At a time when religious values are under attack, it is more important than ever to safeguard the sanctuary.
At a time when religious values are under attack, it is more important than ever to safeguard the sanctuary.
H ouses of worship, designed to be sanctuaries for communion with God, have increasingly been targeted for intimidation, harassment, and disruption. In response, Congress is considering the Right to Worship Act, a bill introduced just last month in both the Senate and House with bipartisan support.
The Act establishes a narrowly tailored 100-foot protection zone where conduct that disrupts a scheduled religious service or impedes attendance is prohibited. Enforcement would be through civil fines, with congregants having a private right of action.
The need for such a measure is growing. Last year, agitators posed as congregants at the Mission Church in Carlsbad, Calif., and then loudly and disruptively shouted slogans inside. At the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan in November 2025 and May 2026, hundreds of demonstrators surrounded the building from two sides for three-and-a-half hours chanting “death to the IDF.” A police officer was hospitalized, but no arrests were made.
Hanna’s grandfather, Marvin Gerber, is a member of an Ann Arbor, Mich., congregation that has been at the epicenter of this phenomenon. For over 1,100 consecutive weeks, he has walked past angry demonstrators to worship on Shabbat. Her grandfather has not let these protesters keep him from services — but at 92 years old, it has taken a toll on him.
Demonstrations at houses of worship are particularly disruptive because they target the congregants at a particularly vulnerable time. They are coming to services out of some religious obligation — a captive audience in First Amendment parlance. As congregants come to approach God in supplication, accompanied typically by their families, disturbances that could be dismissed as part of the hurly-burly of democracy can have particularly destructive effects.
Community leaders in Ann Arbor have told us many have reconsidered having their bat or bar mitzvahs at the shul. Demonstrators certainly have a right to express their views, but standing outside of more than 1,100 consecutive shabbats where they know certain people will be coming by at specific times resembles harassment.
Many conservatives have a bad taste in their mouths from any mention of “buffer zone” laws because of their widespread use in restricting protests and counseling activities outside of abortion clinics. But buffer zone laws are uncontroversially in force to protect the sanctity of places like cemeteries and funerals.
Congress has, in fact, protected houses of worship since 1994, but only as a secondary provision of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a statute to address a different problem and built around that problem’s assumptions. FACE reaches only force, threats of force, and physical obstruction — but not other kinds of conduct that can in practice disrupt or seriously interfere with religious services.
The free exercise of religion is a core First Amendment right. Thus, it is important to protect churches and synagogues with a free-standing statute. Because the Right to Worship Act protects against interference in religious exercise by private parties, it does not protect the constitutional right per se, which addresses governmental interference. But constitutional protection for worship does demonstrate its safeguarding to be a compelling government interest.
At the same time, it does not sweep nearly as far as abortion clinic access laws, some of which the Supreme Court has struck down on First Amendment grounds. For example, McCullen v. Coakley (2014) struck down a law that in effect barred any kind of speech, including one-on-one conversations within the buffer zone around a clinic. The Court found that while the state had a valid interest in “preventing harassment and intimidation,” a de facto no–speech zone swept too far. But that is exactly what the Right to Worship Act doesn’t do.
The federal bill only restricts particularly disruptive activities, which falls well within the constitutional allowance for time, place, and manner restrictions and is in line with McCullen. One person’s exercise of their rights cannot come at the expense of another — and thus the statute only “buffers” “conduct that meaningfully interferes with the ability of people to participate” in a scheduled religious service, or that “unreasonably hinders or deters” entrance.
It is also quite clear that many local authorities — like New York City’s mayor, who has cheered on synagogue demonstrations — will never enforce available local nuisance laws that could be used against such disturbances.
We recognize that disturbances around houses of worship are, in a sense, matters of local law and order which under a well-functioning system of federalism should not be within the purview of the federal government.
Yet 100 years of expansive Commerce Clause jurisprudence means that as a matter of current constitutional doctrine, it clearly is within federal power. The FACE Act, for example, lacks any statutory requirement connecting the conduct to interstate commerce, a gap the Supreme Court has yet to address.
The Right to Worship bill, by contrast, makes a “substantial effect on interstate commerce” an element of the offense — which means it can only be used in cases that truly do cross state lines. This language was borrowed from the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996, not widely thought of as massive government overreach.
Thus, the Right to Worship Act doesn’t change the federalism landscape. Moreover, there is no need for conservatives to deny themselves, and themselves alone, the protections of existing constitutional law, while working to change it based on conservative principles.
At a time when religious values are under attack, it is more important than ever to safeguard the sanctuary itself. The Right to Worship Act is modest, bipartisan, and well within what the Constitution allows, at least as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court.
Hanna Gerber is the Director of the Solomon Charitable Foundation. Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School and a Senior Legal Fellow in the Meese Institute at Advancing American Freedom.