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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • In United States v. Safehouse, the Third Circuit heard arguments on whether a nonprofit aiming to open a safe injection site can invoke religious protections under the Free Exercise Clause or RFRA, after a lower court ruled that the founders’ religious motivations alone do not shield the group from federal drug laws.
  • In Mennonite Church USA v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a D.C. federal court declined to issue a preliminary injunction to reinstate DHS’s “sensitive locations” policy, holding that the plaintiff religious organizations lacked standing to challenge its rescission based on speculative risks of enforcement at places of worship, decreased attendance, restricted services, and added security costs.
  • In Catholic Benefits Association v. Lucas, a North Dakota federal court issued a permanent injunction shielding a Catholic diocese and employers’ group from EEOC enforcement of federal anti-discrimination rules in ways that would compel them to support or accommodate abortion, fertility treatments, or gender transitions contrary to their religious beliefs.
  • In Kynwulf v. Corcoran, an Ohio federal court dismissed a Free Exercise claim challenging Medicaid’s estate recovery rules, holding that the plaintiff was not coerced into participation and could not demand that the state tailor its program to his religious beliefs.
  • In People of the State of California v. Calvary Chapel San Jose, a California appellate court upheld over $1.2 million in fines against the church for violating Covid-era health orders, rejecting its Free Exercise and due process claims by finding the mandates neutral and generally applicable.
  • West Virginia signed a new law, the Parents’ Bill of Rights, granting parents wide-ranging authority over their children’s education, healthcare, and moral upbringing, with state interference allowed only under a compelling interest and narrowly tailored means. 
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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion stories from around the web:

  • Yeshiva University recently settled a protracted lawsuit with a student-led LGBT group by granting it formal recognition as a student organization, allowing it access to campus facilities and university funding. The lawsuit arose from the school’s refusal to recognize the group on religious grounds, whereas the group claimed such a refusal violated New York antidiscrimination statutes.
  • The state legislature of Kentucky recently passed a joint resolution directing the return of a monument displaying the Ten Commandments to the state’s Capitol Grounds. Temporarily removed during the 1980s due to construction, its return was enjoined by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, citing the now-defunct Lemon test as rendering the monument violative of the Establishment Clause. In light of recent Supreme Court jurisprudence declaring the Lemon test overruled, the state legislature voted to reinstate the monument.
  • A Catholic diocese and a Christian pregnancy center filed suit against the State of Illinois, challenging recent amendments to the Illinois Human Rights Act that prevents discrimination against employees based on their reproductive health choices. The plaintiffs allege that the amendments burden their Free Exercise rights by preventing them from making faith-based employment decisions, and coercing them to associate with individuals whose actions undermine their staunchly pro-life mission.
  • The Kansas state House of Representatives issued a condemnation against a “Black Mass” to take place on the state capitol grounds, citing its clear anti-Catholic animus and blatant disrespect to Christianity. The procession involves the use of a consecrated Catholic host, viewed as a clear mockery and distortion of the Catholic Eucharist, and an alleged affront against the religious sensibilities of “all people of good will.”
  • A New York federal district court ruled that a gender support plan that involved hiding a students social gender transition from her parents did not violate the Free Exercise or Due Process rights of her parents. The Court held that the plaintiff was free to exercise her religious and parental rights over her daughter in the household, and that a school policy that existed for the voluntary benefit of students does not endorse a religious message.
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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • In Royce v. Pan, a California federal court upheld the state’s repeal of the “personal belief” exemption from school vaccination requirements, rejecting claims that the law was hostile to religion. The court found that the law was neutral and generally applicable, and that the removal of the exemption did not unfairly target religious practices.
  • In Shash v. City of Pueblo, a Colorado district court rejected a Native American plaintiff’s RLUIPA and free-exercise claims after he was arrested for DUI, as he objected to a blood alcohol test on religious grounds. The court found that RLUIPA did not apply because the plaintiff was not confined to a qualifying institution, and dismissed the First Amendment claim on qualified immunity grounds, noting there was no evidence that the officers were aware of his religious beliefs or intentionally burdened his exercise of religion.
  • In Atlantic Korean American Presbytery v. Shalom Presbyterian Church of Washington, Inc., a Virginia appellate court dismissed a church property dispute, invoking the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine, which bars civil courts from intervening in religious matters. The court ruled that Shalom Presbyterian Church’s decision to seek civil court relief after previously submitting to the Presbyterian Church Synod’s authority amounted to a collateral attack on the Synod’s decision, violating constitutional principles of religious freedom.
  • Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon recently signed HB 0207, establishing the Wyoming Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which mandates strict scrutiny of state actions that significantly burden a person’s religious exercise. Wyoming becomes the 29th state to adopt such a law.
  • Georgetown University argues that the government cannot control its DEI curriculum, citing the First Amendment and its Jesuit mission. This raises the question of whether religious freedom could protect religiously affiliated institutions from attacks on DEI practices, as faith-based colleges often defend their right to make decisions based on their religious tenets.
  • The U.S. Acting Solicitor General filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn an Oklahoma ruling that a Catholic-sponsored charter school violated the state constitution and the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The brief argues that the Free Exercise Clause prohibits excluding the religious school, noting that charter schools do not perform functions exclusively reserved to the state, and thus are not subject to the same constitutional constraints as government-run institutions.
    • Stay tuned for our Symposium on this case!
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Marginalized Religions in the Roman Empire

Most are familiar with the Roman Empire’s treatment of Christianity–which, the conventional account goes, was uniquely bad. But, argues classicist K.P.S. Janssen in a book out this month from Oxford University Press, Marginalized Religion and the Law in the Roman Empire, Rome marginalized other religions as well, and treated them quite similarly in legal terms. Readers can evaluate the argument for themselves. Here’s the description from the Oxford website:

The Roman Empire’s approach to religion has traditionally been described in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, Rome has often been regarded as almost proverbially tolerant, as well as highly flexible in its dealings with the diverse range of religious cults and practices within its territories. On the other hand, the Roman religious landscape was not without its limits, and there were certain groups who found themselves, for one reason or another, on the outside. The legal interactions between these groups and the Roman authorities have largely been studied in isolation. In Marginalized Religion and the Law in the Roman Empire, K. P. S. Janssen instead takes a comparative approach, and investigates how members of various marginalized religious groups were embedded in, and interacted with, the wider Roman legal system. The legal positions of private diviners, Jewish communities and early Christians are compared and contrasted to provide a broader perspective on the legal treatment of marginalized religion in the Roman world. Janssen argues that the known interactions between these respective groups and the Roman authorities are best understood within the wider context of Roman law and administration, and that they furthermore shared a number of important characteristics. While the treatment these groups received was certainly not in all respects identical, the procedural, socio-political, and ideological mechanisms that underpinned the relevant legal measures were nonetheless conspicuously similar.

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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  •  In People v. Johnson, a California appellate court ruled that prohibiting a criminal defendant, an ordained minister, from wearing a clerical collar and having a Bible during trial was not a reversible error. The court found that this restriction did not affect the trial’s fairness or the verdict. 
  • In Gartenberg v. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a New York federal court ruled that while Title VI must be applied consistently with the First Amendment, it still requires schools to address harassment that goes beyond protected speech. The court found that Cooper Union’s response to antisemitic intimidation, where protestors banged on a locked library door while Jewish students sheltered inside, was inadequate under Title VI, as the conduct was physically threatening and not shielded by free speech protections.
  • In Civil Rights Department v. Cathy’s Creations, Inc., a California appellate court ruled that a bakery violated state civil rights law by refusing to sell a predesigned white cake for a same-sex wedding reception. The court rejected the bakery’s free speech and religious freedom defenses, finding that its policy was facially discriminatory.
  • In Miller v. City of Burien, a Washington federal court upheld the city’s requirement that a Methodist church obtain a permit before hosting a homeless encampment on its property. The court ruled that the permit process did not substantially burden the church’s religious exercise, as the city’s request was a minor inconvenience aimed at ensuring safety.
  • In Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington v. Doe, the Maryland Supreme Court upheld the retroactive elimination of the limitation period for filing child sexual abuse lawsuits, ruling that the General Assembly had the power to abrogate the statute of limitations.
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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • President Donald Trump signed an executive order that established a temporary task force within the Justice Department aimed at eradicating anti-Christian bias within the federal government. The Executive Order names the Attorney General as the Task Force chair and vests within the Task Force with authority to review the activities of all executive departments and agencies for unlawful anti-Christian policies, practices, or conduct, recommend methods to revoke or terminate violative policies, develop strategies to protect the religious liberties of Americans, and more.
  •  In a new complaint filed for Arroyo-Castro v. Gasper, the plaintiff, a public school teacher,  alleges that DiLoreto Elementary & Middle School violated the Free Exercise clause when she was placed on administrative leave following her refusal to remove a crucifix that she had hung among other personal items in personal workspace near her classroom desk. The plaintiff alleges that the school district pressured her in several meetings to remove the crucifix, and suspended her for two days without pay shortly before placing her on administrative leave.
  • In Groveman v. Regents of the University of California, a California District Court recently dismissed a suit alleging that the University of California Davis alleging that the University violated the plaintiff’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights when it allowed a pro-Palestinian encampment to operate on campus grounds and exclude Plaintiff from walking on the sidewalk where the encampment was located, despite the fact that the encampment violated school policy. The District Court found that the causal connection between the University’s inaction and the injury the plaintiff suffered was too attenuated for a Free Exercise claim to survive. Further, the District Court held that it was impossible to draw a plausible inference that the defendant’s inaction favored or disfavored any religion or burdened the plaintiff’s religious exercise.
  • The Australian Parliament recently passed new amendments to the country’s Hate Crimes Law, strengthening the punishments for existing offenses that urge and force violence and creating new offenses that threaten force or violence against targeted groups and members of groups. These amendments were passed following several high-profile incidents of antisemitism that have risen across the country.
  • The Supreme Court of India recently held that the government of Chhattisgarh has two months to demarcate new, exclusive burial sites for Christians in an attempt to reduce disputes over burial grounds. The Supreme Court’s decision was made against the backdrop of continued persecution by Chhattisgarh state officials, in which Christians have been routinely (and sometimes violently) denied the right to a Christian burial.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Christianity and American Democracy

Historically, the American approach to church-state relations has had two primary, and complimentary, influences: the Evangelical Christian tradition and the Enlightenment Liberal tradition, both of which support official state neutrality and freedom of conscience. A new book from Jonathan Rauch (Brookings) argues that Christian influence in the US is fading and that the historical bargain between Christianity and liberalism is falling apart. Although he’s an atheist, Rauch regrets this development, which he sees as a threat to America’s future. The book is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy and the publisher is Yale University Press. Here’s the description from Yale’s website:

What happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends? In this provocative book, the award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch—a lifelong atheist—reckons candidly with both the shortcomings of secularism and the corrosion of Christianity.
 
Thin Christianity, as Rauch calls the mainline church, has been unable to inspire and retain believers. Worse, a Church of Fear has distorted white evangelicalism in ways that violate the tenets of both Jesus and James Madison. What to do? For answers, Rauch looks to a new generation of religious thinkers, as well as to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has placed the Constitution at the heart of its spiritual teachings.
 
In this timely critique Rauch addresses secular Americans who think Christianity can be abandoned, and Christian Americans who blame secular culture for their grievances. The two must work together, he argues, to confront our present crisis. He calls on Christians to recommit to the teachings of their faith that align with Madison, not MAGA, and to understand that liberal democracy, far from being oppressive, is uniquely protective of religious freedom. At the same time, he calls on secular liberals to understand that healthy religious institutions are crucial to the survival of the liberal state.

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Legal Spirits 065: Reading CS Lewis in Law School

Photo: Reasonable Theology

In this episode, Fordham Law Professors Sean Griffith and Richard Squire join Mattone Center Director Mark Movsesian to talk about their experience leading a discussion of CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity in a student reading group this past semester. Sean and Richard discuss their goals in establishing the group, their students’ response to Lewis–in particular, his defense of natural law and Christian ethics–and the value of taking Christianity seriously as a matter of faith and intellect at a 21st-century American law school. A fascinating and wide-ranging discussion. Listen in!

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Posted on by Mark Movsesian

On Christian Institutionalism in the Early Republic

The proper role of Christianity in American public life has sparked controversy from the beginning. Is the US a Christian nation, and what does that mean, exactly? Or is the US a secular republic? Like France, perhaps? Historian Miles Smith has written a new book, Religion & Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War, that argues that the true role of Christianity in the early Republic is captured by the phrase “Christian Institutionalism,” in which a public, Protestant Christianity coexisted with official disestablishment. Looks interesting. Here’s the description from the publisher’s website (Davenant):

In recent years, America’s status as a “Christian nation” has become an incredibly vexed question. This is not simply a debate about America’s present, or even its future–it has become a debate about its past. Some want to rewrite America’s history as having always been highly secular in order to ensure a similar future; others seek to reframe the American founding as a continuation of medieval Christendom in the hopes of reviving America’s religious identity today.

In this book, Miles Smith offers a fresh historical reading of America’s status as a Christian nation in the Early Republic era. Defined neither by secularism nor Christendom, America was instead marked by “Christian institutionalism.” Christianity–and Protestantism specifically–was always baked into the American republic’s diplomatic, educational, judicial, and legislative regimes and institutional Christianity in state apparatuses coexisted comfortably with disestablishment from the American Revolution until the beginning of the twenty-first century. 

Any productive discussion about America’s religious present or future must first reckon accurately with its past. With close attention to a wide range of sermons, letters, laws, court cases and more, Religion & Republic offers just such a reckoning

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Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • In Solliz v. Knox County, Tennessee, a Muslim woman filed suit after she was required by a Knox County sheriff to remove her hijab for a booking photo following her arrest. The complaint alleged violations of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) and the Tennessee Preservation of Religious Freedom Act.
  • A Ukrainian court has extended the detention of an Orthodox bishop for two months after he was arrested for allegedly revealing army positions to the public in a sermon, having mentioned the presence of a road block that prevented access to a local monastery. The bishop was denied the possibility of posting bail, and the checkpoints in question were removed prior to the publication of his sermon online.
  • A petition for certiorari was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, after the Supreme Court of Oklahoma declared the certification of a Catholic-sponsored charter school violative of the state’s constitution and the Establishment Clause. The petition states that the exclusion of religious schools from the state’s charter program violates the Free Exercise Clause, and that the mere funding of religious schools by the state does not constitute state action.
  • The recently-passed Abortion Services Act in Scotland threatens prosecution against anyone praying within a 200-meter radius of an abortion facility, including within their own homes, if they can be seen or heard within the zone, and act in an intentional or reckless manner. Guidance provided by the government to facilitate compliance lists silent vigils and religious preaching as potentially actionable offenses, if conducted intentionally and recklessly.
  • The University of California has continued to deny wrongdoing following a California federal court’s order mandating a variety of measures to prevent the exclusion of Jewish students from parts of campus. The University claims responsibility lies with actors unaffiliated with the school, whereas the plaintiffs maintain the school’s complicity via its failure to act in the face of clear religious discrimination against its students.