Christians arrested for maskless outdoor church service to get payout from liberal college town

A liberal college town in Idaho is paying $300,000 to three Christian churchgoers who sued the city after being arrested for not wearing masks at an outside service during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The city of Moscow announced this week that it would settle with Gabriel Rench, as well as Sean and Rachel Bohnet, who brought a case against city leaders in March 2021 that alleged their rights under the First and Fourth Amendments were violated when they were arrested at an outdoor “psalm sing” conducted by leaders from their church.

Moscow, home to the University of Idaho, is a town of approximately 25,000 people about 80 miles south of Spokane, Washington. Christ Church is a local congregation of approximately 1,000 people belonging to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

Footage of the arrests, which went viral and were condemned on Twitter at the time by then-President Trump, showed officers taking Rench’s hymn book before leading him away in handcuffs to the county jail, where he and the others were detained for several hours.

Rench and the others were charged with violating the city’s repeatedly extended health ordinance, which carved out exemptions for activities protected under the U.S. Constitution and the Idaho State Constitution, including religious activity.

A magistrate judge later dismissed the city’s case against them, and U.S. District Court Judge Morrison C. England, Jr., wrote in his Feb. 1, 2023 memorandum and order denying the city’s motion to dismiss that the “plaintiffs should never have been arrested in the first place, and the constitutionality of what the City thought [its] code said is irrelevant.”

“Somehow, every single City official involved overlooked the exclusionary language [of constitutionally protected behavior] in the Ordinance,” the judge further wrote.

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