Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-1/establishment-of-religion
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 12:29:22+00:00

Document:
Financial Assistance to Church-Related Institutions.
From these beginnings, the case law on the discretion of state and federal governmental assistance to sectarian elementary and secondary schools as well as other religious entities has multiplied. Through the 1970s, at least, the law became as restrictive in fact as the dicta in the early cases suggested, except for the provision of some assistance to children under the “child benefit” theory. Since that time, the Court has gradually adopted a more accommodating approach. It has upheld direct aid programs that have been of only marginal benefit to the religious mission of the recipient elementary and secondary schools, tax benefit and scholarship aid programs where the schools have received the assistance as the result of the independent decisions of the parents or students who initially receive the aid, and in its most recent decisions direct aid programs which substantially benefit the educational function of such schools. Indeed, in its most recent decisions the Court has overturned several of the most restrictive school aid precedents from its earlier jurisprudence. Throughout, the Court has allowed greater discretion with respect to aid programs benefiting religiously affiliated colleges and social services agencies.
The primary secular effect and no excessive entanglement aspects of the Lemon test, however, have proven much more divisive. As a consequence, the Court’s applications of these tests have not always been consistent, and the rules guiding their application have not always been easy to decipher. Moreover, in its most recent decisions the Court has substantially modified the strictures these tests have previously imposed on public aid to pervasively sectarian entities.
But the Court has not imposed a secular use limitation on aid programs that benefit sectarian entities only indirectly, i.e., as the result of decisions by someone other than the government itself. The initial beneficiaries of the public aid must be determined on the basis of religiously neutral criteria, and they must have a genuine choice about whether to use the aid at sectarian or nonsectarian entities. But, where those standards have been met, the Court has upheld indirect aid programs even though the sectarian institutions that ultimately benefit may use the aid for religious purposes. Moreover, the Court has gradually broadened its understanding of what constitutes a genuine choice so that now most voucher or tax benefit programs benefiting the parents of children attending sectarian schools seem able to pass constitutional muster.
Thus, the Court initially struck down tax benefit and educational voucher programs where the initial beneficiaries were limited to the universe of parents of children attending sectarian schools and where the aid, as a consequence, was virtually certain to go to sectarian schools.71 Subsequently, however, it upheld a state program that allowed taxpayers to take a deduction from their gross income for educational expenses, including tuition, incurred in sending their children to public or private schools, because the deduction was “available for educational expenses incurred by all parents” and the aid became available to sectarian schools “only as a result of numerous, private choices of individual parents of school-age children.”72 It upheld for the same reasons a vocational rehabilitation program that made a grant to a blind person for training at a Bible college for a religious vocation73 and another program that provided a sign-language interpreter for a deaf student attending a sectarian secondary school.74 Most recently, it upheld as constitutional a tuition voucher program made available to the parents of children attending failing public schools, notwithstanding that most of the private schools at which the vouchers could be used were sectarian in nature.75 Whether the parents had a genuine choice among religious and secular options in using the vouchers, the Court said, had to be evaluated on the basis not only of the private schools where the vouchers could be redeemed but also by examining the full range of educational options open to them, including various public school options.
Thus, the Court’s jurisprudence concerning public aid to sectarian organizations has evolved, particularly as it concerns public aid to sectarian elementary and secondary schools. That evolution has given some uncertainty to the rules that apply to any given form of aid; and in both Agostini v. Felton86 and Mitchell v. Helms87 the Court left open the possibility of a further evolution in its thinking. Nonetheless, the cases give substantial guidance.
Later, in Mitchell v. Helms118 the Court abandoned the presumptions that religious elementary and secondary schools are so pervasively sectarian that they are constitutionally ineligible to participate in public aid programs directly benefiting their educational functions and that direct aid to such institutions must be subject to an intrusive and constitutionally fatal monitoring. At issue in the case was a federal program that distributed funds to local educational agencies to provide instructional materials and equipment, such as computer hardware and software, library books, movie projectors, television sets, VCRs, laboratory equipment, maps, and cassette recordings, to public and private elementary and secondary schools. Virtually identical programs had previously been held unconstitutional by the Court in Meek v. Pittenger119 and Wolman v. Walter.120 But in this case the Court overturned those decisions and held the program to be constitutional.
Justice Souter, joined by Justices Stevens and Ginsburg, dissented on the grounds that the Establishment Clause bars “aid supporting a sectarian school’s religious exercise or the discharge of its religious mission.” Adhering to the “substantive principle of no aid” first articulated in Everson, he contended that direct aid to pervasively sectarian institutions inevitably results in the diversion of the aid for purposes of religious indoctrination. He further argued that the aid in this case had been so diverted.
As the opinion upholding the program’s constitutionality on the narrowest grounds, Justice O’Connor’s provides the most current guidance on the standards governing the constitutionality of aid programs directly benefiting sectarian elementary and secondary schools.
A second factor important in Mueller, which had been present but not controlling in Nyquist, was that the financial aid was provided to the parents of schoolchildren rather than to the school. In the Court’s view, therefore, the aid was “attenuated” rather than direct; because it was “available only as a result of decisions of individual parents,” there was no “imprimatur of state approval.” The Court noted that, with the exception of Nyquist, “all . . . of our recent cases invalidating state aid to parochial schools have involved the direct transmission of assistance from the State to the schools themselves.”132 Thus, Mueller apparently stands for the proposition that state subsidies of tuition expenses at sectarian schools are permissible if contained in a facially neutral scheme providing benefits, at least nominally, to parents of public and private schoolchildren alike.
In contrast to its rulings concerning direct aid to sectarian elementary and secondary schools, the Court, although closely divided at times, has from the start approved quite extensive public assistance to institutions of higher learning. On the same day that it first struck down an assistance program for elementary and secondary private schools, the Court sustained construction grants to church-related colleges and universities.142 The specific grants in question were for the construction of two library buildings, a science building, a music, drama, and arts building, and a language laboratory. The law prohibited the financing of any facility for, or the use of any federally financed building for, religious purposes, although the restriction on use ran for only twenty years.143 The Court found that the purpose and effect of the grants were secular and that, unlike elementary and secondary schools, religious colleges were not so devoted to inculcating religion.144 The supervision required to ensure conformance with the non-religious-use requirement was found not to constitute “excessive entanglement,” inasmuch as a building is nonideological in character, and the construction grants were one-time rather than continuing.
At the time it was rendered, Bowen differed from the Court’s decisions concerning direct aid to sectarian elementary and secondary schools primarily in that it refused to presume that religiously affiliated social welfare entities are pervasively sectarian. That difference had the effect of giving greater constitutional latitude to public aid to such entities than was afforded direct aid to religious elementary and secondary schools. As noted above, the Court in its recent decisions eliminated the presumption that such religious schools are pervasively sectarian and has extended the same constitutional latitude to aid programs benefiting such schools as it gives to aid programs benefiting religiously affiliated social welfare programs.
Governmental Encouragement of Religion in Public Schools: Released Time.
Access of Religious Groups to Public Property.
Finally, the Court has made clear that public colleges may not exclude student religious organizations from benefits otherwise provided to a full spectrum of student “news, information, opinion, entertainment, or academic communications media groups.” In Rosenberger v. Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia,188 the Court struck down a university policy that afforded a school subsidy to all student publications except religious ones. Once again, the Court held the denial of the subsidy to constitute viewpoint discrimination in violation of the free speech clause of the First Amendment. In response to the University’s argument that the Establishment Clause required it not to subsidize an enterprise that promotes religion, the Court emphasized that the forum created by the University’s subsidy policy had neither the purpose nor the effect of advancing religion and, because it was open to a variety of viewpoints, was neutral toward religion.
These cases make clear that the Establishment Clause does not necessarily trump the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech. In regulating private speech in a public forum, government may not justify discrimination against religious viewpoints as necessary to avoid creating an “establishment” of religion.

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