First Pentecostal Church of Holly Springs, MS arson follow up - extraordinary

quote:

---

DON R. WILLETT, Circuit Judge, concurring.

The First Pentecostal Church of Holly Springs was burned to the ground earlier this week. Graffiti spray-painted in the church parking lot sneered, “Bet you Stay home Now YOU HYPOKRITS.”

The City mentions the church burning in its latest brief, but in a manner less commendable than condemnable. One might expect a city to express sympathy or outrage (or both) when a neighborhood house of worship is set ablaze. One would be mistaken. Rather than condemn the crime’s depravity, the City seized advantage, insisting that the Church’s First Amendment claim necessarily went up in smoke when the church did: “the Church was destroyed from an arson fire . . . making the permanent injunction claim moot.”

This argument is shameful.

When the parishioners of First Pentecostal Church leave their homes on Sundays, they are not going to church; they are the church. The church is not the building. When the New Testament speaks of the church, it never refers to brick-and-mortar places where people gather, but to flesh-and-blood people who gather together.1 Think people, not steeple. I concur in the court’s grant of injunctive relief. Singling out houses of worship—and only houses of worship, it seems—cannot possibly be squared with the First Amendment.

1. “Ekklesia,” the Greek word for church, means the gathered ones, an assembly of the faithful. See Ekklesia, The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (Alexander P. Kashdan ed., 1991) (“personification of the church”).

---