How a church, religious organization or nonprofit operates
A church, synagogue, mosque, temple, denominational body, parochial school, food bank, shelter, counseling agency or community nonprofit performs its work through eleven functions, and every one of them is a gathering, a movement of people or a transaction that a governmental order can reach and did reach. The industry's product is assembly: people meeting in a room to worship, learn, eat, celebrate, mourn, give and serve. An order that limits group meetings limits this industry's operation in the most direct sense the statute admits, which is why Congress wrote "religious" into the parenthetical of the Suspension Clause. This section describes the functions in operational terms, the revenue lines, the counterparties, the workforce and the calendar, and maps each counterparty class to the orders that reached it, so that the layers, quarters and function-by-function sections below can measure the orders against an operation rather than a label. The eleven codes are keyed in the function table at the end of this page.
WS: worship services and gathering caps
The core operation is the weekly service, held one or more times in a sanctuary, hall or rented space, with a median United States congregation of about sixty-five regular participants, a mean of several hundred, and sanctuaries built for 150 to 2,000. The service is an in-person gathering by definition: it involves singing, responsive speech, communion or other shared rites, the passing of offering plates or baskets, and the greeting of members at the door. Weddings, funerals, baptisms, bar and bat mitzvahs, confirmations and holiday services are gatherings of the same kind and often larger. An order that prohibits gatherings above a number, caps a room at a percentage of capacity, confines worship to "video and teleconference," bans singing, requires six feet between households, or imposes infection-prevention and exposure-control requirements on every person indoors, face coverings among them, changes what the service is, how many can attend it, and what the staff and volunteers must do to hold it.1
RE: religious education, youth programs, parochial schools and child care
Congregations run Sunday school, Hebrew school, catechesis, confirmation classes, youth groups, vacation programs and summer camps; many operate preschools, child-care centers and elementary or secondary schools that enroll students from the community and employ teachers, aides and administrators under State licenses. Each is a scheduled in-person gathering of children and adults in classrooms, gyms, cafeterias and buses. School-closure orders, child-care orders confining centers to the children of essential workers, camp orders, cohort and ratio rules, school face-covering orders (with the quarantine and exclusion rules that accompanied them) and staff vaccination-or-testing orders, the schools' infection-prevention and exposure-control regime, reach this function directly.2
EV: events, fundraising and galas
Congregations and nonprofits raise a substantial share of their revenue through events: galas and dinners, festivals and fairs, auctions, bingo and charitable gaming, concerts, revivals, walks and runs, denominational conventions and annual meetings. Each is a gathering of tens to thousands of people, often in a rented venue, hotel ballroom, arena or fairground, with caterers, florists, audiovisual contractors and volunteers. Gathering caps, venue closures, event-permit moratoria, indoor-event prohibitions and face-covering, distancing or vaccination-proof conditions at venues, imposed as the exposure-control terms of assembly, reach this function in terms.3
FS: food, shelter and social services
Food pantries, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, clothing closets, thrift stores, addiction-recovery programs, day programs for disabled adults, refugee-resettlement offices and counseling agencies operate in fixed premises, often under State licenses, Medicaid waiver contracts, HUD Continuum of Care grants and USDA commodity programs, and rely on walk-ins, volunteer shifts and group settings (congregate meals, group counseling, day rooms). The stay-at-home orders named these organizations as covered entities and permitted them to continue only "when providing food, shelter, and social services, and other necessities of life"; the same orders confined food service to pick-up and take-away, imposed distancing and occupancy rules on shelters and day programs, and closed thrift stores as non-essential retail; eviction moratoria and congregate-setting orders governed the housing programs.4
CR: counseling and visitation
Clergy, chaplains, lay ministers and volunteers visit members in homes, hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, jails and prisons; pastoral counseling is delivered in offices and homes; prison ministries hold services and classes inside correctional facilities. Every one of those settings was closed to visitors or conditioned by order: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' visitation guidance of March 13, 2020, the State health departments' nursing-home orders, the Bureau of Prisons' suspension of social, legal and volunteer visits on the same day, the State corrections departments' suspensions of volunteer and faith-based entry, and, from the summer of 2021, the vaccination conditions on entrants to hospitals, nursing homes and prisons.5
FC: facilities rental
Congregations rent their halls and sanctuaries to weddings and receptions, funerals, community groups, recovery meetings, polling places, child-care tenants, schools, concerts and other congregations; the income supports the building and the staff. Gathering caps, event prohibitions, venue closures, distancing rules and face-covering conditions, the exposure-control terms every rental carried, reach every rental, and the facility's own capacity limit under an order is the tenant's capacity limit.6
VL: the volunteer workforce
The typical congregation's volunteer workforce exceeds its paid staff several times over: ushers, greeters, musicians, teachers, pantry and kitchen workers, drivers, visitors and event staff. Volunteers travel to the premises, work in groups indoors, and serve the public. Stay-at-home orders confined them to their homes; gathering caps and occupancy rules limited how many could serve at once; conveyance orders governed their transit; visitation orders barred them from hospitals, nursing homes and prisons; and school and child-care orders kept the parents among them at home.7
HR: hiring, clergy and staffing
Congregations and denominations call clergy across State lines and from abroad, place seminarians and interns, hire teachers and program staff on school-year calendars, and depend on religious-worker visas for foreign clergy and religious orders. Consular suspensions, entry proclamations, interstate traveler quarantines and, from the summer of 2021, vaccination-or-testing conditions on school staff, health-care workers and federal contractors reached this function.8
OP: offices and telework
The parish office, the denominational headquarters, the development office and the program office employ administrators, bookkeepers, communications and development staff who handle contributions, payroll, scheduling and records. The stay-at-home and telework orders of March 2020 ordered "all businesses and not-for-profit entities" to telecommute "to the maximum extent possible," reduced in-person workforces by 50 and then 100 percent, and closed non-essential offices; the reopening orders capped office occupancy; the winter orders re-imposed telework mandates; and the Delta-wave orders of August 2021 imposed face-covering and related exposure-control requirements in every non-residential building open to the public.9
WF: workforce availability
Paid staff and volunteers alike were subject as individuals to stay-at-home orders, curfews, quarantine and isolation orders, school and child-care closures that kept parents home, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act's leave mandate for employees under a quarantine order or caring for a child whose school an order closed, and the transit orders that governed their commute. An order that removes a staff member from the premises for ten to fourteen days, or that keeps a parent home because a school is closed, limits the employer's operation as surely as an order addressed to the employer.10
CB: members and donors
The industry's customers are its members, attenders, participants and donors. Contributions (tithes, offerings, pledges) are historically the majority of congregational revenue and are collected heavily in person at services; program fees, tuition and event revenue depend on attendance; grants and government contracts depend on service delivery. Every stay-at-home order confined the member base to home; every gathering cap limited how many could attend; every school closure kept families away; every visitation order separated the congregation from its hospitalized and imprisoned members; and every eviction moratorium and unemployment surge changed what the donor base could give.11
The revenue lines
Contributions; program fees (tuition, camps, weddings, counseling); facility rental income; fundraising events; grants and government contracts (human services, housing, food programs); thrift and social-enterprise sales; bequests and investment income; and, for human-service nonprofits, fee-for-service Medicaid waiver billing, HUD Continuum of Care grants, USDA commodities and State contracts. Each line depends on a gathering, a premises open to the public, a service delivered in person or a program licensed by the State.
The inputs and counterparties
Members and donors (the customer base); denominational bodies (assessments, appointments, conventions); parochial schools and child-care centers (tenants and operating units); hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, jails and prisons (visitation settings); food banks, USDA programs and grocery donors (commodities); homeless-services systems and HUD (housing programs); Medicaid agencies and day-program regulators (licenses and billing); event venues, hotels, caterers and florists (galas); camps and retreat centers (programs); transit agencies (commutes of staff, volunteers and members); funeral homes and cemeteries (funerals); public schools (facility-use agreements); landlords and lenders (premises); building contractors (capital projects); and printers, audiovisual suppliers and PPE vendors (supplies).
The workforce
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 3,006,600 employees in NAICS 813 in February 2020 and 2,717,900 in April 2020, a fall of 288,700, or 9.6 percent, in the two months the stay-at-home orders took effect; the count had recovered only to 2,780,500 by September 2021. The Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies counts 12.5 million paid nonprofit workers nationally and estimates 1.6 million nonprofit jobs lost between March and May 2020, with 70 percent recovered by October 2021. The workforce is local: clergy and staff live in the communities they serve, commute by car and transit, and have children in the public and parochial schools whose closures the orders directed. Religious organizations are exempt from federal unemployment tax, which is why the official employment series understates them and why the Pew Research Center's survey of attenders is the better measure of what the orders did to the operation: in March 2021, 17 percent of attenders said their congregation was closed, two-thirds said it was open "only on a modified basis due to the pandemic," and 12 percent said it was "open and operating normally."12
Seasonality and geography
The industry's calendar runs through Lent, Holy Week and Easter (Easter fell on April 12, 2020, under stay-at-home orders in forty-two jurisdictions), Passover (April 8 to 16, 2020), Ramadan (April 23 to May 23, 2020), summer camps and vacation programs (June to August), the High Holy Days (September 18 to 28, 2020; the New York cluster orders of October 6, 2020 followed Sukkot), the fall gala and festival season (September to November), Advent, Hanukkah and Christmas (December 2020, under the winter caps) and year-end giving; parochial schools and child care run on the school year. The industry is present in every county in the United States; the orders that reached it were the orders of every State, and the metropolitan orders described below reached the largest concentrations of congregations and nonprofits in the country.13
The counterparty map
For each counterparty class, the orders that reached it, by category, with the subsection of the layers analysis in which the instruments are cited with exhibit identifiers. Members and donors: the stay-at-home orders, curfews and gathering bans of every State and the District of Columbia, and the metropolitan stay-at-home orders (the fifty States; the largest metros). Parochial schools and child care: the school-closure orders of March 2020 in every State, the fall 2020 and winter closure orders of Kentucky, New York, California and the Ohio and Wisconsin counties, the child-care orders confining centers to essential workers' children, and the 2021-22 school and child-care face-covering and staff-vaccination orders (the sector regulators; the counterparties). Hospitals, nursing homes and prisons: the CMS visitation guidance, the State nursing-home orders, the Bureau of Prisons' and State corrections departments' visitation suspensions, and the health-care-worker vaccination orders of 2021 (the federal layer; the sector regulators). Venues, hotels and caterers: the venue closures, gathering caps, event-permit moratoria and vaccination-proof orders of the States and metros (the fifty States; the largest metros). Transit: the transit agencies' rules of 2020 and the CDC conveyance order and TSA directives from February 1, 2021 (the federal layer). Funeral homes and cemeteries: the funeral caps of the State orders and the Department of Veterans Affairs' announced national-cemetery restrictions (the federal layer; the fifty States). Courts and public offices: the court closures that suspended guardianship, legal-aid and eviction dockets (the counterparties). Food supply and PPE: the Defense Production Act orders and the FEMA allocation rule, and the USDA food-program waivers (the federal layer; the ecosystem). Landlords and lenders: the eviction moratoria of the CDC, the federal housing agencies and the States (the federal layer; the counterparties). Clergy and foreign religious workers: the entry proclamations, the consular suspension and the interstate quarantines (the ecosystem).