In Guinn v Church of Christ the Oklahoma Supreme Court used Paul v Watchtower to show the difference between active punishment of a former member and passive punishment of a former member. In Guinn the parishioner had removed herself from the association of the church and then sued the church and the elders for the invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress. In Guinn the court said:
In Paul a former member deliberately rejected the faith and beliefs of the Jehovah's Witness Church and was thus shunned. The Elders admonished the members of the church not to speak to Ms. Paul, and they obeyed. While Ms. Paul had withdrawn her membership and thus her consent to submit to the authority of the Jehovah's Witness Church, the act of discipline which it carried out against her was-unlike that in the instant case-a form of rejection and exclusion which did not call for her consent:
“The members of the Church Paul decided to abandon have concluded that they no longer want to associate with her. We hold that they are free to make that choice.”57
The Elders' postresignation conduct in Paul was passive. Their disassociation from Ms. Paul through shunning was merely a reiteration of her prior rejection, not an active attempt to involve her in the religious practices of a church whose precepts she no longer followed. The church's *781 decision to turn away from her was protected under the First Amendment as a passive exercise of religious freedom, the legitimacy of which was not grounded in her prior acquiescence.
For purposes of First Amendment protection, religiously-motivated disciplinary measures that merely exclude a person from communion are vastly different from those which are designed to control and involve. A church clearly is constitutionally free to exclude people without first obtaining their consent. But the First Amendment will not shield a church from civil liability for imposing its will, as manifested through a disciplinary scheme, upon an individual who has not consented to undergo ecclesiastical discipline. The court in Paul stated that “[c]ourts generally do not scrutinize closely the relationship among members (or former members ) ...,” and that “[c]hurches are afforded great latitude when they impose discipline on members or former members,”58[emphasis added] but it provided no support for this view. Regardless of our disagreement with the court's refusal in Paul to distinguish between “former” and “present” church members when assessing a church's freedom to visit religious discipline, it is apparent that the stated rationale did not form the basis of the court's holding. We believe that the conclusion reached in Paul and our holding today are entirely consistent and easily reconcilable.