U.S. District Judge for the Middle District of North Carolina William Osteen Jr. has temporarily canceled a decision of the Chatham County Board of Commissioners to reject the request by former Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear’s The Summit Church to rezone nearly 100 acres of land to house its Chapel Hill campus.
Osteen’s ruling came Friday in a 50-page memorandum and opinion order in response to a religious discrimination lawsuit filed earlier this year by The Summit Church. The suit argues that Chatham County’s rejection of their application to rezone the land violates the church’s “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.”
Summit Church asked the court to “grant preliminary and permanent injunctive relief.” The church wants the court to require the county to approve the rezoning request and associated site plan and “enter a Declaratory Judgment that the County’s denial of Summit Church’s rezoning applications violates RLUIPA, and is therefore void.”
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.
The church also seeks costs and expenses, “including reasonable attorney’s fees; all the damages to which Summit Church is entitled; and any such further relief as it deems appropriate.”
Although Osteen found, based on the evidence and arguments presented by The Summit Church, that they are “entitled to a preliminary prohibitory injunction” he chose not to grant that form of relief because “the balance of equities/public interest factor favors” Chatham County “with respect to a preliminary mandatory injunction.”
“Plaintiff argues that ‘injunctions protecting First Amendment freedoms are always in the public interest,'” wrote Osteen.
“Defendant, in its brief, does not address the balance of equities/public interest factor, … but at oral argument urged this court to consider the potential detriment to Chatham County were the court to grant a mandatory injunction that forces the County to approve Plaintiff’s proposal. This court agrees that the public and Plaintiff have a strong interest in religious liberty, which RLUIPA protects,” Osteen explained.
The judge found that even though Chatham County did not show that it would be harmed by a preliminary prohibitory injunction, “the balance of equities and public interest tilts in Chatham County’s favor.”
“Mandatory injunctions are ‘highly disfavored,’… and this policy appears especially salient where the requested mandatory injunction would, as here, result in a federal court commanding a local government to affirmatively act in the confines of traditional local control,” Osteen wrote.
“Further, as Defendant expressed at oral argument, there is significant potential harm associated with issuing the mandatory preliminary injunction Plaintiff seeks, which would require Chatham County to approve Plaintiff’s proposal and permit Plaintiff to begin constructing its church campus. If, at a later date, either before this court or on appeal, Defendant ultimately prevails — the result would be an improperly built or half-built church campus in Chatham County,” he added. “Such a conundrum would not be in the interest of the County or its residents.”
While Osteen denied The Summit Church’s request for a mandatory injunction, he granted the church a prohibitory injunction.
“Defendant Chatham County, North Carolina Board of Commissioners is hereby ENJOINED from denying Plaintiff’s rezoning proposal, pending further order of this court,” Osteen wrote.
He further ordered that Chatham County’s December 16, 2024, denial of the church’s application to rezone nearly 100 acres of land “shall be of no force and effect pending further order of the court” as long as the church posted a bond of $2,000 and as soon as the order is filed with the clerk of the court.
In April, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in support of The Summit Church’s lawsuit two weeks after lawyers for the Chatham County Board of Commissioners asked the court to dismiss it.
The DOJ backed 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. “The Civil Rights Division is committed to defending religious liberties as our founders intended and as federal law requires.”
Since RLUIPA is a federal law, the DOJ says it “guards individuals and religious institutions from unduly burdensome, unequal, or discriminatory land use regulations.”
Osteen found that The Summit Church “has shown that it is likely to succeed in proving that the impediment imposed by Chatham County — the denial of its proposal — constituted a ‘substantial’ burden on its religious exercise.”
Contact: leonardo.blair@christianpost.com Follow Leonardo Blair on Twitter: @leoblair Follow Leonardo Blair on Facebook: LeoBlairChristianPost
