Part One: What Supreme Court Case involving religious freedom have you AGREED with the ruling?
1. What is one Supreme Court case (involving religion and the first amendment) that you agreed with the ruling? Why did you agree with the ruling? What is an Establishment case or a Free Exercise case? Has the ruling ever been overturned or does it still stand?
Part Two: What Supreme Court Case involving religious freedom have you DISAGREED with the ruling?
1. What is one Supreme Court case (involving religion and the first amendment) that you disagreed with the ruling? Why did you disagree with the ruling? What is an Establishment case or a Free Exercise case? Has the ruling ever been overturned or does it still stand?
Your initial discussion board response must be at least 500 words long and contain one direct quote from the readings
so for this week we are moving on to talking about the Supreme Court and Religion. So we’re going to talk about some of the, like just really what are called landmark cases, which are cases that set precedent, precedent or change pre -existing laws in relation to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause. All right, we’ll talk about what all that means. But for your reading this week, the first, the very first thing that you’re going to do is read articles five through seven of the Constitution. We’ve divided up the U.S. Constitution over three different weeks. And you guys have now read. You’ve read the vast majority of it. The very last thing is just to read articles five, six and seven, which are very short. They’re much, much shorter than articles one through four. So just to make sure that we have the entire U.S. Constitution read, then you’re going to read, you’re going to read three summaries and excerpts from the decisions for three very important cases that deal with the separation of church and state and the proper relationship between, you know, between the U.S. government, U.S. law and the free exercise of religion. The first one is Reynolds V. The United States. This was, it’s the first one we’ll talk about in the video lectures this week. It’s from 1879 and it’s a case where a Mormon man was arrested for practicing polygamy for marrying more than one woman. And the case is decided against him. So it’s decided that no, he’s not, you know, not legally allowed to practice polygamy. And that will probably, you know, not be surprising to anyone because we know that in the U.S. polygamy is still against the law. You’re not allowed to marry more than one person. But this case is really important because it’s the first time that the Supreme Court says flat out, right, that basically even though the Constitution says that the U.S. government, U.S. Congress cannot make, cannot prohibit the free exercise of religion. The U.S. Supreme Court says basically, yes, we can. We can actually prohibit the free exercise of religion if there is, right, a sort of a strong national interest in doing so. So they sort of say, you know, no, we can in no way regulate belief, right? We can’t tell you what to believe or not to believe. But as a society, as a government, we can in some instances say, even what your religion says you’re allowed to do, you’re not allowed to do this in this country, if there is sort of pressing interest in not being able to do that, right? So this is how they sort of defend that even though at that time, polygamy was legal or was, was part of the Mormon religion. It was a practice that was encouraged in the Mormon community that the United States could say, right, even though your religion says it’s okay to do that, we have a right to say that you are not allowed to do that. So Reynolds versus the United States is really important in sort of distinguishing belief versus action in terms of religion, what can and cannot be regulated. The second one is Angle versus Vitale. This is another really important case that comes in 1962 and it’s the law that renders unconstitutional daily Bible readings and prayers in public school. It was common in some parts of the United States before 1962 for public school students to be read a Bible passage or to be encouraged to take part in prayer, but Angle versus Vitale renders that unconstitutional. The third one is Sherbert versus Verner. This is one that has to do with sort of when your work, what the legal standard is, when your work asks you to do something that goes against the practice of your religion or goes against your religious beliefs. It has to do with a woman who was seventh day Adventist and her job asked her to work on Saturdays, which for her was the Sabbath, and she refused to do so. So she was fired for doing that. She was unable to collect unemployment benefits on the state said, no, you’re not entitled to these benefits because you could actually get a job. It’s just that you won’t take a job where you have to work on Saturdays. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor and said that no Americans should have to choose between having a job and following their religious beliefs. They should be able to do both. The next one is called the lemon test. It’s not a full excerpt from a decision, but you’ll read about the three-pronged approach to the lemon test, which is something that’s very important in constitutional law. The last one is another decision. I’m having you read excerpts from the majority decision, the sort of the way the court ruled of deployment division versus Smith. This was from 1990, so it’s a much more recent decision, but it had to do with the very famous case, had to do with the termination, so the firing of two Native American men in Oregon. They worked at a drug rehabilitation center, and part of their employment was that they would receive drug tests to make sure that they were not themselves doing drugs since they worked at a drug rehab center. They tested positive in one of their tests, but they said it was because they had participated in a peyote ceremony as part of their Native American religious beliefs and practices. The drug rehab center still fired them and said, nope, that doesn’t, we don’t accept that as an excuse. You are still fired, you’re still lost your job. The two men sued the state, sued the rehab center, sued the state for, I think it was a public, it was like a public facility. sued them for saying that that was a denial of their religious freedom, that they were engaging in a peyote ceremony, that was legal. It was something that had been rendered legal in the 1970s, to four Native Americans to practice their traditional ceremonies, even if it involved a classified substance. They were not breaking the law by participating in the peyote ceremony. So they were basically suing for wrongful termination. They had been wrongfully terminated because doing so violated their religious freedom. And ultimately, actually the court decided with the drug rehab center, with the state of Oregon and said that the two men had, it was okay that they were that they were fired. This is a case that is still very controversial. People were so upset about this, about the fact that this peyote ceremony was not protected, that these Native American men were not protected as part of their religious freedom, that the U.S. Congress and several states subsequently, in the next year or two, they passed a congressional legislation about religious freedom that we’ll read about next week in order to protect, to make sure that what happened to those men didn’t happen to anyone else. So it was a very controversial decision and one that even more conservative justices have since said that this was not decided correctly. So it still remains a very controversial decision. And then the last reading that I have there, just because so many of you have mentioned, have mentioned to me that the issue around abortion is something that you want to learn more about and you want to learn sort of more about the you could say the intersection of religion and politics in terms of this issue, which we’ll talk about this weekend next week. But I have his optional reading that you can read part of the decisions for Roe v Wade. I don’t have the decision for Casey in there. This is Casey versus Planned Parenthood, which was 1992, which was basically a Supreme Court decision that upheld the Roe v Wade decision, but also an excerpt from the decision for the Dobs, the Dobs decision, which was the ruling that came out in 2022 that overturned Roe versus Wade. So that is not required. I won’t ask you quiz questions on those readings. But if you’re interested in looking more at this issue and seeing the wording for each of these decisions and how it was justified, one of the important things that I want you to see in that reading is that of course this is an issue where religion gets brought up a lot, but it is not actually religious justification is not part of either of these decisions, right? So it is not the constitutional law upon which any of these Supreme Court decisions were made, okay? But it is something that is important if it’s an issue that you’re interested in, that you’re passionate about. Definitely you should read the actual language of the decisions in both of these cases.
Article. V.
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
Article. VI.
All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
Article. VII.
The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.
The Word, “the,” being interlined between the seventh and eighth Lines of the first Page, The Word “Thirty” being partly written on an Erazure in the fifteenth Line of the first Page, The Words “is tried” being interlined between the thirty second and thirty third Lines of the first Page and the Word “the” being interlined between the forty third and forty fourth Lines of the second Page.
Attest William Jackson Secretary
done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independance of the United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names,
G°. WashingtonLinks to an external site.
Presidt and deputy from Virginia
Source:
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#5Links to an external site.
Reynolds was decided in a time of westward expansion and the growth of the Mormon Church, particularly in Utah. The question raised was whether sincere religious beliefs exempted a practicing member of the Mormon Church from the laws against polygamy. The case was the first time the Supreme Court addressed the meaning of free exercise of religion. The Court also expressed its view that civil society may legitimately regulate marriage, which it argued was the foundation of social relations.
Excerpt: Majority Opinion, Chief Justice Morrison Waite. . . . [T]he question is raised, whether religious belief can be accepted as a justification of an overt act made criminal by the law of the land. The inquiry is not as to the power of Congress to prescribe criminal laws for the Territories, but as to the guilt of one who knowingly violates a law which has been properly enacted, if he entertains a religious belief that the law is wrong.
Congress cannot pass a law for the government of the Territories which shall prohibit the free exercise of religion. The first amendment to the Constitution expressly forbids such legislation. Religious freedom is guaranteed everywhere throughout the United States, so far as congressional interference is concerned. The question to be determined is, whether the law now under consideration comes within this prohibition.
The word ‘religion’ is not defined in the Constitution. We must go elsewhere, therefore, to ascertain its meaning, and nowhere more appropriately, we think, than to the history of the times in the midst of which the provision was adopted. The precise point of the inquiry is, what is the religious freedom which has been guaranteed. . . .
In the preamble of [the Virginia act for establishing religious freedom,] religious freedom is defined; and after a recital ‘that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty,’ it is declared ‘that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.’ In these two sentences is found the true distinction between what properly belongs to the church and what to the State. . . .
Mr. Jefferson afterwards, in reply to an address to him by a committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, took occasion to say: ‘Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions, . . . thus building a wall of separation between church and State. . . .’
Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe . . . . At common law, the second marriage was always void, and from the earliest history of England polygamy has been treated as an offence against society. . . .
Marriage, while from its very nature a sacred obligation, is nevertheless, in most civilized nations, a civil contract, and usually regulated by law. Upon it society may be said to be built, and out of its fruits spring social relations and social obligations and duties, with which government is necessarily required to deal. In fact, according as monogamous or polygamous marriages are allowed, do we find the principles on which the government of the people, to a greater or less extent, rests. . . .
[T]he only question which remains is, whether those who make polygamy a part of their religion are excepted from the operation of the statute. If they are, then those who do not make polygamy a part of their religious belief may be found guilty and punished, while those who do, must be acquitted and go free. This would be introducing a new element into criminal law. Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pile of her dead husband, would it be beyond the power of the civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice?
So here, as a law of the organization of society under the exclusive dominion of the United States, it is provided that plural marriages shall not be allowed. Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances. . . .
Source:
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/su…
Engel v. Vitale was an important Supreme Court decision policing the boundaries of church and state. There, the New York State Board of Regents authorized public schools to recite a short, voluntary prayer at the beginning of each school day. The prayer read, “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.” A group of parents challenged this government-sponsored prayer, arguing that it violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The Supreme Court—in a six-to-one decision—agreed with these parents and struck down the New York prayer. In his majority opinion for the Court, Justice Hugo Black concluded that state officials may not compose official state prayers and require that they be recited in public schools, even if the prayer was “denominationally neutral” and students could opt out of reciting it. The Engel decision resulted in a massive public backlash against the Supreme Court, but the Court held its ground and further expanded the reasoning of the school prayer decision in later cases. However, the Court has also upheld public prayers in contexts involving adults, such as legislative sessions and at town council meetings.
Excerpt: Majority Opinion, Justice Hugo BlackThe respondent Board of Education of Union Free School District No. 9, New Hyde Park, New York, acting in its official capacity under state law, directed the School District’s principal to cause the following prayer to be said aloud by each class in the presence of a teacher at the beginning of each school day:
“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”
This daily procedure was adopted on the recommendation of the State Board of Regents, a governmental agency created by the State Constitution to which the New York Legislature has granted broad supervisory, executive, and legislative powers over the State’s public school system. These state officials composed the prayer which they recommended and published as a part of their “Statement on Moral and Spiritual Training in the Schools,” saying: “We believe that this Statement will be subscribed to by all men and women of good will, and we call upon all of them to aid in giving life to our program.”
Shortly after the practice of reciting the Regents’ prayer was adopted by the School District, the parents of ten pupils brought this action in a New York State Court insisting that use of this official prayer in the public schools was contrary to the beliefs, religions, or religious practices of both themselves and their children. Among other things, these parents challenged the constitutionality of both the state law authorizing the School District to direct the use of prayer in public schools and the School District’s regulation ordering the recitation of this particular prayer on the ground that these actions of official governmental agencies violate that part of the First Amendment of the Federal Constitution which commands that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” – a command which was “made applicable to the State of New York by the Fourteenth Amendment of the said Constitution.” . . .
We think that, by using its public school system to encourage recitation of the Regents’ prayer, the State of New York has adopted a practice wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause. There can, of course, be no doubt that New York’s program of daily classroom invocation of God’s blessings as prescribed in the Regents’ prayer is a religious activity. It is a solemn avowal of divine faith and supplication for the blessings of the Almighty. . . .
The petitioners contend, among other things, that the state laws requiring or permitting use of the Regents’ prayer must be struck down as a violation of the Establishment Clause because that prayer was composed by governmental officials as a part of a governmental program to further religious beliefs. For this reason, petitioners argue, the State’s use of the Regents’ prayer in its public school system breaches the constitutional wall of separation between Church and State. We agree with that contention, since we think that the constitutional prohibition against laws respecting an establishment of religion must at least mean that, in this country, it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government.
It is a matter of history that this very practice of establishing governmentally composed prayers for religious services was one of the reasons which caused many of our early colonists to leave England and seek religious freedom in America. . . .
It is an unfortunate fact of history that, when some of the very groups which had most strenuously opposed the established Church of England found themselves sufficiently in control of colonial governments in this country to write their own prayers into law, they passed laws making their own religion the official religion of their respective colonies. Indeed, as late as the time of the Revolutionary War, there were established churches in at least eight of the thirteen former colonies and established religions in at least four of the other five. But the successful Revolution against English political domination was shortly followed by intense opposition to the practice of establishing religion by law. This opposition crystallized rapidly into an effective political force in Virginia, where the minority religious groups such as Presbyterians, Lutherans, Quakers and Baptists had gained such strength that the adherents to the established Episcopal Church were actually a minority themselves. In 1785-1786, those opposed to the established Church, led by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who, though themselves not members of any of these dissenting religious groups, opposed all religious establishments by law on grounds of principle, obtained the enactment of the famous “Virginia Bill for Religious Liberty” by which all religious groups were placed on an equal footing so far as the State was concerned. Similar though less far-reaching legislation was being considered and passed in other states.
By the time of the adoption of the Constitution, our history shows that there was a widespread awareness among many Americans of the dangers of a union of Church and State. These people knew, some of them from bitter personal experience, that one of the greatest dangers to the freedom of the individual to worship in his own way lay in the Government’s placing its official stamp of approval upon one particular kind of prayer or one particular form of religious services. They knew the anguish, hardship and bitter strife that could come when zealous religious groups struggled with one another to obtain the Government’s stamp of approval from each King, Queen, or Protector that came to temporary power. The Constitution was intended to avert a part of this danger by leaving the government of this country in the hands of the people, rather than in the hands of any monarch. But this safeguard was not enough. Our Founders were no more willing to let the content of their prayers and their privilege of praying whenever they pleased be influenced by the ballot box than they were to let these vital matters of personal conscience depend upon the succession of monarchs. The First Amendment was added to the Constitution to stand as a guarantee that neither the power nor the prestige of the Federal Government would be used to control, support or influence the kinds of prayer the American people can say – that the people’s religions must not be subjected to the pressures of government for change each time a new political administration is elected to office. Under that Amendment’s prohibition against governmental establishment of religion, as reinforced by the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, government in this country, be it state or federal, is without power to prescribe by law any particular form of prayer which is to be used as an official prayer in carrying on any program of governmentally sponsored religious activity.
There can be no doubt that New York’s state prayer program officially establishes the religious beliefs embodied in the Regents’ prayer. The respondents’ argument to the contrary, which is largely based upon the contention that the Regents’ prayer is “nondenominational” and the fact that the program, as modified and approved by state courts, does not require all pupils to recite the prayer, but permits those who wish to do so to remain silent or be excused from the room, ignores the essential nature of the program’s constitutional defects. Neither the fact that the prayer may be denominationally neutral nor the fact that its observance on the part of the students is voluntary can serve to free it from the limitations of the Establishment Clause, as it might from the Free Exercise Clause, of the First Amendment, both of which are operative against the States by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although these two clauses may, in certain instances, overlap, they forbid two quite different kinds of governmental encroachment upon religious freedom. The Establishment Clause, unlike the Free Exercise Clause, does not depend upon any showing of direct governmental compulsion and is violated by the enactment of laws which establish an official religion whether those laws operate directly to coerce nonobserving individuals or not.
This is not to say, of course, that laws officially prescribing a particular form of religious worship do not involve coercion of such individuals. When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. But the purposes underlying the Establishment Clause go much further than that. Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion. The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs. That same history showed that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had relied upon the support of government to spread its faith. The Establishment Clause thus stands as an expression of principle on the part of the Founders of our Constitution that religion is too personal, too sacred, too holy, to permit its “unhallowed perversion” by a civil magistrate. Another purpose of the Establishment Clause rested upon an awareness of the historical fact that governmentally established religions and religious persecutions go hand in hand. The Founders knew that, only a few years after the Book of Common Prayer became the only accepted form of religious services in the established Church of England, an Act of Uniformity was passed to compel all Englishmen to attend those services and to make it a criminal offense to conduct or attend religious gatherings of any other kind – a law which was consistently flouted by dissenting religious groups in England and which contributed to widespread persecutions of people like John Bunyan who persisted in holding “unlawful [religious] meetings . . . to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom. . . .” And they knew that similar persecutions had received the sanction of law in several of the colonies in this country soon after the establishment of official religions in those colonies. It was in large part to get completely away from this sort of systematic religious persecution that the Founders brought into being our Nation, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights, with its prohibition against any governmental establishment of religion. The New York laws officially prescribing the Regents’ prayer are inconsistent both with the purposes of the Establishment Clause and with the Establishment Clause itself.
It has been argued that to apply the Constitution in such a way as to prohibit state laws respecting an establishment of religious services in public schools is to indicate a hostility toward religion or toward prayer. Nothing, of course, could be more wrong. The history of man is inseparable from the history of religion. And perhaps it is not too much to say that, since the beginning of that history, many people have devoutly believed that “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.” It was doubtless largely due to men who believed this that there grew up a sentiment that caused men to leave the cross-currents of officially established state religions and religious persecution in Europe and come to this country filled with the hope that they could find a place in which they could pray when they pleased to the God of their faith in the language they chose. And there were men of this same faith in the power of prayer who led the fight for adoption of our Constitution and also for our Bill of Rights with the very guarantees of religious freedom that forbid the sort of governmental activity which New York has attempted here. These men knew that the First Amendment, which tried to put an end to governmental control of religion and of prayer, was not written to destroy either. They knew, rather, that it was written to quiet well justified fears which nearly all of them felt arising out of an awareness that governments of the past had shackled men’s tongues to make them speak only the religious thoughts that government wanted them to speak and to pray only to the God that government wanted them to pray to. It is neither sacrilegious nor anti-religious to say that each separate government in this country should stay out of the business of writing or sanctioning official prayers and leave that purely religious function to the people themselves and to those the people choose to look to for religious guidance.
It is true that New York’s establishment of its Regents’ prayer as an officially approved religious doctrine of that State does not amount to a total establishment of one particular religious sect to the exclusion of all others – that, indeed, the governmental endorsement of that prayer seems relatively insignificant when compared to the governmental encroachments upon religion which were commonplace 200 years ago. To those who may subscribe to the view that, because the Regents’ official prayer is so brief and general there can be no danger to religious freedom in its governmental establishment, however, it may be appropriate to say in the words of James Madison, the author of the First Amendment: “[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. . . . Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment may force him to c