It’s good to obey the law and you should absolutely do so.

Also, the actual risk that churches of <100 people who’ve been canceled for 1-5 weeks now meeting up for 2 hours are going to create any appreciable increase in infection risk is basically zero.

The main reason for this is because a large number of people will voluntarily stay home anyways, and most of the people who disobediently show up anyways are probably disobeying elsewhere too.

But beyond that, modestly sized churches can pretty easily practice social distancing within the congregation.

Big churches are another story. You can’t have a 2,000 person gathering with social distancing.

But going after the 17 people who showed up at a random local church today and sat with 2 pews between each family and wore masks and have complied and cancelled services for the last 3 weeks prevents *precisely zero* infections.

But it does raise revenue for the police!

Crack down on large assemblies; they are dangerous. And I think churches that refuse to take appropriate precautions are engaged in a mortal sin together.

But there is absolutely no sound case to be made that squashing every modest gathering is helpful.

For one thing, “the beatings will continue until morale improves” is NOT going to work as a strategy in the long run. Given that measures of some kind WILL be in place for MONTHS, I think we need to be trying to adopt policies we can sustain.