Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith
U.S. Supreme Court
1990
In Sherbert v. Verner, the Supreme Court had said that under some circumstances the government could not impose laws that burdened religion — even if that harm was incidental or accidental. This issue reappeared thanks to the case of a man named Al Smith, who was definitely no relation to the Catholic New York governor but had other remarkable connections to earlier themes in religious history. Smith was a Native American who had been sent to Christian boarding schools as a boy. He ran away numerous times and ultimately became an alcoholic. Eventually, he found Alcoholics Anonymous, sobered up, and joined the Native American Church, an entrepreneurial new religion that sprang up late in the nineteenth century in the wake of the decimation of Native American tribes. It combined Christianity, a pan-Indian message, and the ingestion of peyote, a hallucinogen that had been used by Native American tribes in North America for at least five hundred years. Smith maintained that peyote use was an essential part of the religion and helped him to stay sober. But he was fired from his job on the staff of an addiction center and then was denied unemployment benefits by the state because he’d used an illegal drug. He argued that this was a violation of his religious freedom, on the basis of the Sherbert case.
In 1990, in Employment Division v. Smith, the US Supreme Court ruled against Smith—and ditched the Sherbert standard. In his opinion for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that because the law was neutral in intent, there could be no exemption for religiously motivated behavior.
“[…] But the ‘exercise of religion’ often involves not only belief and profession but the performance of (or abstention from) physical acts: assembling with others for a worship service, participating in sacramental use of bread and wine, proselytizing, abstaining from certain foods or certain modes of transportation. It would be true, we think (though no case of ours has involved the point), that a state would be ‘prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]’ if it sought to ban such acts or abstentions only when they are engaged in for religious reasons, or only because of the religious belief that they display. It would doubtless be unconstitutional, for example, to ban the casting of ‘statues that are to be used for worship purposes,’ or to prohibit bowing down before a golden calf.
Respondents in the present case, however, seek to carry the meaning of ‘prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]’ one large step further. They contend that their religious motivation for using peyote places them beyond the reach of a criminal law that is not specifically directed at their religious practice, and that is concededly constitutional as applied to those who use the drug for other reasons. They assert, in other words, that ‘prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]’ includes requiring any individual to observe a generally applicable law that requires (or forbids) the performance of an act that his religious belief forbids (or requires). As a textual matter, we do not think the words must be given that meaning. It is no more necessary to regard the collection of a general tax, for example, as ‘prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]’ by those citizens who believe support of organized government to be sinful than it is to regard the same tax as ‘abridging the freedom . . . of the press’ of those publishing companies that must pay the tax as a condition of staying in business. It is a permissible reading of the text, in the one case as in the other, to say that, if prohibiting the exercise of religion (or burdening the activity of printing) is not the object of the tax, but merely the incidental effect of a generally applicable and otherwise valid provision, the First Amendment has not been offended. Compare Citizen Publishing Co. v. United States, 394 U. S. 131, 139 (1969) (upholding application of antitrust laws to press), with Grosjean v. American Press Co.,297 U. S. 233, 297 U. S. 250-251 (1936) (striking down license tax applied only to newspapers with weekly circulation above a specified level); see generally Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue, 460 U. S. 575, 460 U. S. 581 (1983).
Our decisions reveal that the latter reading is the correct one. We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition. As described succinctly by Justice Frankfurter in Minersville School Dist. Bd. of Educ. v. Gobitis, 310 U. S. 586, 310 U. S. 594-595 (1940):
‘Conscientious scruples have not, in the course of the long struggle for religious toleration, relieved the individual from obedience to a general law not aimed at the promotion or restriction of religious beliefs. The mere possession of religious convictions which contradict the relevant concerns of a political society does not relieve the citizen from the discharge of political responsibilities.’
(Footnote omitted.) We first had occasion to assert that principle in Reynolds v. United States, 98 U. S. 145 (1879), where we rejected the claim that criminal laws against polygamy could not be constitutionally applied to those whose religion commanded the practice. ‘Laws,’ we said, ‘are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. . . . Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.’
Subsequent decisions have consistently held that the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).’…,.
Nor is it possible to limit the impact of respondents’ proposal by requiring a ‘compelling state interest’ only when the conduct prohibited is “central” to the individual’s religion. Cf. Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Assn., supra, 485 U.S. at 485 U. S. 474-476 (BRENNAN, J., dissenting). It is no more appropriate for judges to determine the “centrality” of religious beliefs before applying a ‘compelling interest’ test in the free exercise field than it would be for them to determine the ‘importance’ of ideas before applying the ‘compelling interest’ test in the free speech field. What principle of law or logic can be brought to bear to contradict a believer’s assertion that a particular act is ‘central’ to his personal faith? Judging the centrality of different religious practices is akin to the unacceptable ‘business of evaluating the relative merits of differing religious claims.’ United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. at 455 U. S. 263 n. 2 (STEVENS, J., concurring). As we reaffirmed only last Term, ‘[i]t is not within the judicial ken to question the centrality of particular beliefs or practices to a faith, or the validity of particular litigants’ interpretation of those creeds.’
Hernandez v. Commissioner, 490 U.S. at 490 U. S. 699. Repeatedly and in many different contexts, we have warned that courts must not presume to determine the place of a particular belief in a religion or the plausibility of a religious claim. See, e.g., Thomas v. Review Board, Indiana Employment Security Div., 450 U.S. at 450 U. S. 716; Presbyterian Church v. Hull Church, 393 U.S. at 393 U. S. 450; Jones v. Wolf, 443 U. S. 595, 443 U. S. 602-606 (1979); United States v. Ballard, 322 U. S. 78, 322 U. S. 85-87 (1944)….
Values that are protected against government interference through enshrinement in the Bill of Rights are not thereby banished from the political process. Just as a society that believes in the negative protection accorded to the press by the First Amendment is likely to enact laws that affirmatively foster the dissemination of the printed word, so also a society that believes in the negative protection accorded to religious belief can be expected to be solicitous of that value in its legislation as well. It is therefore not surprising that a number of States have made an exception to their drug laws for sacramental peyote use. See, e.g., Ariz.Rev.Stat.Ann. § 13-3402(B)(1) (3) (1989); Colo.Rev.Stat. § 12-22-317(3) (1985); N.M.Stat.Ann. § 30-31-6(D) (Supp.1989). But to say that a nondiscriminatory religious practice exemption is permitted, or even that it is desirable, is not to say that it is constitutionally required, and that the appropriate occasions for its creation can be discerned by the courts. It may fairly be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs.”
Source(s):
Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith Majority Opinion, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).