Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1971

Lemon v. Kurtzman

403 U.S. 602 | 91 S. Ct. 2105 | 29 L. Ed. 2d 745 | 1971 U.S. LEXIS 19

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Takeaway

In short, this case announced the three-part Lemon test and held that direct, closely regulated state aid to church-related schools was unconstitutional because the monitoring and financial relationship required excessive government entanglement with religion.

Background

The Court considered Pennsylvania’s Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act together with companion challenges to Rhode Island’s Salary Supplement Act. Both programs delivered public financial assistance to church-related elementary and secondary schools, most of which were Roman Catholic.

Pennsylvania reimbursed nonpublic schools for teachers’ salaries, textbooks, and instructional materials used in specified secular courses: mathematics, modern foreign languages, physical science, and physical education. Participating schools had to maintain separate accounts for secular educational costs, use state-approved materials, and exclude religious teaching, morals, or worship from reimbursed courses. The Pennsylvania three-judge District Court dismissed the challenge for failure to state a claim, holding that the program violated neither the Establishment Clause nor the Free Exercise Clause.

Rhode Island paid eligible teachers in nonpublic elementary schools a direct salary supplement of up to 15 percent. Eligible teachers had to teach secular public-school subjects, use public-school materials, hold state certification, and promise not to teach religion while receiving the supplement. The Rhode Island three-judge District Court held that this arrangement created excessive governmental entanglement with religion and therefore violated the Establishment Clause.

The Supreme Court affirmed the Rhode Island judgment, reversed the Pennsylvania dismissal, and remanded the Pennsylvania case for proceedings consistent with its conclusion that the statute was unconstitutional.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Rhode Island’s program of salary supplements for teachers in church-related elementary schools violated the Establishment Clause.

Holding

Yes. The Rhode Island Salary Supplement Act unconstitutionally fostered excessive governmental entanglement with religion.

Reasoning

The Court distilled its prior Establishment Clause decisions into three criteria: a statute must have a secular legislative purpose, its principal or primary effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion, and it must not foster excessive government entanglement with religion. The Court accepted that Rhode Island had a legitimate secular purpose—improving the quality of secular education—and did not rest its decision on an illicit legislative purpose.

The relevant parochial schools were integral to the Catholic Church’s religious mission. Religious symbols, religious exercises, religiously oriented extracurricular activities, teaching nuns, and the schools’ governance by church authorities created an environment in which religious formation was part of the overall educational enterprise, even though direct religious instruction occupied only part of the school day.

A teacher is not like a textbook, whose content can be reviewed once and classified as secular or religious. Teachers in a religiously controlled school may face subtle and unavoidable difficulty separating religious commitments from secular instruction. The Court did not accuse the teachers of bad faith; rather, it concluded that the State could not constitutionally rely merely on their ability to remain religiously neutral while subsidized by public funds.

Because Rhode Island sought to ensure that publicly subsidized teachers taught only approved secular subjects with approved materials and did not teach religion, it would need comprehensive, discriminating, and continuing surveillance of religious-school classrooms and teachers. That continuing supervision created an excessive and enduring church-state relationship.

The statute also could require the State to examine school records and separate expenditures for secular education from expenditures for religious activity. This governmental evaluation of the internal financial and religious operations of a church-related school posed an additional and constitutionally forbidden risk of government direction of religious institutions.

The Court further treated the political division likely to arise from recurring annual appropriations for aid to particular religious schools as part of the entanglement problem. Political conflict is ordinarily a normal feature of democracy, but recurring conflict aligned along religious lines was one of the dangers the Establishment Clause was designed to prevent.

Issue #2

Whether Pennsylvania’s reimbursement of church-related schools for specified secular educational services violated the Establishment Clause.

Holding

Yes. Pennsylvania’s reimbursement program was unconstitutional because its required controls, audits, and direct financial support created excessive governmental entanglement with religion.

Reasoning

Pennsylvania’s asserted purpose was secular: supporting secular educational objectives performed by nonpublic schools. The Court gave that stated purpose appropriate deference and did not hold that the legislature had enacted the law to advance religion.

The Court accepted, at the pleading stage, the allegations that the recipient church-related schools were controlled by religious organizations, existed to propagate a particular faith, and operated to fulfill that purpose. In schools with that religious character, Pennsylvania’s effort to finance only secular instruction could not be administered without close oversight of whether teachers and courses remained nonideological.

The program required schools to use state-approved instructional materials, limited reimbursement to public-school curriculum subjects, prohibited religious teaching and sectarian morals or worship in reimbursed courses, and required separate accounting for secular costs. Those safeguards were intended to protect the Constitution, but the inspections and monitoring needed to enforce them produced the very excessive entanglement the Establishment Clause prohibits.

Unlike the transportation aid in Everson and the textbook loans in Allen, Pennsylvania made direct reimbursements to church-related schools themselves. Direct cash payments, coupled with the State’s authority to audit financial records and decide which expenses were secular rather than religious, created an intimate and continuing relationship between government and religious authorities.

The Court therefore reversed the District Court’s dismissal of the Pennsylvania challenge and remanded. Its conclusion was that the statute’s overall relationship between State and church—including direct aid, auditing, supervision, and likely political divisiveness—could not be squared with the Establishment Clause.

Concurrences

Justice Douglas

Reasoning

Justice Douglas joined the Court's result, but justice Black joined Justice Douglas’s concurrence. Justice Douglas agreed that both programs were unconstitutional, but emphasized more directly that parochial schools exist to transmit a religious faith and that public money supporting their instructional staff necessarily supports that religious enterprise as an organic whole.

In his view, the State faced an unconstitutional dilemma. If it did not monitor the subsidized instruction, public funds could support religious indoctrination. If it did monitor instruction closely enough to prevent that result, government officials would be drawn into pervasive supervision of religious schools, including classrooms, curricula, and teachers’ conduct.

Justice Douglas also maintained that compelled taxpayer contributions to the propagation of a faith infringed religious liberty. He rejected the idea that accounting labels could constitutionally separate a school’s secular and religious functions when state-funded salaries for secular teachers freed the school’s own resources for religious instruction.

Justice Brennan

Reasoning

Justice Brennan agreed that Pennsylvania’s judgment should be reversed and Rhode Island’s judgment affirmed. He relied on a broader account of the Establishment Clause: government may not become involved with a religious institution’s essentially religious activities, use governmental instruments for essentially religious purposes, or use religious means to achieve secular ends when secular means would suffice.

He stressed the historical opposition to direct public subsidies for sectarian schools. Unlike long-accepted tax exemptions for religious property, a subsidy transfers money collected from taxpayers directly to the religious institution and creates a close financial relationship between government and church.

Justice Brennan considered the promised limits on religious teaching a distinct constitutional danger. Enforcing them required state officials to police teachers, curricula, classroom practices, and school facilities, producing self-censorship and governmental interference with religious freedom. In his view, a school’s secular teaching was inseparable from the religious environment and mission within which that teaching occurred, so direct aid to the school aided the religious enterprise as well.

Justice White

Reasoning

Justice White concurred in the judgment reversing the Pennsylvania dismissal, but not in the Court’s reasoning that the Pennsylvania statute was facially invalid. He believed the complaint should proceed to trial because evidence might show that state-financed courses actually blended religious and secular instruction, which would establish an unconstitutional application of the program.

He rejected the majority’s assumption that teachers in religious schools would be unable to keep religious instruction out of secular courses. The Rhode Island record, he noted, included findings that teachers did not inject religion into secular instruction, and he saw no basis for treating religious-school teachers as unable to honor statutory limits.

Justice White maintained that a State may finance the separable secular educational function performed by private religious schools. He found it difficult to reconcile the Court’s rejection of the state programs with its more permissive treatment of federal aid to church-related colleges in the companion case, Tilton v. Richardson.