The Right to Worship

The first amendment of the American Constitution grants:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That right is clearly understood to contain the right of “freedom of religion” which was an essential right for the settlers of the American colonies. Colonies intentionally established as havens for (Christian) religion minorities included: Massachussetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island (this last for religious minorities fleeing… Massachussetts).

More importantly and immediately for the authors of the Constitution (the colonies were all 5 or so generations old by the time of independence), the wealthiest, largest, colony (Virginia) had an active problem with the Church of England abusing the legal authority granted parish vestries to hassle parishioners who had become Baptists.

It strikes me as no accident that Madison packed together the right to freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom to worship, freedom to speak, freedom to publish, freedom to assemble and freedom to petition/protest as one big set of ideas. These are not separate rights: for the authors they are aspects one and the same right.

In the 1770s through 1790s… your right to attend a Baptist church, or a Catholic Mass, or a Quaker House of Friends and worship on a Sunday… was the same as your right to protest British Soldiers firing into a crowd in Boston: fundamental to what it meant to be free in an American colony.

But, the Supreme Court of the US has recently had to affirm that churches and synagogues do have a right to operate as places of worship and assembly, even during this time of plague.

One author who I follow said of this decision:

[Y]ou can’t require fewer people in a church than a restaurant, nor treat the right to protest as more important than the right to worship and [the] health departments that try to do so are headed for constitutional hot water

… [M]any of the people rubbishing the decision are making the same error DeBlasio did; they cannot even conceive of holding the worship of your creator to be an essential activity, like protesting social injustice. They think it’s a somewhat déclassé hobby, like bowling.

So, there’s my question.

Do you think the act of worship is an essential activity, like protesting social injustice?