx, where Rabbi Stephen Exler has followed

New York state guidelines, but was stumped by one detail last spring. You could gather outdoors for religious worship services in groups of no more than 10. 10 is the number of men required to read from the Taurus girls or say certain prayers. You would think, OK, that's perfect for us. But what was terrible for us was then we would be forced to make a horrible choice, which was between being able to gather and do the quorum activities and then say women couldn't attend. They improvised. Men and women gathered separately, both in eyesight.

And they used speakers to hear each other, although they couldn't use that setup on the Sabbath. Exler tried contacting New York officials to ask for some leniency. If we had had more of an ear, that's something I would certainly have advocated for and would advocate for. These days, members of the Hebrew Institute gather in small, distance groups for weekly services. The same is true for Pastor Rick Henderson's church in Rochester, Minnesota, where he frequently reminds his congregation that they need to register in advance to attend. Because of COVID restrictions and distancing, we have a smaller capacity than we could normally have.

And so I want to... As he's watched some of his fellow Christians openly defy public health guidelines, Henderson says it's made him sad. Sometimes I even felt embarrassed by what I saw. One day we're going to look back and this is just going to be a story that we tell. What kind of story do you want to tell? Henderson wants his story to say that he protected the people in his care. NPR producer Lee Hale.

Like so many congregations, the Mosque of Jesus, Son of Mary, that's in Syracuse, New York, has had to do things differently. But unlike many congregations, many of its members are refugees to the U.S., often coming from traumatic circumstances. They were feeling so much anxiety, and their response was they wanted to come even closer to the mosque. They wanted to be in that physical space because it was their way of they're dealing with their anxiety and understanding what was going on in the world. That's Asma Uddin again, the religious liberty lawyer and writer. She says a member of that mosque happened to be an asbestos removal expert. And at the beginning of the pandemic, he proposed that the group could meet in person if they covered the inside of the building in plastic. That's how he treats homes when he's working on them. He had special mechanisms put in place to sort of,

you know, funnel the air out, sort of refresh the air in the space. The plastic made it easier to, like, do a deep cleaning every single day. But not everyone was impressed by his ingenuity. There was a number of people, even among Muslims, who were just like, well, this is the wrong way. What he should be doing is educating, this mosque should be educating the refugees, again, about the science of this instead of trying to sort of essentially capitulate to their spiritual needs. The critics argued that no matter what precautions were taken, the safest option was to not meet at all. So this comes back to the idea of whether or not worship should be deemed essential. Whether helping members of this mosque feel spiritually safe

is worth some risk to their physical safety. That case is part of the reason why Udine was happy with a Supreme Court ruling last November. The 5-4 majority said Governor Andrew Cuomo's restrictions on in-person worship were inflexible, and the court barred the state from enforcing strict attendance limits. The reaction on the political left was swift. For one, Amy COVID Barrett was trending on Twitter and lots of commentary by different sort of news columnists and FOMO himself, who said that it was an ideological decision.

Yadin says the political divisiveness around this issue isn't helping things. I spoke with her about what this moment might mean for the future of the debate over religious freedoms. Religion and religious freedom have been deeply politicized for a while now. And in the beginning of the COVID restrictions, I was hoping that there was a unity that was going to begin to depolarize the conversation. But unfortunately, it ended up falling exactly the lines that these previous other conflicts had fallen into, right? This idea that one side consists of these dogmatic religious people who don't care about anyone else and are more than happy

to inflict harm on others in the service of their own religious exercise. And then the other side was basically sort of calling out these harms and protecting vulnerable groups. service of their own religious exercise. And then the other side was basically sort of calling out these harms and protecting vulnerable groups. And COVID, COVID restrictions, mask wearing, everything just ended up falling right into those precise categories. And it was disheartening. And I'm hoping that some version of this conversation that sort of evolved around these COVID restrictions and about the essentialness of religion will help to shed light on the unique place of religion in people's lives.

What are the implications of some of this debate going forward? Meaning this was essentially a kind of emergency situation, right? That governments were taking certain actions. How should we think about this going forward? Well, that connects back to my reflections as an American Muslim and who, you know, sort of came of age in the post 9-11 landscape where extremism and national security and like the sort of the bogeyman of potential sort of terrorist attacks were used in extremely sort of overbroad ways to, for example, surveil like millions of

Muslim Americans who are just going about their lives. You know, we know there's been lots of evidence that came out there reporting by the Associated Press about this decade-long surveillance program by the NYPD where they had informants placed in mosques and in cafes and other places where Muslims frequented. And it was all justified in the name of this compelling government interest of national security, which again, I'm not diminishing the importance of that, but it goes back to this idea of when the government identifies a serious interest, a compelling government interest, that it says it can use then to restrict people's fundamental rights, including their fundamental right to religious freedom, how far is too far? What is it allowed to do? And what can we do as

citizens to force a government to think more precisely in the restrictions that it thinks are justified? Like, the evidence has to match the justification. Was some of this hurt by the actual rhetoric coming out of faith communities? I mean, absolutely. I mean, that's the difficult part here, right? Because it's easy to say, well, okay, you see this, you know, this major Trump-supporting Christian evangelical who is, you know, taking on all the same talking points about how COVID isn't real and this is all about the liberals or assault on religion. Then you see another Christian who's also conservative and devout but is, you know, following all the protocols,

fully understands, like, the severity COVID, and is just asking for a little bit more sort of precision in the government restrictions. But the people don't, I mean, in general, the public discourse doesn't really see the difference between these two sets of people, right? They're like, oh, well, they're both white conservative Christians. They're both saying that these COVID restrictions aren't right. So they're probably all the same. That's religious liberty attorney and writer Asma Uddin. She has a new book out that tackles some of these issues. It's called Politics of Vulnerability. You're listening to Consider This from NPR.

I'm Adi Cornish.