Historic churches

Richard A. Sokerka

Having just celebrated our great nation’s 241st birthday earlier this month, most Americans surely reflected on our nation’s humble beginnings, its storied history and the importance of the preservation of our historical sites, many of them located right here in our neighborhoods.

Historical preservation is so critical that Morris County created a historic preservation fund for historic buildings in the county and instituted a competitive grant program. Between 2012 and 2015, the county provided grants to 55 religious and nonreligious recipients. The program requires applicants to establish the historic significance of the building; grants for churches are limited to preservation of exterior building elements and the buildings’ structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems.

This year the historic preservation fund has recommended the Morris County freeholders award $2.9 million in grants to help preserve 25 historic sites, including seven churches, among them, Assumption Church in Morristown

But these grants may be in jeopardy because an atheist group, calling itself Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), is unrelenting in its fight to stop historic churches from participating in a historic preservation grant. In December 2015, FFRF sued Morris County, complaining that allowing churches to participate in the program violates the N.J. Constitution. In January 2017, a N.J. court ruled in favor of Morris County, protecting the right of religious historic buildings to participate in the program. But FFRF appealed that decision and the case is now before the N. J. Supreme Court.

Courts have consistently protected a church’s right to participate in widely available public benefit programs. Just recently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer that a state can’t deny church schools from participating in a shredded-tire resurfacing program to make playgrounds safer for children. Becket, a religious liberty law firm, had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in that case. Becket, which successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court for the Little Sisters of the Poor against the Obama administration’s lawsuit to enforce the Obamacare mandate on the order, filed a friend-of-the-court brief last week with the N.J. Supreme Court. It supports the historic preservation program and the churches, stating, “excluding an otherwise eligible religious organization from a public benefits program solely because of its religious status ‘is odious to our Constitution and cannot stand.’” The state has a long history of funding historic preservation for buildings, including churches, going back to the 1850 Solomon Wesley Church, a house of worship originally built to serve as a community for freed slaves.

The atheist group’s ongoing fight through the courts to blacklist historic churches from the historic preservation grant program is a sad attempt to strike a blow at our religious liberties.

The simple fact is, as Hannah Smith, senior counsel at Becket, stated, “Whether a historic building is used for religious or secular purposes should make no difference to whether the building gets public restoration funds.”