Briarwood Presbyterian Church, a megachurch located in the relatively wealthy Birmingham suburb of Vestavia Hills, Alabama, attracts a reported 8,000 people to its campus every day. In 2017, Briarwood officials lobbied and were successful in getting conservative politicians to propose a bill that would allow them to have their own police force. They argued that the police force would be modest, and that there would be no “jail” under Briarwood’s control, but that “officers would answer to the church and if you had a complaint, you’d have to complain it to the church.” Keep in mind, the church already has its own private security force. No other church in Alabama signed on to the request.
The bill faded away until this year. On Wednesday, after it had passed through the state legislature, Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill that allows Briarwood Presbyterian to create its own police force to enforce the law at its church and school campuses. The bill allows the church to “appoint and employ one or more suitable persons to act as police officers to keep off intruders and prevent trespass upon and damage to the property …These persons shall be charged with all the duties and invested with all the powers of police officers, including the power of arrest for unlawful acts committed on the property.” The law is set to come into effect this fall.
Alabama ACLU Executive Director Randall Marshall said that he expects a court battle in the coming months. A lawyer told Birmingham Fox affiliate WBRC that this was just the beginning for churches that want to obtain state-level law enforcement rights: "I think that other congregations and academies could be on the fast track. They would at least have the precedent of Briarwood and Madison Academy being able to join the ranks of small colleges and universities."
Allowing a church, or any religious institution, to wield the same powers as the state is a clear violation of our Constitution. And if you consider the history of internal church investigations into sexual abuse allegations, for example, it is clear that such institutions cannot be left to police themselves.
One of the important bits of history to remember is that the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) has a history that begins when Northern and numerous Southern Presbyterian churches split during the Civil War. Yes, that Civil War. There were orthodoxy issues that had plagued a unified Presbyterian alliance in general, but the Civil War brought out even further divisions, with one side opposing slavery and supporting the federal government, while the other side—well, you can guess what their spiritual feelings were on the matter. After the war, the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) was formed, pulling in many of the southern flocks that had separated leading up to the war. Divisions still existed, and as the PCUS began to have more liberal-minded congregants, interested in ordaining women and integrating flocks, that favorite conservative sense of orthodoxy reared its ugly head again. In 1973, a meeting to separate from that “liberalism” and form the s separate organization, the PCA, took place in … Briarwood Presbyterian Church, in Vestavia Hills, Alabama. The excuse that those same old-school Presbyterians gave during the Civil War and again in the early ‘70s was that they were protecting the orthodoxy of the religion—but the orthodoxy in both centuries seems to share one consistent theological position: a racist one.
Does this history mean that a church-controlled police force will be any more racist that an Alabama-controlled police force? No. But it’s important to remember that churches and religions are constitutionally forbidden from imposing decisions of morality on the rest of us in a secular state. I realize this is a laughable statement to make in a political climate that uses religious ideology to punish women and restrict their rights. But turning law enforcement authority over to a religious organization is yet another unconstitutional step away from the basic foundations of our country.