the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out a California order banning all in-person worship and granted Harvest Rock Church an opportunity to present evidence prior to the country’s top court making a judgement on the matter. [Note: the California order bans indoor worship, not in-person worship.]
“The application for injunctive relief, presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court, is treated as a petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment, and the petition is granted,” stated the Supreme Court’s Dec. 3 order.
The Supreme Court “vacated” the lower court order against the California Christian churches were California Governor Gavin Newsom’s worship ban was upheld, stripping it of its effects.
. . . The Supreme Court in its order today sent the case back down to the lower court, telling it to consider its ruling in light of the Court’s Nov. 26 ruling against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on places of worship. In that case, it blocked the governor from enforcing the limits against religious buildings and places of worship.
The justices, with no noted dissents, set aside a lower court ruling that rejected a challenge to Newsom’s policy by Harvest Rock Church Inc, which has several campuses in the state, and Harvest International Ministries Inc, an association of churches. Both are based in Pasadena, a city in Los Angeles County.
The Supreme Court ordered California judges Thursday to follow its lead in blocking stringent coronavirus restrictions on houses of worship, as the high court did in a New York case last week.
The justices' unsigned order sending a California church's challenge back to lower courts likely will stop Gov. Gavin Newsom from prohibiting most indoor religious services.
Exactly how this will affect actual worship plans by churches in most parts of the state isn't completely clear. Certainly the three Los Angeles area megachurches that have defied Newsom's order up to now will continue, such as Grace Comminity Church in the photo above, with a much diminished threat posed by their ongoing legal cases.
I assume, though, that other churches, including Roman Catholic dioceses, will need to plan more fully how to resume indoor worship. I would expect they would continue, at least for the time being, to require masks and social distancing indoors, as well as to provide an outdoor seating option for communicants who wish to continue that way. I'll be covering this with great interest.
However, with the advent of cooler weather in the state, a resumption of indoor worship comes at a providential time.
What Are The Social Tensions Underlying The COVID Panic?
US flu outbreaks in recent decades include Asian Flu (1957-58), Bird Flu (1997-98), and Swine Flu (2009-2010). Although the discussions I've found indicate that they were comparable to COVID, they resulted in no calls for draconian social controls. In fact, the 1918-19 Spanish Flu, while it was far more severe than any of the more recent epidemics, didn't cause equivalent moral panic. Restrictions on social gatherings and public meetings were of much shorter duration and far more limited. (No Spaniards were vilified, either.)
There was apparently something missing, particularly from the flu epidemics of the 1990s and 2000s, that might otherwise have caused the widespread calls for drastic social controls we've seen with COVID. This suggests, if the premise that COVID is a moral panic is correct, that social tensions exist now that didn't in recent decades. What might they be?
One way to try to answer this question is to ask what groups are identified with the crisis -- in sociological terms, the "folk devils". In yesterday's post, I pointed out that the moral enforcers have been definite on one question, that the country in which the crisis originated, China, is the one group that's definitely not at fault. This at minimum suggests that if the Chinese food markets or flu labs aren't at fault, something else at least must be, and the enforcers must know who they are.
Well, what groups are most disadvantaged by the COVID controls? Most visibly, it's the more observant Christians and Orthodox Jews, who are the ones who've been systematically suing civil authorities for relief or commiting civil disobedience. Another group is small businesses, who are disadvantaged by restrictions that require them to close, when equivalent mail order and big-box retailers can stay open. A third group is food service and personal service workers, like waiters, bartenders, barbers, and cosmeticians. (Those who work for cash or tips aren't even covered in government relief programs.)
Thus the groups most affected are observant believers, the entrepreneurial working class, and the working poor. Given the moral enforcers have begun to extend their prohibitions to family-oriented holiday celebrations, imposing severe limits on the size of even family gatherings and discouraging holiday travel, the group being singled out for adverse treatment extends even beyond Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox Jews to non-observant people who operate within traditional family and community-oriented value sets.
People in this group are often portrayed as carrying on with traditional activities in ignorance of their newly discovered epidemiological effects, or deliberately engaging in superspreader events while disregarding the destructive effects on society out of pure self-indulgence or "science denial". Church services and Trump rallies are chief offenders here, but others include wedding or holiday celebrations in excess of the circumscribed limits, and unauthorized parties in the Hollywood Hills.
So the groups deemed most responsible for COVID spread turn out to be those most affected by the controls, and the continued spread of infections irrespective of controls is blamed on the unwillingness of the affected groups to abide by the controls, when it's fairly plain that the public does wear masks, is socially distanced, and simply can't get haircuts or facials or go to restaurants, which are closed. The most prominent violators, the Califonmia megachurches, actually record minimal infections. Grace Community Church was in fact officially cleared of a charge that it had experienced a COVID outbreak.
The key marker for identifying anyone in the bad group is refusal to wear a mask. Although in the most populous areas, masks are very common, if not de facto compulsory, surges in COVID cases occur notwithstanding. The reaction of political and health authorities is simply to scold the population for not wearing masks or social distancing, when simple observation of conduct on the street indicates that people do in fact wear masks and socially distance. Nobody asks the perfectly reasonable question whether the surges have some other explanation, and nobody tries to answer it.
On the other hand, those least affected by controls outside the 1%, naturally with exceptions, are the college-educated suburban professional class, especially those with undemanding but prestigious office jobs that now have been transformed into work-from-home sinecures. Drs Fauci and Birx, prominent moral entrepreneurs, are representative of this class, with Dr Fauci's working-class accent somehow carrying an aura of quasi-meritocratic authenticity. I'll have more to say about the nature of moral entrepreneurs in a subsequent post. But the more prestigious the people, the more they're entitled to ignore the rules they set up for their inferiors.
Broadly speaking, those are the opposing interests. But prejudice against flyover country or the wrong side of the tracks is nothing new. I saw it daily in the Ivy League as a student there. A moral panic is the result of social tensions. People knew their place back in the day -- what's changed? I would venture that the difference is that the people who used to know their place are getting uppity. As Glenn Reynods, one of the more conventional thinkers around, nevertheless puts it,
What’s happening in America is an echo of what’s happening in democracies around the world, and it’s not happening because of Trump. Trump is the symptom of a ruling class that many of the ruled no longer see as serving their interest, and the anti-Trump response is mostly the angry backlash of that class as it sees its position, its perquisites and — perhaps especially — its self-importance threatened.
The problem is that the "folk devils" here are roughly half the population in many Western countries, which strikes me as a reason the panic is not sustainable. But the social tension caused by the rise in the classes who owe nothing to the current elites is palpable, and I think it also led to the other moral panic of 2020, the Black Lives Matter riots, which is a whole separate subject I'll defer for now.
Last week, my wife and I warched an episode of the Crimes That Changed Us series on Investigation Discovery on the McMartin preschool case. This was a bizarre, years-long rehearsal of allegations against a Manhattan Beach, CA day care that involved sex abuse of toddlers, a bad clown in a secret underground room, and Satanic sacrifices on the altar of an Episcopal church. None of this could be proven in court, and after two hung juries, the prosecution eventually got tired and dropped all charges
The narrator of the episode said the McMartin case was an example of "moral panic". My wife suggested that the current COVID crisis seems like a moral panic as well. I wasn't sure, but the idea was tantalizing enough that I decided to do some research on the web the next day.
Moral panics are normally the province of sociology. What I've found is that much of the academic discussion is limited by the current Overton window, and academics will be likely to accept COVID restrictions as entirely reasonable. I don't agree, and naturally, I won't find conventional discussion necessarily insightful or helpful. But, with reservations, I find the YouTube discussion above is at least a good general introduction to the subject. Other web discussins, like Wikipedia, nevertheless do seem to provide a consensus outline of what a moral panic is:
A moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among many people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media".
In recent centuries the mass media have become important players in the dissemination of moral indignation, even when they do not appear to be consciously engaged in sensationalism or in muckraking. Simply reporting a subset of factual statements without contextual nuance can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic. Stanley Cohen states that moral panic happens when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests".
Earlier examples of moral panics would include the Salem witch trials and Prohibition. Some discussions trace the incidence of moral panics to the need to resolve an underlying social tension. Prohibition, for instance, has been traced to tensions over immigration, particularly Catholics, who routinely consume wine and other alcohol, whereas nativist Protestants were often teetotal. The narrator of the TV special above traced the McMartin case to bourgeois discomfort over the rising trend of families where both parents have jobs and the resulting need to place children in day care. Both suggestions seem reasonable, and I'll discuss this in tomorrow's post.
So a key first element of a moral panic is a set of conditions that makes a threat to overall social order credible -- and this threat is often identified with a group. What this group is in the case of COVID is also worth separate discussion, although one key factor is that mass media and moral enforcers have emphasized, from the start of the panic, that China, although empirically the place where the COVID virus somehow escaped, is most assuredly not the threat. Odd, no?
The next element of such a panic is "moral entrepreneurs", individuals who become clearly identified with the issue, and who work in concert with, the mass media to articulate the threat in its early phases. In the McMartin case, the key entrepreneur was Judy Johnson, a Manhattan Beach, CA mother who alleged that her toddler son had been sodomized by her estranged husband and by a McMartin teacher. As the case developed, Ms Johnson turned out to be mentally unstable, and the charges likely were motivated by the custody battle, but they were enough to incite panic given the underlying social tensions that media and other entrepreneurs could exploit opportunistically. (Ms Johnson subsequently was foud dead at age 42 of alcoholic liver diease in the course of the panic.)
Other moral entrepreneurs emerged, including Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner, who secured grand jurty indictments against every school employee, and Kee MacFarlane, a psychologist who conducted highly questionable interviews with the toddlers, promptng them to confirm stories of secret tunnels, flying witches, children being flushed down toilets, and animals being slaughtered on the altar of a local church.
This leads to another feature of moral panics, that the perceived threat is disproportinate to the actual threat in some measurable way. In recent times, the disproportion can be overcome by professional credentials among the moral entrepreneurs. In the McMartin case, the bizarre accusations and unbelievable overall narrative were supported by credientialed experts, including a district attorney backed up by professional psychologists and medical doctors.
The life of the McMartin scandal was relatively brief. I think the factors behind this included limited potential gain for the entrepreneurs -- Ms Johnson turned out to be too sick to continue in her campaign -- and other actors were driven by some combination of narcissism and fairly limited prospects for professional advancement, which proved not to be attainable given their overall poor performance in the courtroom.
In addition, the McMartin case proved to be limited in geographic scope, with fairly limited implications for overall social control on the part of the moral enforcers. People still needed day care, so imposing some form of radical control over it was not a realistic goal. Prohibition, on the othr hand, had a much wider scope, though it failed, first practically and soon enough legislatively, because too many people wanted to drink legallly.
Several discussions of moral panics I've found do suggest they have a life cycle, with a "morning after" phase. I'll conside this in subsequent posts as well.
[San Francisco Abp Salvatore Cordileone] criticized a new health order from the state of California placing San Francisco and San Mateo Counties into a more restrictive tier of coronavirus restrictions, resulting in a ban on indoor worship services.
The health order treats religious worship as a “non-essential” activity, while allowing hair and nail salons, massage parlors, and tattoo parlors to remain open, Cordileone noted.
“This is precisely the kind of blatant discrimination to which the Supreme Court gave injunctive relief in New York,” he said, referencing a decision Wednesday which blocked New York from similarly closing houses of worship while allowing secular retail venues to remain open.
. . . The archbishop recognized concerns over rising COVID hospitalizations, and said he is discerning the proper course of action, with advice from his fellow bishops, archdiocesan lawyers, and infectious disease specialists.
Kentucky’s four Catholic dioceses will not suspend public Masses despite the governor’s request that religious services be held online only until December 13.
. . . “At this time, we will not be suspending public liturgies but encourage all to act in a responsible way that respects the seriousness of this pandemic and the health and safety of all,” said Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville in a statement on November 19.
I think the subtext here is that, with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn winning its injunction against New York State lockdown orders, the US bishops are beginning to evaluate their options. Abp Cordileone has been in the lead in objectinng to California lockdown measures, while the Archdiocese of New York endorsed the Diocese of Brooklyn's suit when it was filed. That Cordileone would mention that he's getting "advice from his fellow bishops, archdiocesan lawyers, and infectious disease specialists" suggests that serious next steps will be undertaken.
It appears from the direction of both statements that the ecclesiastical authorities intend to regain control over conditioins of worship and liturgy, for now giving communicants discretion over whether to worship in person. I don't know if the bishops would articulate their situation in exactly these terms, but I think they see that we're in a moral panic, where "moral entrepreneurs" have seized public opinion and are controlling public behavior for essentially their own aggrandizement. This would include a public health establishment aligned with leftist politicians who wish to de-privilege a range of social behavior, including Jewish and Christian worship.
Although moderates insist that such measures -- extending not just to church, but increasingly to traditional holiday celebrations like Halloween and Thanksgiving -- are meant to be temporary, other politicians and public health figures telegraph that they're meant to become a "new normal". Even the moderates are vague about just how "temporary" the measures will be, and a consensus seems to be emerging that they won't end with a vaccine. I think the bishops are correct to oppose all such trends, legally and in the public forum.
"Moral enforcers" are also seeking to perpetuate the authority they've gained from the initial crisis, for instance now by insisting that new waves of the virus continue to threaten the social order. The bishops legitimately see themselves as the traditional spokesmen for some part of the social order and are seeking to regain their normal role. Even if they don't necessarily see the current circumstances as a "moral panic", I think they're at least resisting the right symptoms, and for the right reasons. I think Evangelical spokesmen like Pastor John MacArthur are correctly working in the same direction.
The fairly recent notion of "moral panic" does seem to be a productive way to understand what's going on. I'll look more closely at this in subsequent posts.
As reported here, "Under new lockdown restrictions in Manitoba, no more than five people can gather in one location, including if they remain in their cars." However, a church in Steinbach, MB elected to hold a drive-in service in violation of the order. The RCMP, of all agencies, then blocked the highway leading to the church parking lot to prevent this.
From episodes like this, it seems like Canada is an order of magnitude crazier than the US on COVID restrictions, and the US is pretty crazy. But in the US, police agencies began to recognize even last spring that hauling moms off in cuffs for taking their kids to the playground was a bad look, and they dropped it. Now, poliec agencies back off this sort of thing, with the chiefs saying in one way or another that they don't enforce health orders.
Manitoba borders the US states of Minnesota and North Dakota and has had 16,483 COVID cases total, with 301 deaths. for a case fatality rate of about 0.02%. Manitoba's population is 1.359 million, which I believe gives a 2020 COVID death rate of about 22 per 100,000, which is roughly comparable to the overall 2018 Canadian death rate from seasonal flu and pneumonia of 23 per 100,000.
But this results in the national police being called in to block church attendance. Poor Steinbach, which with a population of less than 20,000 is the third largest city in Manitoba, seems to have become a focus for provincial indignation. "Steinbach late to recognize COVID-19 threat, some residents say," reads the CBC headline.
The Mounties blocked vehicle access to an anti-lockdown protest there Nov 14, while health officials issued fines to inividual protesters, apparently for not wearing masks or social distancing. In the US, enforcement of mask and social distance rules at protests is nugatory, and in fact, the epidemiological effect of non-socially distanced protests hasn't been publicized, if it's been measured at all.
Press coverage of COVID case rates in Canada appears to be even more hysterical than in the US. But we're looking at a global phenomenon that I'm beginning to think is basically a moral panic. I'll have more to say about this.
Another Free-Exercise Petition Goes To The Supreme Court
On Nov 23, the Thomas More Society announced that it had filed a petition for Writ of Certiorari with the US Supreme Court on behalf of South Bay United Pentecostal Church in San Diego. This is essentially a renewal of a petition for certiorari that the court deniedd in a 5-4 vote last May.
The announcement quotes special counsel Charles LiMandri, “Governor Newsom, in revising his reopening restrictions under his new California ‘Blueprint’ framework, has not only continued his disparate treatment of places of worship but has exacerbated the discrimination by targeting a core practice of South Bay’s religious expression – the ability to raise one’s voice to worship God in song." This has been a concern I've had since the start of lockdowns, that government assumes the ability not just to limit or prohibit attendance at religious services, but to regulate liturgical practice.
Choral singing, chanting, congregational responses, use of pew hymnals and missals, and processions have all been effectively banned, with no justification. Singing was banned universally due to anecdotal evidence from a single Mt Vernon, WA choir practice, when plain evidence from the Southern California megachurches that have not implemented COVID restrictions and continue to sing is that, even without masks, normal liturgical practice does not spread the disease.
The Nov 25 decision by the Supreme Court staying Gov Cuomo's esecutive orders indicates that the court will tend to strike down disparate treatment, especially in cases where any specific attendance limits are imposed on churches and synagogues, but no equivalent limits are placed on "essential" businesses. The Thomas More suit notes that Newsom's color-coded controls have no provision for returning to full liberty and only permit 50% church capacity at the lowest risk tier.
(In the Roman Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles, it appears that the diocese at least is no longer imposing numerical limits on outdoor mass attendance, although singing and other liturgical practices continue not to be used. Indoor masses are still prohibited. This is an indication of the vague and arbitrary nature of such controls.)
It interests me that, as flights delivering COVID vaccine begin, health departments have been making no announcements of how they plan to implement vaccinations, or how they may affect COVID restrictions going forward. It seems clear that authorities will be slow and very reluctant to relax controls, no matter the effectiveness of vaccines.
This is going to be a long and difficult fight. It's nevertheless encouraging that political
authorities are forced to recognize that the population will not be docile going forward.
Toronto is less than a hundred miles from Buffalo, but I couldn't help but notice a contrast. Over the US holiday, photos and videos of Toronto police arresting restaurant owner Adam Skelly for trying to reopen his barbeque vent viral. Commentators saw at least eight units and ten officers on the scene, which was little short of a SWAT deployment. Skelly was unarmed and faced charges like operating a business without a license.
A week ago in Buffalo, three sheriff's deputies and a health inspector entered a gym to try to disperse members who were holding a meeting. It sounds as if the members had had some type of legal advice, as they shouted at the deputies that they were in effect conducting a warrantless search, and under the US Fourth Amendment, they were trespassing on private property. After some shilly-shallying and scolding from the health inspector, they were prevailed upon to leave the building and then the parking lot.
Nobody was cuffed and hauled away to jail like Skelly.
Skelly's public statements in the days prior to his arrest indicate this was an event he planned and staged for the express purpose of becoming a martyr. This is exactly why in general, US police agencies have avoided this type of confrontation, and many sheriffs and police chiefs have explicitly said they do not enforce health orders. I'm puzzled that Toronto authorities allowed themselves to be put into the situation of creating both a martyr and a leadership figure, when equivalent attempts to do this sort of thing in the US created folk heroes like Karl Manke, the Owosso, MI barber, and Shelly Luther, the Dallas salon owner.
(For that matter, although an internal review, a review by another police agency, and yet another review at the provincial level, of the May 4 violent takedown of the Lethbridge, AB Star Wars trooper were promised, I've found no reference to any such review being published or even conducted in the nearly seven months since that happened. Canada, I fear, isn't the US.)
Although the Los Angeles County health department just tightened its latest restrictions to prohibit any gatherings of people who aren't members of the same household, it explicitly excepted both protests and church services, which it said are "constitutionally protected rights". The addition of church as an express exception is completely new, and it reflects a well-founded fear of an active citizenry, as well as the newly rediscovered role of the US Supreme Court.
I don't believe I would be happy living in Canada.
