CONFLICTS BETWEEN PUBLIC HEALTH MEASURES AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN A PERIOD OF PANDEMIC

ABSTRACT: In the United States of America, government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have brought into focus conflicts between public health activities and religious liberty. State and local governments utilized familiar and long-established public health measures to combat this pandemic, including surveillance, testing, reporting, contact tracing, sanitation, closure, isolation, quarantine, and social distancing.2 Closure orders have had significant effects on religious believers and their places of worship. In addition to disrupting regular worship assemblies, public health orders also disrupted other important religious services, including baptisms and Eucharistic celebrations, weddings and funerals, last rites and pastoral counseling, religious education and charitable works. Many jurisdictions enforced public health measures even-handedly against religious and secular institutions, and some state and municipal governments displayed attentive sensitivity to the unique concerns of faith communities. In some instances, however, governments adopted overly restrictive measures or enforced measures unequally against religious institutions. Litigation was instituted in many jurisdictions, with litigants bringing claims under federal and state law.3 Courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have issued rulings in many cases. This paper examines conflicts between public health orders and religious liberty that arose in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it argues that the strict-scrutiny standard, rather than the rational-basis standard or a com-parable standard, is the appropriate standard to protect religious liberty from infringement by government orders in the current public health crisis. It explores these conflicts by considering several of the judicial rulings. However, before turning to these cases, this paper considers several constitutional background issues and the public health enterprise. KEYWORDS: public health, measures, religious freedom, COVID-19 pandemi