Owatonna, MN Correspondent — I taught music for years, so let me say the uncomfortable thing first, because nobody at these tables who isn’t a musician is going to.

The singing evidence is real. In March a choir rehearsed in Washington state — sixty-one people, one infected, and fifty-three of them caught it and two died. I have stood in front of enough choirs to understand exactly why. Sustained projection, deep breathing, sixty people in a room designed for sound to carry, for two hours.

That’s the most defensible restriction of the entire year and it happens to fall on a religious practice.

So my objection isn’t to the singing rules. It’s that nobody ever said this. The orders capped attendance, which is a proxy, instead of addressing the specific activity, which is what the evidence actually supported. A congregation could have been told: come, distance, don’t sing, and here’s the study. That would have been persuasive to reasonable people and most congregations would have complied.

Instead they got a number with no reasoning attached, and the reasoning existed the whole time. That’s a failure of explanation, and it produced a constitutional fight that a well-drafted order might have avoided entirely.

Clermont, Florida Correspondent — I’m answering from the state that took the other path, so this is a report rather than an argument.

Florida designated religious services as essential in early April and they were never closed by state order. Some congregations closed voluntarily, a great many moved outdoors or to parking lots, and some carried on largely as before.

I’d tell you honestly that I don’t think we can attribute much to it either way. We had a bad summer and a manageable autumn and the churches weren’t the identifiable driver of either.

What I can say is about the politics rather than the epidemiology. There was no constitutional fight here, no litigation, and no sense among religious Floridians that the state had chosen against them. Whatever that was worth in compliance elsewhere — and I suspect it was worth something — we got it for free.

Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — I keep the books for a church that couldn’t find a treasurer, so I saw this from an angle nobody else here will have.

The offering collapsed. Not because people stopped giving — because the mechanism was a plate passed on Sunday, and there was no Sunday.

A congregation of a hundred and forty people with a building, a mortgage, and a part-time pastor lost most of its income in about three weeks. We got through it. Several around here didn’t, and the buildings are for sale.

Nobody counted that. The argument was conducted as a rights question and the immediate effect on the ground was financial, and the congregations that closed permanently were the small ones with no reserve.

Whatever the courts decided, that’s what happened.

Dayton, Ohio Correspondent — This is a ventilation and occupancy problem and it was treated as a category problem, which is why it went badly.

I spent the year working out what made a plant floor safe. Air changes per hour, distance, duration of exposure, whether people are talking loudly. Those are the variables and they’re measurable, and we measured them and adjusted and it worked.

A sanctuary is a room with the same variables. A large modern building with good air handling and forty people spread across it is a materially different risk from a small hall with a hundred people and no ventilation. The orders treated them identically because they used occupancy caps rather than conditions.

We knew how to do this better. Every industrial hygienist in the country knew. Nobody asked, and the result was a rule that was too strict for half the buildings and too loose for the other half, and that gave everyone a legitimate grievance.

Novi, Michigan Correspondent — Michigan is a useful counterexample and it’s been left out of the national account.

Our stay-home order explicitly declined to impose penalties on places of worship. That was in the text from the beginning. Whatever else Michigan fought about this year, and we fought about a great deal, this wasn’t it.

So a state with about as aggressive a set of restrictions as any in the country carved out religious services from enforcement from the outset, and the sky did not fall, and the litigation went elsewhere.

That suggests the confrontation wasn’t necessary. Several states chose to have it and at least one chose not to, and I haven’t seen anyone argue that Michigan’s outcomes were worse for the choice.

Orange County, California Correspondent — I’d approach this as a compliance question, which is how a regulator ought to approach it and mostly didn’t.

Here’s the analytical point. A rule that a substantial population regards as unjustified doesn’t get complied with, and non-compliance is invisible. Congregations that concluded the rules were arbitrary didn’t file suit. Most of them met anyway, in a house or a hall, in conditions considerably worse than the sanctuary would have been.

So a strict rule that fails the legitimacy test may produce more transmission than a moderate rule that passes it. That’s not a legal argument and it’s the one that should have governed the drafting.

California drew a rule that was defensible on the numbers and indefensible on the comparison — retail open, worship closed — and got the worst of both. The state’s own compliance data would have shown it if anyone had looked.

Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent — I’d talk about funerals, because that’s the version of this that people around here actually experienced.

A Navy town has a lot of them and they matter enormously. In the spring you had families burying somebody with ten people present, on a video link, while other things were permitted.

I understand the reasoning and I’d have made the same call in March. What I’d say is that the cost of it was enormous and was never entered anywhere. A funeral is not a service that can be rescheduled. It happens once and the version you get is the version you live with.

That isn’t a constitutional argument. It’s an argument about what got counted. We counted cases carefully and counted this at zero.

Myrtle Beach Correspondent — Two things from where I sit, both practical.

The congregations that adapted well were the ones that already had someone under forty running a Facebook page, and that’s mostly a matter of luck. The ones that couldn’t were older and smaller and lost contact with their own members for months. That’s a technological divide inside religion that nobody had mapped before this year.

The other thing is that this became an identity fight online faster than almost any other pandemic issue. By May, whether your church was open was a statement about who you were, and I watched that happen in real time in local groups.

Once it’s that, no court decision settles anything. The Court can rule in November and the fight continues, because the fight stopped being about the rule some time in the spring.

Gastonia, NC Correspondent — The coverage of this was poor and I’d take some responsibility for the trade.

The word “church” carried a megachurch with a ten-thousand-seat auditorium and professional air handling and a rural congregation of thirty in a hall built in 1890. Those are entirely different epidemiological objects and they were reported as one thing, on both sides.

The result was that a story about a large congregation defying an order became the image of the whole category, and a story about a court protecting religious exercise became a story about that same congregation.

The small church that closed voluntarily, lost its income, and reopened outdoors in a parking lot in August was most of what actually happened, and it was covered almost nowhere, because there was no conflict in it.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent — Ours closed under the same rules as everything else and there was very little argument, and I want to say why rather than claim it as a virtue.

We have no federal bill of rights. Religious exercise here is protected by a narrow constitutional provision that has been read almost to nothing, so the claim your churches made isn’t available. The argument was conducted as politics and the churches lost it, quietly.

I’d be careful about drawing the flattering conclusion. Our restrictions weren’t scrutinised because they couldn’t be, and a government that never has to justify a distinction doesn’t develop the habit of drawing defensible ones.

Watching your litigation from here, my view changed over the year. In May I thought the American argument was an indulgence during an emergency. By November I thought the requirement to state a reason had produced better rules in your country than the absence of that requirement produced in mine.