It didn’t take long to realize that there would be church-state clashes between independent-minded religious groups — from fundamentalist Baptists to Hasidic Jews — and state officials during the coronavirus crisis.

So that was the big story, at first: Lots of crazy white MAGA evangelicals wanted to keep having face-to-face church, even if it was clear that this put lives at risk in the pews and in their surrounding communities. That was the subject of last week’s “On Religion” podcast.

The real story was more complex than that, of course. The vast majority of religious congregations and denominations (you can make a case for 99%) recognized the need for “shelter in place” orders and cooperated. The preachers who rebelled were almost all leading independent Pentecostal and evangelical churches and quite a few of them were African-Americans.

So that was a story with three camps: (1) The 99% of religious leaders who cooperated and took worship online (that wasn’t big news), (2) the small number of preachers who rebelled (big story in national media) and (3) government leaders who just wanted to do the right thing and keep people alive.

However, things got more complex during the Easter weekend (for Western churches) and that’s what “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I discussed during this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in).

As it turned out, there were FIVE CAMPS in this First Amendment drama and the two that made news seemed to be off the radar of most journalists.

But not all. As Julia Duin noted in a post early last week (“Enforcement overkill? Louisville newspaper tries to document the ‘war on Easter”), the Courier-Journal team managed, with a few small holes, to cover the mess created by different legal guidelines established by Kentucky’s governor and the mayor of Louisville.

That’s where drive-in worship stories emerged as the important legal wrinkle that made an already complex subject even harder to get straight.

Those five camps?