Ragamuffins is not your typical business. The little Laurel, Maryland, shop serves up a great cup of coffee with a side of spiritual comfort.
“Community is our first product. After that we bring [handcrafted] coffee,” Rev. Jeremy Tuinstra, whose Redemption Community Church owns Ragamuffins, told The Baltimore Sun.
But the city of Laurel has decided, it seems, that Ragamuffins was getting a bit too religious with its coffeehouse services.
The coffee shop was subject to a change in zoning code instituted three weeks after the church applied for a “parking waiver for a nonprofit coffee shop and house of worship,” according to the lawsuit brought on behalf of Ragamuffins by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The café also faces daily fines for hosting worship gatherings.
The ADF, headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, argues that the Laurel board is singling out Ragamuffins for bad-faith reasons.
“Three days after they first looked through the property and walked through it with a city official, the city started to change its laws,” ADF attorney Christian Holcomb said, according to a press release on the case. “First it banned nonprofit organizations, and then, secondly, it changed the law to make houses of worship restricted to … second class or second tier in their zoning.”
She added, “The law forces houses of worship to submit to an expensive, time-consuming, and uncertain special exception process that is not imposed on secular organizations.”
Rev. Tuinstra’s church is, in fact, a model group within the community. It serves the poor and needy and provides a welcoming place to people who need a break from life’s troubles, allowing them to engage in fellowship with others in a meaningful way.
The completed coffeehouse fit perfectly with the reverend’s initial vision for what it could offer the community. Julio Pereira, of Walden Studio Architects in Columbia, Maryland, was contracted to assume that no detail was too small in order to build a truly special café.
“[Pereira] understood our vision and helped us to grow it out physically,” Rev. Tuinstra told The Baltimore Sun. “[He] would get teary-eyed talking about it.”
The café’s website gives an excellent flavor of the reverend’s viewpoint, drawn from American priest and author Brennan Manning’s book, “The Ragamuffin Gospel,” which says that “people who receive God’s love and grace are spiritual ragamuffins.”
“To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark,” reads a passage from Manning’s work. “In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, ‘A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God’ … My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ, and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”
Still, the little gathering place isn’t being welcomed by Laurel officials. “The government can’t discriminate against churches simply because they are religious,” Holcomb said in the press release on the case.
“Despite making every effort to work with the city to comply with its burdensome zoning changes, Redemption Community Church is now being told to either stop holding worship services or pay severe fines,” she continued. “Federal law is clear: The city’s discriminatory practices violate the law.”
The ADF is arguing that the city’s anti-religious zoning restriction is a civil rights violation.
The Department of Justice announced the Places to Worship initiative last Wednesday, making it clear that the Trump administration is taking action to ensure spiritual businesses like Ragamuffins will have explicit legal protection from religious restrictions.
“The Constitution doesn’t just protect freedom to worship in private. It protects the public exercise of religious belief, including where people worship together,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. “Under the laws of this country, government cannot discriminate against people based on their religion — not in law enforcement, not in grant-making, not in hiring, and not in local zoning laws.”
“President Trump is an unwavering defender of the right of free exercise, and under his leadership, the Department of Justice is standing up for the rights of all Americans,” he continued. “By raising awareness about our legal rights, the Place to Worship Initiative will help us bring more civil rights cases, win more cases, and prevent discrimination from happening in the first place.”
The Religious Freedom Center in Washington, D.C., applauded the administration for its efforts on behalf of religious institutions.
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“I welcome the initiative, as it raises awareness of a right central to religious liberty: the right to build and expand houses of worship,” Asma Uddin, senior scholar at the Religious Freedom Center, told LifeZette. “Without this right, the ability of religious believers to engage in communal worship and activities is severely limited.”
Although the ruling in the Redemption Community Church’s civil rights case is yet to be made, this administration is making a good-faith effort to ensure the church’s rights — and others like it — are not taken lightly.
Kyle Becker is a content writer and producer with LifeZette. Follow him on Twitter.
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