Houses of worship must be free to protect themselves

Americans with even a rudimentary understanding of the Constitution will quickly point to the Second Amendment as the part that guarantees the right to bear arms. Many would be surprised to learn that the First Amendment has something to say about it too.

Of course, the First Amendment guarantees a variety of precious freedoms. Most understand its basic protections for free speech and religious liberty, but few can name the several clauses protecting seven different freedoms in the First Amendment.

That is deeply unfortunate when we understand that the rights guaranteed in these amendments are meant to work together in a complementary fashion, maximizing our freedom.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently corrected a mistaken understanding some had of the First Amendment. He reminded us that, though filled with clauses protecting many freedoms, each clause of the First Amendment builds the upon the whole. Thus, as Justice Gorsuch wrote, “That the First Amendment doubly protects religious speech is no accident. It is a natural outgrowth of the framers’ distrust of government attempts to regulate religion and suppress dissent.”

That same distrust applies with equal force to the free exercise of religion and the right to bear arms.

In His Tabernacle v. Hochul, Pastor Micheal Spencer asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to invalidate a New York state law that harmed his ability to protect his congregation. The law came eight days after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld important Second Amendment rights in New York Gun & Rifle Association v. Bruen in 2022. The new law classified a number of places—including houses of worship—as “sensitive places,” making them off limits to lawfully carry a gun for all but a select few.

Private businesses were not affected by the new gun law. If you operated a store in a strip mall, the law gave you the affirmative choice to allow customers to lawfully carry a weapon while shopping. But not churches or synagogues. New York’s law disarmed all of its houses of worship.

For Pastor Spencer, that was an especially personal concern. He maintains his license to carry on the advice of law enforcement who visited his home after someone—upset over something Pastor Spencer had said from the pulpit—came to his home with lethal intent. But, while the New York law may have allowed for self-defense in his home, Pastor Spencer could not carry his weapon at the church, nor allow others to do so if they wished to defend themselves (and others).

In a lengthy opinion upholding much of the New York law, the Second Circuit struck down the part that infringed on the First Amendment. The court noted that the state offered precious little explanation as to why business owners could allow the lawful carrying of a weapon, but not churches. And, it said, even if “the decision to regulate places of worship more with greater restriction than other locations” is aimed at “preventing gun violence,” that “approach is understandable, but unconstitutional.”

Just as it is appropriate for businesses to elect, or not, to allow its customers to lawfully possess a firearm while in their store, the same deference must be allowed for houses of worship. Indeed, the court concluded that it had difficulty seeing “how the law advances the interests of religious organizations, as a whole, by denying them the agency to choose for themselves whether to permit firearms.”

After all, while a business may enjoy many privileges, secular businesses are obviously not religious. Enshrined in our Constitution, through the Bill of Rights, are specific protections for our nation’s houses of worship and religious institutions.

Those protections are meant to be more than theoretical niceties, for they are practical necessities. Even in the last month, calls for the genocide of Jewish Americans have been heard outside of our nation’s synagogues. In one location—in New York—a man fired off rounds outside a Jewish house of worship.  

At least now houses of worship facing such threats are no longer forcefully disarmed. While there will certainly continue to be many arguments over whether or not guns should be invited into a church or synagogue, the Constitution affords the nation’s houses of worship to make that decision—not the government.