U.S. Supreme Court

The Witnesses

May 10, 2019 Sacred Liberty

A tiny, reviled, and obnoxious American religion forces the nation to define what religious liberty really means. Excerpted from Sacred Liberty Robert Fischer was trying to escape from Litchfield, Illinois, when the mob caught up with him. The crowd pulled him out of his car and started destroying his Jehovah’s Witnesses literature. It was June 16, 1940, war hysteria was mounting, and the residents were livid that Fischer and the other Witnesses refused, as a matter of conscience, to salute…

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Engel v. Vitale Majority Opinion

January 21, 2019 Sacred Liberty

U. S. Supreme Court 1962 The plaintiffs in Engel v. Vitale—three Jews and two “spiritual” people who did not belong to an organized religion—objected to their children having to recite prayers that had been written and required by the State of New YTork. The Court agreed 6 to 1, with three Republican- appointed justices joining three appointed by Democrats. The majority opinion was offered by Justice Hugo Black The respondent Board of Education of Union Free School District No. 9,…

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Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing

January 21, 2019 Sacred Liberty

U.S. Supreme Court 1947 In Everson, the Court focused on the meaning of the Establishment Clause. Did that cryptic phrase intend merely to block the establishment of a state religion? Or did it prohibit taxpayer support for religion more generally? The Court disagreed with a New Jersey taxpayer who objected that his tax dollars were being used to subsidize the transportation of students to parochial schools. But it offered a set of guidelines and then these controversial words: “In the…

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Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith

January 21, 2019 Sacred Liberty

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…

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Sherbert v. Verner

January 21, 2019 Sacred Liberty

U.S. Supreme Court 1963 The Supreme Court’s first major twentieth-century religious liberty case involved Adele Sherbert, a textile worker in Beaumont Mills, South Carolina. The factory that employed her instituted a six-day workweek—Monday through Satur- day. But Sherbert was a Seventh-day Adventist, which teaches that the Sab- bath is Saturday (Exod. 31:15: “Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord: whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he…

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