Preserving historic churches

Richard A. Sokerka

Morris County has always been in the forefront of other state counties in preserving the important historic sites in its towns, some of which date back to the Revolutionary War.

But last year, the N.J. Su­preme Court ordered Morris County to stop allowing participation in its historic preservation program by historic houses of worship. Freedom From Religion Foundation — an atheist organization — sued the county for allowing historic houses of worship to apply for preservation funds on equal terms with all other historical sites, even though the grants are awarded under neutral criteria, and houses of worship can only use the grants to repair a historic building’s exterior and mechanical systems.

According to the N.J. Supreme Court’s ruling, giving neutral treatment to houses of worship constituted religious activity and was in violation of the N.J. Constitution. By any stretch of the imagination, that’s a really strange interpretation of the state’s Constitution. Is repairing the roof of an historic church a religious activity? Certainly not, and that makes excluding houses of worship from Morris County’s program, as the Supreme Court ruled, a case of religious discrimination.

That’s why we were heartened to see that Morris County filed a petition Sept. 19 asking the U.S. Supreme Court to protect its historic preservation program and let it continue treating all historic sites the same, without any religious discrimination.

In its 2017 Trinity Lutheran ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court protected a church’s right to participate in a generally available public program, stating that excluding the church because of its religious status would violate the First Amendment.

According to Diana Verm, legal counsel at Becket, a non-profit religious liberty law firm representing Morris County in its petition before the Supreme Court, “The county should not be forced to discriminate by favoring secular sites in its preservation efforts.”

Doug Cabana, the freeholder director of Morris County, said, “We want to preserve all of our historical sites, including our magnificent houses of worship, some of which date back to the 1700s and were designed by the leading architects of their time.”

It is our hope that the U.S. Supreme Court will come to the same conclusion it did in its Trinity Lutheran ruling, and end the religious discrimination that the Catholic, Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches in Morris County now face and once again will allow them to participate in the county’s historic preservation program.