ABSTRACT
The Court decided several free exercise cases where serving in the armed forces was not at issue. In each of these cases, individuals sincerely claimed that civil laws burdened their right to exercise their religions. The Court’s approach in the earlier cases in modern free exercise jurisprudence was rather inconsistent in both result and approach. In some cases, the Court claimed to be employing one test, but the Court’s own description of the relevant test suggested that application of the test should have yielded a different result. To make matters more confusing, the Court seemed to ignore its own previous decisions, using different tests in relevantly similar cases while claiming all the while to be employing a consistent approach. The Court seemed to be trying to work out its own approach without admitting that it was doing so, and Court members sometimes pointed out that the Court’s decisions simply could not be reconciled. The early decisions in the modern free exercise jurisprudence provided no coherent approach to free exercise, claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
