Area pastor ‘relieved’ by win before high court
Suit challenged state’s restraints on holding services in homes
Jeremy Wong doesn’t consider himself particularly political. For years, the 40-year-old pastor has focused on leading services at Campbell’s Orchard Community Church.
But last fall, after months of frustration trying to lead weekly Bible study for several families on Zoom, he couldn’t resist joining a lawsuit seeking to overturn California’s coronavirus rules limiting at-home religious gatherings.
Now the case has worked its way to the Supreme Court. And late Fri
day, the high court ruled in his favor.
“Never in my wildest thoughts would I have thought the Supreme Court would bat an eye,” Wong said in a phone call Saturday. “I feel a bit relieved … I didn’t have super high expectations in the first place, so I’m not hoisting a trophy or anything.”
The court ordered that California cannot enforce coronavirus-related restrictions limiting home-based religious worship, including Bible studies and prayer meetings. The decision marks the latest in a recent string of cases in which the high court has barred officials from enforcing some COVID-19 rules applying to religious gatherings.
Five conservative justices agreed that California’s move to limit indoor social gatherings to no more than three households — which also apply to at-home religious gatherings — should be lifted for now. The restrictions were first rolled out in October and already were slated to loosen next week.
More than three households may gather at places like schools, grocery stores and churches, a discrepancy that served as the basis for the plaintiffs’ argument that at-home religious activities were being treated unfairly.
“California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than athome religious exercise,” allowing hair salons, retail stores and movie theaters, among other places, “to bring together more than three households at a time,” the unsigned order from the court said. A lower court “did not conclude that those activities pose a lesser risk of transmission than applicants’ proposed religious exercise at home,” it said.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a searing dissent for herself and her liberal colleagues, Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that the court’s majority was hurting state officials’ ability to address a public health emergency.
“If the State also limits all secular gatherings in homes to three households, it has complied with the First Amendment. And the State does exactly that,” she wrote. “California need not … treat at-home religious gatherings the same as hardware stores and hair salons.”
For Wong, however, the differing rules felt both arbitrary and personal. Before the pandemic, he and his family enjoyed a weekly ritual: Every Tuesday or Wednesday, the same 10 or 12 members of his congregation shared dinner in his San Jose dining room before starting Bible study. It wasn’t exactly always highbrow theology, the pastor said, but wide-ranging discussions about the practical ways that they had experienced God during the week.
And trying to comfort churchgoers who had lost family members or jobs via Zoom — while liquor stores, dispensaries and hair salons stayed open — left Wong increasingly dismayed by how
the state decreed what was essential or not.
“Our desire was not necessarily to achieve normalcy as soon as possible,” Wong said. “But I think, at least from a pastor’s perspective, these groups are important because they address needs of people in the congregation that things like medicine can’t.”
The lawsuit was originally filed in October by a group of mostly Bay Area residents, including business owners and an aspiring politician who said lockdown requirements threatened their rights and the survival of their businesses. They include Frances Beaudet, co-owner of the Old City Hall restaurant in Gilroy and Dhruv Khanna, a Stanford-trained telecommunications lawyer and owner of the Kirgin Cellars winery in Santa Clara County, who told the Gilroy Dispatch an “overwhelming majority” of his income comes from events such as weddings and parties limited by the county’s health orders.
When Wong learned of the case through the author of an anti-lockdown op-ed that resonated with him, he signed on to represent pastors like himself. Santa Clara County resident Karen Busch, who could not be reached for comment, also served as a plaintiff on similar grounds.
Santa Clara County in particular has become the nexus of multiple legal battles related to church gatherings. A prolonged back-andforth ultimately led to the court rejecting the county’s ban on indoor worship services in late February.
While several local officials were named in the original complaint, the county was not involved in the proceedings related to at-home religious worship because they pertained only to state rules, County Counsel James Williams said Saturday. The elements of the case related to the South Bay businesses will continue to be litigated.
“What’s really happening in these cases is you’re seeing a pretty radical transformation of basic constitutional law on the First Amendment as it applies to religious activity, and that’s clearly because of the composition of the court changing,” Williams said, referring to the court’s conservative majority. “There’s no question that this never would have been issued a handful of months ago.”
Wong said that he doesn’t cast himself within the national political controversy: In fact, the word “radical” has never crossed his mind.
On Saturday morning, members of the weekly Bible study traded articles about the decision in their group text. They’ll make plans for their first in-person meeting at church today, the pastor said.
“When we have people over together, we’ll do it in the safest way possible, but there will be a collective experience of putting on our old shoes,” Wong said. “I haven’t worn these in a while, but it’s pretty comfortable.”