Source: https://texaslawreview.org/trinity-lutheran-church-columbia-inc-v-comer-play-joints-establishment-free-exercise-religion/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 14:08:09+00:00

Document:
Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? The philosopher will tell us that there is no answer, that it is a paradox. He has the luxury of throwing up his hands. But the irresistible force of Free Exercise has been meeting the immovable object of antiestablishment for 200 years in American courtrooms. And American jurists have had to rough fit an answer. It is no mean feat to weigh two such lofty ideals. We might be more than charitable in accepting and forgiving error made in good faith, were it not thought the importance of the ideals demanded a more rigorous standard.
This past June, the United States Supreme Court handed down its latest landmark decision operating in these interstices of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses. In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, the Court held that Free Exercise requires the state to provide financial benefits to religious entities on equal terms, notwithstanding the state’s interest in antiestablishment. More than being merely wrongly decided, Trinity Lutheran has the potential to work an unacknowledged revolution in the Court’s Religion Clauses jurisprudence. On the one hand, the holding takes the Free Exercise Clause into broad and uncharted new waters that are well beyond the facts and reasoning of seminal precedent. And on the other, the holding threatens long-standing Establishment Clause practice and precedent with a new legal standard under the Free Exercise Clause with which to challenge prevailing government antiestablishment conduct.
In reaching this destabilizing conclusion, the Court commits two primary errors. First, in arriving at its ultimate holding, the Court miscategorizes the case and misapplies Free Exercise precedent. And the judicial whole cloth it invents to distinguish the case is jurisprudentially wanting. Second, to get to the Free Exercise Clause issue in the first place, the Court entirely elides an important threshold Establishment Clause analysis. Thus Trinity Lutheran is wrongly decided and conceptually infirm, and should be limited and reversed in the future.
In an effort to reduce the number of used rubber tires that end up in landfills and dump sites, the State of Missouri, through the State’s Department of Natural Resources (Department), introduced the Scrap Tire Program. The Program offers reimbursement grants to nonprofit organizations that purchase playground surfaces made from recycled tires. The Department awards grants on a competitive basis to those applicants that score highest on a selection of criteria including population poverty level and the applicant’s plan to promote recycling. In 2012, the Trinity Lutheran Church Child Learning Center applied to participate in the Scrap Tire Program to attain funds to replace a large portion of the surface beneath a playground that is part of the Center’s facilities. Despite ranking fifth among forty-four applicants, the Department rejected the Learning Center’s application. Because the Learning Center was operated by the Trinity Lutheran Church, it was deemed categorically ineligible to receive such a grant pursuant to Article I, Section 7 of the Missouri Constitution, which purported to deny such financial assistance directly to a church.
In response to this categorical denial, Trinity Lutheran filed suit against the Department, alleging the failure to approve its application based on its religious affiliation violated the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. Trinity Lutheran asked for a declaratory judgment and injunctive relief that would prevent the Department from discriminating against the Church in future grant applications on the basis of its religious affiliation. Finding the present case “nearly indistinguishable” from Locke v. Davey, the District Court held that Free Exercise “does not prohibit withholding an affirmative benefit on account of religion[,]” and thus did not require the State to make funds like those provided by the Scrap Tire Program available to a religious institution like the Trinity Lutheran Church. Echoing Locke’s principle that there is “play in the joints” between the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses, the Eighth Circuit affirmed. It recognized that while Missouri could award a grant to Trinity Lutheran without infringing on the Establishment Clause, Free Exercise did not compel Missouri to ignore the antiestablishment principle reflected in its constitution.
In reaching his conclusion, Chief Justice Roberts had one further job in front of him: distinguishing the Locke decision that had formed the basis of the lower courts’ decisions and that the Department had argued controlled the outcome of the case. Locke had upheld, against a Free Exercise challenge, a provision of the Washington Constitution similar to the Missouri provision at issue in the instant case that had been applied to prohibit a state scholarship recipient from applying the scholarship funds to pursue a devotional theology degree. In so doing, Locke had established a “play in the joints” principle. There were some state actions that were not prohibited by the Establishment Clause, but neither were they required by the Free Exercise Clause. Applying Locke, the Department argued, and the District Court and Eighth Circuit held, that Missouri could allow churches to participate in the Scrap Tire Program, but was not required to. To distinguish Locke, Roberts derived a status–use distinction between Locke and the case before him. According to the Chief Justice, “[the respondent in Locke] was not denied a scholarship because of who he was; he was denied a scholarship because of what he proposed to do—use the funds to prepare for the ministry.” In contrast, “[h]ere there is no question that Trinity Lutheran was denied a grant simply because of what it is—a church.” But Locke is not so readily distinguishable as the Chief Justice asserts.
The fundamental problem with Chief Justice Roberts’s analysis is that in reaching his result, he conflates two fundamentally different types of Free Exercise challenges: those actively inhibiting self-determined religious devotion and those merely denying an affirmative benefit. Given the historical purposes of the Clause, it is no surprise that most Free Exercise cases arise in the context of the government imposing an active burden on the individual’s actual practice of his faith. Perhaps the most paradigmatic example of such a case is Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah. In a transparent attempt to discourage, if not outright prohibit, the practices of the Santeria Church, the city of Hialeah, Florida enacted certain laws, under the guise of public welfare ordinances, that severely restricted animal slaughter. But a component aspect of the practice of Santeria is the ritual sacrifice of animals as part of religious rights and observances. Importantly, and revelatory of the inherently discriminatory purpose of such laws, exemptions were given to the ritualistic slaughter of animals in other religious practices, such as the Kosher butchery of observant Jews. Although such laws were purported to be facially neutral, the Court saw through this pretext and struck down the laws as an attempt to disfavor one particular religious practice that was distasteful to the local residents. Such intentionally gerrymandered laws, designed to burden one discrete and disfavored minority religious practice, go precisely to the core of what the Free Exercise Clause is intended to prohibit.
Although lacking the clear animus present in Lukumi, in a similar case the Supreme Court applied the “ministerial exception” doctrine to employment decisions regarding teachers at parochial schools. Recognizing that teachers serve a similar function to ordained and denominated ministers in the course of parochial instruction, the court exempted such teachers from the requirements of equal opportunity in employment laws of general application. To impose such secular constraints on such decisions would be to deny religious practitioners the prerogative to decide for and amongst themselves who would serve as the spiritual leaders and educators in their faith, a core component of self-deterministic religious adherence. Cases like these represent the essential core of the principal of religious liberty; the freedom to direct the substantive practice of your faith as you see fit, without interference from the governing majority.
A second strand of subtly different but principally identical cases concerns the denial of what we might call universal societal benefits based on religious practices. Decided under the Establishment Clause, Everson v. Board of Education announced the principle that “cutting off” religious groups “from such general government services as ordinary police and fire protection, connections for sewage disposal, public highways and sidewalks” is antithetical to the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment. Nominally, such services could be deemed affirmative state benefits as opposed to active inhibitions on practice. But their universality and essentiality to functioning in civil society should more than suffice in demonstrating that their denial, based on an individual’s religious practice, speaks, once again, to the essential substance of Free Exercise protections. The individual in such cases is being asked to forsake the precepts of his faith to participate fully and equally in society in ways he is otherwise entitled. Thus, although nominally benefits, such denials are better conceived of legally and conceptually as burdens on religious practice.
More than a few cases have been decided under essentially this rubric. Most importantly, the case relied on primarily by the majority in Trinity Lutheran, McDaniel, is one such case. Recall that McDaniel “struck down under the Free Exercise Clause a Tennessee statute disqualifying ministers from serving as delegates to the State’s constitutional convention.” At first blush it might be possible to conceive, as with the provision of police and firefighters or the availability of unemployment benefits, that the ability to hold public office is an affirmative benefit provided by the state. But a moment’s reflection ought to make apparent that in a democratic republic, in which the people are sovereign, and governed of, by, and for themselves, such a proposition cannot withstand the most basic scrutiny. To hold that civic participation in the mechanisms of government should be considered under the law to be but a privilege accorded by the state and not the inalienable right of a free citizen in civil society turns the entire premise of the American Experiment on its head. It is too great a refutation of ordered liberty to be maintained. Therefore, Chief Justice Roberts is incorrect to conceive of McDaniel as a case dealing with the denial of an affirmative benefit from the government based on religious practice and observance. In truth, McDaniel is thus best conceived of as one imposing an active burden on the functional practice of one’s religious faith.
The second category of Free Exercise cases that Chief Justice Roberts fails to distinguish is, as previously identified, those that instead merely deny some form of benefit that the government has chosen of its own prerogative and on its own accord to selectively provide. The Scrap Tire Program grants at issue in Trinity Lutheran are beyond a doubt of this second variety of cases. Accepting the premise that denying civic participation to ministers is not merely withholding a benefit but burdening religious faith by imposing a penalty on its pursuit, McDaniel is easily distinguishable from Trinity Lutheran. In contrast, Locke v. Davey, the case that Chief Justice Roberts was forced to distinguish in reaching his holding, arises in the almost identical context of the denial of a monetary grant based on the State’s antiestablishment interest.
Similar to the facts in Trinity Lutheran, Locke involved the provision of a selective public benefit to a limited number of recipients. High-achieving students could be awarded funds to pursue post-secondary education as part of the Promise Scholarship Program. Among other eligibility requirements, however, a student could “not pursue a degree in theology . . . while receiving the scholarship,” though was free to study at accredited religiously affiliated universities. The statute did not expressly define what a degree in theology meant. But it was acknowledged by the parties and by the Court that the statute simply purported to codify the State’s constitutional prohibition on providing public money to support or further religious instruction.
Respondent Davey was initially awarded such a scholarship and was interested in pursuing a course of study that included a degree in “pastoral ministries,” a concededly theological degree. Upon learning that to receive the scholarship funds he had to certify that he was not pursuing any such degree, he refused, so forfeited any scholarship funds, and filed suit alleging several constitutional violations, including of his right to free exercise of religion. The District Court initially rejected Davey’s claims and granted the State’s motion for summary judgment. But the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed, concluding that “the State had singled out religion for unfavorable treatment,” relying heavily on the approach taken by the Court in Lukumi. In this way, the Ninth Circuit in Locke reached much the same conclusion as the Supreme Court did in Trinity Lutheran. Yet, in Locke, seven members of the Supreme Court found this reasoning unpersuasive.
Moreover, Davey had asked the Court to conclude much as the Court in Trinity Lutheran ultimately did, that a law “is presumptively unconstitutional because it is not facially neutral with respect to religion.” Yet as goes entirely unmentioned by the Trinity Lutheran majority, the Locke majority expressly refused to do so. Instead, the Court in Locke “reject[ed] [t]his claim of presumptive unconstitutionality, . . . to do otherwise would extend the Lukumi line of cases well beyond not only their facts but their reasoning.” The laws at issue in Lukumi sought to suppress the Santeria faith itself. Regarding the law at issue in Locke, which merely denied monetary funds just as were denied in Trinity Lutheran, “the State’s disfavor of religion (if it can be called that) [was] of a far milder kind.” It imposed “neither criminal nor civil sanctions on any type of religious service or rite.” And in its very next breath the Court drew a clear distinction between the denial of financial benefits nearly identical to those in Trinity Lutheran and “deny[ing] to ministers the right to participate in the political affairs of the community,” precisely the case relied on so heavily by the majority for its outcome, McDaniel. As went entirely unrecognized or unremarked upon by the Trinity Lutheran Court, the holding in Locke is as much of an express disavowal of precisely the argument put forward by Chief Justice Roberts in Trinity Lutheran as could be imagined.
Worse yet for the Trinity Lutheran majority, it makes extreme light of a state’s compelling antiestablishment interest that is treated as next to sacred in a very similar context in Locke. Discussing the “procuring [of] taxpayer funds to support church leaders” the Locke majority could “think of few areas in which a State’s antiestablishment interests come more into play.” The funds in Trinity Lutheran were not merely to go to “support church leaders,” they were to go to support the very church itself, in the form of improved church facilities. In light of “the historic and substantial state interest at issue” concerning antiestablishment in the American system of government, the Court found nothing “that suggests animus toward religion” and refused to “conclude that the denial of funding . . . alone is inherently constitutionally suspect.” Because the State’s antiestablishment interest was “substantial” and the burden imposed by the denial of the scholarship funds was “relatively minor,” the respondent’s claim “must fail.” Tellingly, the majority in Trinity Lutheran, by contrast, declined to engage in any such analysis. Because if the majority did, it would have been forced to conclude that Missouri’s antiestablishment interest was similarly substantial, the church’s burden in having to pay for its own playground surface was similarly minimal, and thus the church’s claim must similarly fail.
And as noted earlier, Chief Justice Roberts was only able to distinguish Locke by deriving a status–use distinction. The respondent in Locke was denied the benefit of the State of Washington’s scholarship funds because he proposed to use the money to fund a devotional degree. Here in contrast, according to the Chief Justice, the Trinity Lutheran Church was denied the State of Missouri’s money because of what it is, namely a church. But not only is this status–use distinction invented out of whole cloth, it is conceptually wanting. As reasonable as this distinction appears superficially, a deeper analysis reveals the distinction to be more than somewhat facile. To begin with, the respondent in Locke was not truly denied the scholarship because he was certain to use the funds to pursue a ministerial degree, but instead because he refused to certify to the State that he would not. In essence, he was denied the scholarship because he was unwilling to foreclose the possibility that he would use the funds in such a way. The distinction may seem minor, but it begins to chip away at the logic of Locke’s being decided based purely on conduct, as opposed to status. The respondent in Locke was a religious student with an interest in pursuing a devotional degree in accordance with his faith. Described in this way, the denial of the scholarship can begin to look more like one based on status than use.
Even in concurring with the Chief Justice’s opinion and ultimate holding, Justice Gorsuch was able to recognize this conceptual infirmity. Justice Gorsuch admitted that he “harbor[ed] doubts about the stability of such a line.” He rhetorically wondered whether it was “a religious group that built the playground[, o]r did a group build the playground so it might be used to advance a religious mission?” The newest member of the Court considered “reliance on the status-use distinction [insufficient] to distinguish Locke v. Davey” because “[o]ften enough the same facts can be described both ways” depending on perspective and “[t]he distinction blurs . . . when stared at too long.” As just described, the situations in both Locke and Trinity Lutheran can be described in both use and status terms, depending on the perspective one chooses to take in approaching and defining the issue. As hit on by Justice Gorsuch, the fundamental problem with the Chief Justice’s logic is that these fine distinctions begin to blur at the margins. And in which category an issue is placed becomes greatly a matter of interpretation and idiosyncratic application. Such shifting tides are hardly the judicial bedrock upon which successful jurisprudence is based.
In Agostini v. Felton, the Court announced that government aid that has the “‘effect’ of advancing . . . religion” violates the Establishment Clause. For instance, the federal program at issue in Tilton v. Richardson provided grants to colleges and universities for facilities construction. But it contained a prohibition on using those grants to construct facilities “used for sectarian instruction or as a place for religious worship. . . .” To enforce this provision, the government was permitted to recover the value of the grant if within twenty years the grantee reneged and used a building so constructed for such impermissible purposes. This time limitation was held unconstitutional because “the original federal grant w[ould] in part have the effect of advancing religion” as it permitted the grantee to “convert [the facility] into a chapel or otherwise use [it] to promote religious interests” after the twenty years had elapsed. Instead, in Trinity Lutheran, the Court expressly condones using public money to promote and improve the facilities of a church as such.
It is true that a separate line of cases permits government funding to sectarian institutions where that funding is to be used for purely secular purposes. Presumably to this end, the Scrap Tire Program at issue in Trinity Lutheran required an applicant to certify that it would put the program’s funds only to a secular use. But Trinity Lutheran had “not offered any such assurances to this Court.” Instead, Trinity Lutheran states proudly that its Learning Center functions as “a ministry of the church and incorporates daily religion and developmentally appropriate activities into . . . [its] program” and that “[t]hrough the Learning Center, the Church teaches a Christian world view to children of members of the Church, as well as children of non-member residents.” And in fact as part of its very application to the Department to participate in the Scrap Tire Program, Trinity Lutheran specified that the Learning Center’s mission was “to provide a safe, clean, and attractive school facility in conjunction with an educational program structured to allow a child to grow spiritually, physically, socially, and cognitively.” It is by no means beyond reason that “developmentally appropriate” religious education encouraging the “spiritual” growth of elementary school students could very well take place on a playground. Nor is it unreasonable to think that the religiously oriented community the Church seeks to manifest finds expression and reinforcement between and amongst children, their teachers, and their parents, on the playground. Given the pervasive religious mission of the Learning Center, there is no certainty that the use of the new playground could be limited to secular purposes any more than the use of any of its other facilities. The invasive nature of ensuring religiously oriented institutions like the Learning Center do not put public funds to parochial uses evokes exactly the sort of excessive entanglements disavowed by the Court in announcing its famous “Lemon Test” in Lemon v. Kurtzman. The majority should have acknowledged this danger and at the very least engaged in an Establishment Clause analysis before simply proceeding to the Free Exercise issue simply on the say-so of the parties.
The Court’s opinion in Trinity Lutheran is thus wrong on two fronts. First, it glosses over the significant Establishment Clause considerations lurking under the surface. The Founders of our country knew of the dangers of state-sanctioned and state-established churches. They wrote into the Bill of Rights a provision designed exactly to curtail such practices. The Founders were directly motivated by exactly what was at issue in Trinity Lutheran: the provision of public funds directly from public coffers to support churches as institutions. Two hundred years’ jurisprudence has drawn contours and distinctions around an otherwise absolute prohibition. But the Court neglected to do even its due diligence in addressing these concerns and explaining why in its view requiring the State of Missouri to provide funds to improve facilities on church grounds was not improper under the Establishment Clause. Even if the Court were ultimately to have concluded the requirement was not thereby improper, it owed the American people an explanation, if for no other reason than to settle further the doctrines to be applied in future cases.
Second, Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion misapprehends the nature of Locke v. Davey and its holding. Locke was not concerned with the kind of facile distinctions between status and use that the majority derived to argue its way out of binding, on-point precedent. Instead, Locke spoke to the far broader issue of balancing the inherent tension that exists between prohibiting the establishment of religion by the state on the one hand, and guaranteeing religion’s free exercise by the individual on the other. This balance does not resolve itself through such hairsplitting distinctions represented by Trinity Lutheran, as recognized by Justice Gorsuch. Instead, as Locke properly stands for, when the government denies direct financial backing to a religious institution out of its interest in antiestablishment, it does not thereby evince the kind of hostility towards religion that is the hallmark of free exercise ideals. To paraphrase Justice Scalia’s concurrence in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, the state ought not fear that escaping the establishment frying pan by upholding core antiestablishment principles through denying religion direct aid propels it into the free exercise fire. The conclusion of the Court in Trinity Lutheran was therefore incorrect and ought to be revised and reversed in the future.

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v.