I remember when I was a kid, someone in my family had a farm near a small town with one tiny grocery store (at which you could get gas), one tiny liquor store (at which you could get gassed) and one tiny church (at which you could … well, whatever). One day I was at the grocery store with my brother in law, and as he was checking out he said to the guy at the cash register “I’d love to get a couple of bottles of scotch.” The store’s owner, who was also the head of the local John Birch Society (but that’s another story) said, “Sure, I’ll meet you up the street.”
So we walked out of the store with our groceries, got in the car and drove up to the liquor store which at this point I noticed was closed, and the grocery store owner who was just taking our money at the cash register followed us in his car. We all got out, went into the liquor store, and my b-i-l bought his scotch. Which as I recall was very important to him.
On the way back to the farm, confused, having just discovered yet another way in which life didn’t work exactly as I would have expected, I asked “Why did we just …”
“… buy our bread in one store and our booze in another, from the same guy?” my brother in law helpfully interrupter.
“Yeah, that. Why?”
Because of the stupid church.
You see, the church I mentioned above was almost right next to the grocery store, and the grocery store was located where it was for it’s own reasons, and when the owner of the grocery store decided to see if he could either sell liquor in his store or open up a liquor store nearby, he ran into a little problem: In that county and that state at that time, you could not open up a liquor store within a certain distance of a church. Something about one kind of spirit not getting along with another kind of spirit, I suppose.
And that is true in many places in the US, especially in older communities. If you want to sell spirits in a liquor store or a restaurant, you have to be a certain distance from a church. This is clearly a case of a lack of separation of church and state. A civil regulation includes a requirement dictated by physical aspects of a prestigious organization.
Shockingly, the progressive modern city of Minneapolis has rules like this, but one of our even more progressive and modern Councelmembers, Gary Schiff, wants to change it.
I lived in Gary’s district from the time he was first elected to only a short time later, when I moved to a different district in the same city, but I’ve followed his career and news about his district since then for various reasons. He’s a good council member and understands the needs of his constituents, and just as importantly (in my view) he takes on issues that a member of a city council could easily (though not legitimately) ignore or claim to be out of the purview of municipal government. (Political issues like same sex marriage and war and stuff.)
Gary is annoyed by the churchy rules and is proposing that they be changed. He…
…wants to nix a city rule that prevents most restaurants outside of downtown from opening near houses of worship. It’s one strand in a web of liquor regulations that govern businesses in Minneapolis, but Schiff says this one, in particular, explains “why there are so many vacant commercial storefronts.”
“Businesses shouldn’t have unfair rules placed upon them because a religious place of assembly is located nearby,” he said.
The proposal will be discussed today at the Council. Some people are complaining.
“We don’t want to walk out of church on a Sunday afternoon and look across the street and see people coming out of bars,” said Duane Gagnon, chairman of the parish council at Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church in northeast Minneapolis.
You know, there are those of us that are not church goers, but find churches and their privilege annoying, and guess what? Maybe we don’t want to walk out of our favorite restaurant after a nice meal and see all these churchy people wandering around doing their annoying churchy stuff!
Mr. Gagnon, I have no problem that you are annoyed at people who are not like you doing things you seemingly would not do yourself, but that is not a good justification for having what amounts to a legal restriction on other people’s legal and rather run of the mill behavior. The fact that you think that your belief system should be imposed on everyone else is, in fact, more than a little disturbing.
One of the complexities here is interesting and worth note: Increasingly, things that are technically “churches” are being opened in mixed-use business zones and strip malls. Once a church does that, the other store fronts are now restricted from a wide range of possible development.
(The article reporting this is here, in the Star Tribune. Here’s Gary Schiff’s web site.)
The outcome of the current re-examination of church-spirit separation will be also be important for the planned development of one or more microbreweries in Minneapolis. This is serious stuff.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Locally, a megachurch has just opened a “satellite” location in a former pool hall in a downtown area bustling after dark with numerous clubs.
They have announced they’ll be holding services there, which in effect means no new clubs can open (or apply for expanded licenses – say, for distilled drinks as well as beer/wine) in that neighborhood.
At first I suspected they intended to proselytize the partiers, but now I’m wondering whether the pastor has a “special understanding” with some grandfathered-in club owner(s) who now won’t have to worry about increased competition.
Either way, bless their little hearts!
Can they serve wine in church?
Actually what would be even better would be if that story of yours had one more element. That town was so small that the pastor’s stipend wasn’t enough to support a family, so he had a “day job” as well – grocercy store owner …
I once lived in Lewisville, Tx. There is a small town next to Lewisville named Flower Mound.
A highway marks the division between the two towns at one point. On one side, the Lewisville side, was a Presbyterian Church. Across the highway was a convenience store, in Flower Mound.
The owner of the store decided he wanted to sell booze, so he went to the FM city council and applied for a license. Well, Texas has local option, so FM could decide, as a local entity, to allow alcohol sales.
During the council meeting when this was discussed, the members of the church (from Lewisville, remember, a much larger city) packed the council chambers opposing the application based on its proximity to their church.
Given the the two cities had a long standing rivalry based on relative size, the city council of Flower Mound basically said to the Lewisville folks, “stick it where the sun don’t shine, we’re granting the license!”
So life went on, the store owner set up his expansion into the liquor business and everybody went back home.
A few months later, my wife and I were going to my mother’s for Sunday lunch and decided to bring a bottle of wine. Forgetting the State rules forbidding the sale of alcohol before noon on Sunday, we stopped by at about 11:30. Once the clerk told us he was sorry, but rules are rules, we just said, “Oh, that’s ok, we’ll just come by in a half hour.”
His reply: “Don’t bother, the church across the street gets out at 12 and we always get a run on beer about that time. Come back at 12:30!”
Just one of the many nails in the coffin of my religiosity!
You could always make the rule reciprocal, so that no new churches could be set up near established liquor stores. That wouldn’t violate the the first amendment, would it?
Why would any reputable business want to set up in an area polluted by a church?
It’s strange that the complainers are Nordeasters–you can’t drive three blocks in this area without seeing a bar or a church. It’s probably why the ordinance was put in place.
The ridiculous part is that the ordinance was implemented in the 60s, when lots if people walked to their neighborhood church (in this part of Minneapolis, anyway) and might not have wanted to walk past a bar. Now, church attendance is down, and many churches in the city are closing. People generally drive to church, and although I might have exaggerated a little in my first paragraph, you’d have to go out of your way to get to any of the churches in lower Nordeast without passing at least three bars.
I should also mention that every festival I’ve attended at a Catholic church in Nordeast has served beer. At least now I know to decline any invitations to St. Cyril’s.
We have a local coffee shop that I recently learned is legally considered a place of worship. In their case it was apparently more than anything else, about being able to discriminate when hiring. I don’t believe we have rules such as that around here, but of course we might as well – there is an approval process and while it is almost always a formality, you can bet there would be issues.
Makes me miss Portland where there was an adult bookstore directly across the street from a church and almost directly next to a high school. The school didn’t have a problem with it – there is nothing for kids to see and they card people with gray hair. But the church fought hard to prevent them from opening – on the grounds they didn’t want their kids to see “that.” The city counselwoman for that district pointedly asked them what, exactly they didn’t want their kids to see. The store didn’t even have a sign with a name on it – just the address was displayed.
They then played up the notion that they were being oppressed…