A Supreme Court ruling handed down yesterday says the government cannot exclude churches and other faith-based organizations from a secular government program just because of their religious identity.
According to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the non-profit legal organization whose attorneys argued the case before the Supreme Court, the justices ruled 7-2 against the state of Missouri for denying a grant to a church-run preschool that wanted the money to improve children’s safety in the playground.
The church, Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, wanted a partial reimbursement grant to provide a rubberized playground surface made from recycled tires but was denied by the state because they were a religious organization. This was in spite of the fact that 90 percent of the children who attend the preschool do not attend the church, and the playground was also used after hours by children in the community.
The ruling in the case was closely awaited because, if allowed to stand, it would potentially give the government the power to deny churches access to nonreligious public benefits such as fire services or water treatment.
Chief Justice John Roberts along with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Samuel Alito ruled in favor of Trinity Lutheran.
The Chief Justice wrote the majority opinion and ruled that Missouri’s policy “expressly discriminates against otherwise eligible recipients by disqualifying them from a public benefit solely because of their religious character.” This, he said, forces the Church to either cease operating as a church or lose eligibility for a substantial state benefit. Roberts said this violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
As a result, “[T]he exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution…, and cannot stand.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, their dissent was twice as long as Roberts’ majority opinion and held that “the court today blinds itself” to the history of church-state separation, “and leads us instead to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.”
ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman, who argued the case on behalf of Trinity Lutheran, hailed the decision. “The Supreme Court’s decision today affirms the commonsense principle that government isn’t being neutral when it treats religious organizations worse than everyone else.”
He added: “Equal treatment of a religious organization in a program that provides only secular benefits, like a partial reimbursement grant for playground surfacing, isn’t a government endorsement of religion. As the Supreme Court rightly found, unequal treatment that singles out a preschool for exclusion from such a program simply because a church runs the school is clearly unconstitutional.”
In a statement, Missouri’s Republican Governor Eric Greitens, told the Post-Dispatch that “people of faith won an important victory today.
“Earlier this year, I reversed Missouri’s policies that discriminated against religious organizations,” he said, in reference to his April decision to allow religious organizations to receive state grants under the program. “The ACLU and others attacked our decision. We did not back down, and we will continue to fight for people of faith.”
Other advocates of religious liberty were equally pleased by the ruling.
FRC’s Director of the Center for Religious Liberty, Travis Weber, Esq., attended the oral arguments at the Court and said the Trinity Lutheran decision is a win for the freedoms that Americans have long exercised.
“At the heart of the First Amendment is the idea that Americans should be able to not just hold beliefs but follow those beliefs as they live their lives. The Free Exercise of religion, explicitly protected by the First Amendment, protects varied and robust religious expression in the public square. Certainly the Framers never meant to exclude churches from public life in the way the state of Missouri and lower courts have here,” Weber said.
This decision could not have come at a better time – in the middle of the Church’s Fortnight for Freedom – a program dedicated to raising public awareness of the necessity to preserve our religious liberty which saw unprecedented erosion during the last eight years.
As Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami says, “Religious freedom is one of the basic freedoms of the human person because without religious freedom, the freedom of conscience, all other freedoms are without foundation.”
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