Radio Recap – The ACLJ Fights Back Against California’s Ban on Church Singing

The ACLJ fights back against California’s church singing ban.

On today’s Jay Sekulow Live, we discussed the actions that we at the ACLJ are taking to fight back against California’s church singing ban. We have a team of attorneys preparing to file a lawsuit against the state of California.

Online at ACLJ.org, more than sixty thousand of you in about 24 hours have signed the petition that says “Don’t Ban Singing in Church.” I can’t stress enough how great it is to see this level of grassroots support from ACLJ members, We’ve also got a new blog up as well. The blog had something that I think is really important to share. It is entitled, “ACLJ Defending Religious Liberty Against New California Singing Ban That Specifically Aims to Silence Churches Worshiping.”

In the blog, we also quote scripture, Psalm 100:2, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing!” After the scripture, there’s a caution:

“Caution: The actions in this verse are no longer permissible in the State of California.”

My dad, Jay Sekulow, made the following point:

That’s because California has basically outlawed singing and chanting no matter the size of your worship center, no matter how few people are there. In fact, the way their law reads, you could have a five thousand seat worship center. You could have only a hundred people there under the law. So you could really space them out, you could hardly see them. You could have two people on the podium area singing twenty-five or thirty feet apart, wearing a mask, and that’s a violation of California’s law.

My dad continued:

You can constitutionally go to the streets and sidewalks, protest, chant, sing, and walk down the street but you cannot do the same activity inside a church even if you limit the numbers, even if you socially distance, even if you wear a mask. You can’t walk down that aisle and chant or sing. That tells you where the constitutionality of that issue has been raised and that’s why the ACLJ’s engaged in it.

The ACLJ will be filing our lawsuit against the state of California, as soon as tomorrow.

We took a number of listener calls today, as our audience is understandably very upset about what California is doing to churches, but there was one caller that stood out. Yolanda, a listener from Colorado, called into the show and here’s what she had to say:

I’m a U.S. citizen, born in Venezuela and I became a U.S. citizen in 2009. My family lives in Venezuela right now. They’re fighting. They’re fighting for democracy. And let me tell you, once you lose a democracy, it’s hard to get it back.

The point about all this is control. It’s control of our rights. When I became a U.S. citizen, they teach you to respect the constitution, to respect the flag, to respect the people in the United States. That is what they teach us when we become a U.S. citizen. And to me, this is very personal because my family, people in Venezuela are dying to be able to get a democracy back. It took twenty years, and little by little the governors are going to take our rights. And if we don’t open our eyes right now, we will become like a Venezuela. And let me tell you, people what they need to do is open their eyes and fight this. It’s not about whether we’re open or not or if we have to wear masks or not, it’s the control. We don’t have a choice. And when you lose your choice in a democracy, it is done.

She’s exactly correct.

The full broadcast is complete with more discussion by our team of the actions we at the ACLJ are taking to fight California’s ban on singing and chanting in churches.

Watch the full broadcast below.