The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a statement of interest in support of a religious discrimination lawsuit filed by former Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear’s The Summit Church in North Carolina, just over two weeks after lawyers for the Chatham County Board of Commissioners asked the court to dismiss it.
In the lawsuit, Summit Church alleges that members of the county board unlawfully rejected its application to rezone nearly 100 acres of land to house its Chapel Hill campus. The church contends the board’s decision violated its “civil rights as enshrined in the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and codified in the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.”
The congregation has asked the court for a preliminary injunction and is seeking an order requiring the county to approve the church’s rezoning request and associated site plan.
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Summit Church’s Homestead Heights campus worshipped at East Chapel Hill High School for several years. However, since the congregation has grown, additional space is required to meet the needs. The lawsuit proclaims that the country treated the church differently from how nonreligious assemblies are typically treated.
In response, the county asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina to dismiss the complaint with prejudice, citing multiple defenses, including governmental immunity.
Chatham officials also maintain that their zoning decision is a “legislative act” under state law and is not subject to RLUIPA.
Keith E. Richardson, the church’s attorney, argued in an 18-page response to the county’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit that the county’s rezoning decision was administrative, not legislative, which would make the decision subject to RLUIPA.
“RLUIPA’s statutory focus on ‘individualized assessments’ suggests broad judicial authority to fashion remedies when reviewing administrative decisions. Indeed, federal courts have long held that a rezoning action is administrative if it ‘single[s] out specifiable individuals and affect[s] them differently from others,'” Richardson argued.
The DOJ filed a statement of interest with the court last Friday in support of the church’s claim that RLUIPA protects against the county’s discriminatory zoning decision.
“RLUIPA protects the rights of religious groups to exercise their faith free from the precise type of undue government interference exhibited here,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement Tuesday. “The Civil Rights Division is committed to defending religious liberties as our founders intended and as federal law requires.”
The DOJ states that since RLUIPA is a federal law, it “guards individuals and religious institutions from unduly burdensome, unequal, or discriminatory land use regulations.”
Just over a year ago, the department sent a letter to state, county and municipal leaders around the country reminding them of their obligations under RLUIPA, “including its requirement that land use regulations treat religious assemblies and institutions at least as well as nonreligious assemblies and institutions.”
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