Land, faith, and RLUIPA

Not every church is bold enough to sue the county. Yet that’s what North Carolina’s Summit Church, led by former Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear, did this year.

Summit wants to build a new worship facility to serve the Chapel Hill area on a parcel of land in Chatham County. Last December, the Chatham County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to deny the church’s application to rezone the property. But the church has a powerful federal law in its corner: the Religious Land Use and Institution­alized Persons Act, or RLUIPA (often pronounced ar-LOOP-uh).

In June, U.S. District Court Judge William Osteen Jr. ruled in favor of the church, temporarily blocking the board of commissioners from denying Summit’s rezoning proposal, pending further orders from the court. The judge cited RLUIPA, stating “the public and Plaintiff have a strong interest in religious liberty, which RLUIPA protects.”

RLUIPA, which turns 25 years old in September, has for a quarter-century proven its utility and resiliency in a variety of religious freedom cases, Summit’s among them. In short, the law requires the government to clear a higher bar before infringing on religious freedom in particular cases involving land use or prisoners’ rights. While other state and federal religious freedom laws have come under attack in recent years, RLUIPA so far is proving a reliable protection for churches, religious groups, and prisoners with religious beliefs.

RLUIPA was one of two major pieces of religious freedom legislation that emerged out of the 1990s, unifying political rivals at a time when religious liberties appeared to be increasingly threatened. The first pivotal legal change occurred in 1990, when the U.S. Supreme Court in Employment Division v. Smith changed the rules for the free exercise of religion and made it easier for the government to overrule religious rights for Christians, Hindus, Native Americans, or any other religious group.

“There were very few people who knew anything about religious liberty who didn’t hate the Smith decision,” says Brad Jacob, a professor and associate dean at Regent University School of Law. “Virtually everybody thought it was awful—conservatives, liberals, Christians, secularists.”

Jacob and others developed a wide-­ranging coalition that lobbied for better free exercise laws. Their efforts culminated in the Religious Freedom Restora­tion Act, which sailed through Congress with Republican and Democratic support in 1993. But four years later, in response to a challenge by the city of Boerne, Texas, the Supreme Court ruled RFRA unconstitutional with respect to state and local laws, curtailing its effectiveness as a broad religious liberty shield.

Later, advocates in Congress considered a narrower bill focused on land use and prisoners’ rights. Championed by members of both parties and a wide variety of religious faiths, RLUIPA passed Congress unanimously in 2000. It was signed by President Bill Clinton.

Since then, RLUIPA has been a boon to religious groups. In 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit cited the law when it ruled in favor of two Orthodox Jewish congregations that wanted to meet in a zoned business district of Surfside, Fla., that allowed private clubs and lodges but not churches and synagogues. In 2012, the 5th Circuit said the city of Holly Springs, Miss., violated RLUIPA by setting up zoning requirements that were more difficult for churches.

More recently, the San Diego City Council this March decided to allow All Peoples Church to build a new sanctuary in the Del Cerro neighborhood rather than fight an RLUIPA lawsuit.

In North Carolina, Summit Church has more than 10 campus congregations throughout the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. But its congregants in Chapel Hill are outgrowing their current meeting space at a local high school.

“It just puts limitations on who we can reach,” Chapel Hill Campus Pastor Eric Gravelle told me. “It makes it difficult to be in that space outside of one day a week.” He noted that the new building site is close to many congregants who live in Chatham County, in addition to the 400-plus students from the University of North Carolina who attend during the school year.

Leading up to last December’s board of commissioners vote to deny Summit its rezoning request, Chatham County also received many public comments opposing the church, many of them blatantly anti-Christian. One called Summit’s congregants “ignorant zealots” and “high-earning homophobes.”

Chatham County Attorney Bob Hagemann declined to comment on the case, except to say the county acknowledged Judge Osteen’s order and had filed an appeal with the 4th Circuit.

RLUIPA also protects the rights of prisoners. It’s easier for the government to show a compelling interest in limiting religious rights in a prison—mainly for security reasons—yet of the handful of RLUIPA cases to reach the Supreme Court, prisoners have repeatedly prevailed. In 2015’s Holt v. Hobbs, the court allowed a Muslim inmate in Arkansas to grow a beard in accordance with his religious beliefs. In 2022’s Ramirez v. Collier, a Texas death row inmate won the right for his pastor to lay hands on him in the execution chamber.

The law is such a clear and strong statute for land use claims, however, that not a single RLUIPA land use case has reached the Supreme Court.

According to Jacob, “Any federal trial judge will look at this statute and say, ‘Yeah, you win, church. This is a no-brainer.’ And then, of course, the zoning board can choose to appeal, but probably their lawyer is going to say, ‘This is a losing path.’”

For Summit Church, that has yet to happen. But Pastor Gravelle is optimistic.

“We’re thankful for Judge Osteen and what he shared and said about having merits for this particular case, and we’re hoping that the courts will see that,” he said. In the meantime, the Chapel Hill congregation plans to keep meeting at the high school.

Gravelle also said he’s less concerned about what his church can’t control than what it can—its attitude.

“We want to take the posture of Jesus in this,” he said. “And so in the pursuit for freedom and having the right to do so, there needs to be a real posture of humility and care and love and patience in that process.”

—Kent Lupino is a 2025 graduate of the World Journalism Institute mid-career course