Opinion ID: 1793453
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Religion and/or Religious Practice

Text: The United States Constitution prohibits a state from directly promoting or endorsing religion or religious activity. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. U.S. Const. amend. I. This First Amendment provision on religion has been construed to have two guarantees, the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause. While the amendment has two guarantees, the word religion only appears once and the definition of this one word governs both guarantees. See Everson v. Board of Educ., 330 U.S. 1, 32, 67 S.Ct. 504, 91 L.Ed. 711 (1947) (Rutledge, J., dissenting). As Justice Rutledge said in his dissent: It [religion] does not have two meanings, one narrow to forbid an establishment and another, much broader, for securing the free exercise thereof. Thereof brings down religion with its entire and exact content, no more and no less, from the first into the second guaranty, so that Congress and now the states are as broadly restricted concerning the one as they are regarding the other. Id. Accordingly, what is religion or a religious practice is relevant regardless of which of the two guarantees, Free Exercise or Establishment, is being construed. What is and what is not a religious practice is a difficult question to answer and the search for an answer has in many cases led to contradictory and arbitrary results when court-prescribed tests for religious practices have been applied. Such tests are indeterminate in nature and subject to variations in the general level of scrutiny employed. For example, when the three-pronged Lemon test, developed for interpreting the Establishment Clause, is applied with particular rigor, the test yields one result, yet when applied in a less-exacting way to the same set of facts, the test can be made to yield an equally plausible, but contradictory result. The Oxford Companion to The Supreme Court of the United States 719 (Kermit L. Hall, et al., eds., 1992) (referencing Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 91 S.Ct. 2105, 29 L.Ed.2d 745 (1971)). Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has articulated certain principles to be followed by courts when determining whether an activity is a religious practice. In United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78, 64 S.Ct. 882, 88 L.Ed. 1148 (1944), Justice Douglas stated that: Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrine or beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others. Id. at 86, 64 S.Ct. 882. In United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163, 85 S.Ct. 850, 13 L.Ed.2d 733 (1965), the Court attempted to develop a test for granting exemption claims for conscientious objectors who did not belong to an orthodox religious sect. Before doing so, the Court stated: Few would quarrel, we think, with the proposition that in no field of human endeavor has the tool of language proved so inadequate in the communication of ideas as it has in dealing with the fundamental questions of man's predicament in life, in death or in final judgment and retribution. This fact makes the task of discerning the intent of Congress in using the phrase Supreme Being a complex one. Nor is it made the easier by the richness and variety of spiritual life in our country. Id. at 174, 85 S.Ct. 850. The Court then went on to hold that a court must decide whether an objector's beliefs are sincerely held and whether objectively the claimed belief occup[ies] the same place in the life of the objector as an orthodox belief in God holds in the life of one clearly qualified for exemption. Id. at 184, 85 S.Ct. 850. Courts were not to require proof of the religious doctrines nor were they to reject beliefs because the beliefs were not comprehensible. Id. at 184-85, 85 S.Ct. 850.