Given the US Constitution&#39;s 1st Amendment freedom of religion, how can current pandemic restrictions on worship be legal?
<p>The 13th amendment ending slavery and involuntary servitude, which has a big &quot;except&quot; for allowing it as a punishment for crimes. The 1st amendment has no exceptions listed though. It also has several rights squeezed into it: speech, press, religion, protest. So any threat to 1 right within it should rightly be considered a threat to the others.</p>
<p>How can any restriction on worship gatherings be legally justified given the 1st amendment? Are there any legal precedents?</p>
<p>Full disclosure: I am an atheist. It absolutely makes sense, from a public health and safety perspective, to put restrictions on large gatherings of any sort, for worship or otherwise. However, given the language of the 1st amendment -- and it being the legal shrine of multiple freedoms -- it seems hard to justify and a dangerous precedent from a legal perspective to enact any laws or rules abridging worship of any kind.</p>

<p>The First Amendment is never interpreted as a complete prohibition against laws that could affect a religion, nor is it interpreted to mean that you can say or write anything whatsoever that you want. You cannot sacrifice humans when in the name of a religion, and you cannot sacrifice (murder) humans for fun. One part of the First Amendment regarding religion is the Free Exercise clause which says that you cannot prohibit the exercise of a religion, and another, the Establishment Clause, prohibits favoring a religion, or favoring religion over atheism. The clauses about free speech also do not mean that you can commit fraud and you cannot threaten people's lives.</p>
<p>What decides how far the government can go is &quot;strict scrutiny&quot;, a doctrine that limits the extent to which the government can infringe on fundamental rights – First Amendment rights are the canonical example of a fundamental right. The main hurdle that a law so scrutinized has to pass is that the law is necessary for a compelling government interest. Preventing massive deaths is generally seen as such an interest. Then, the law has to be narrowly tailored to affect &quot;just those cases&quot;, and it has to be the lest restrictive means of accomplishing that end. Although the prevention of massive deaths is a compelling government interest, a government might screw this up in their legal arguments, as they seem to have done in <a href="https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2020cv2710-43" rel="noreferrer">Capitol Hill Baptist Church v. Bowser</a>, where mass political protests were allowed but smaller religious meetings were prohibited. The government essentially &quot;waived&quot; that compelling interest, replacing it with an interest in preventing church meetings, which is plainly a violation of the First Amendment – they substantially burdened <em>religious</em> practices.</p>

<p>It depends on what else is restricted. As a rule, a blanket ban on gatherings, whether religious or not, is constitutional. A ban on specifically religious gatherings is not.</p>
<p>This has been a particularly sore point where mass demonstrations, especially by Black Lives Matter activists, have been permitted, but religious gatherings under similar conditions have not.</p>
<p><a href="https://reason.com/2020/10/10/federal-court-accepts-churchs-challenge-to-d-c-s-100-person-limit-on-outdoor-religious-services/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">This article</a> in the Volokh Conspiracy blog contains extensive quotes from one recent judgement on this point.</p>

first-amendment pandemic freedom-of-religion