ABSTRACT

Beginning with the conflict of religiously required plural marriage with a federal antipolygamy law in the 1879 Reynolds case, the Supreme Court has been of at least two minds on the question of whether the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause provides religious believers with the possibility of exemptions from generally applicable laws. This chapter discusses religious liberty to issues that have been debated since the colonial era: the degree to which the government should be able to regulate churches, and the appropriate role of churches and members of the clergy in elective politics. Our constitutional commitment to religious freedom and to acceptance of religious pluralism is one of our greatest achievements in that noble endeavor. In pluralistic societies such as ours, institutions dominated by a majority are inevitably, if inadvertently, insensitive to the needs and values of minorities when these needs and values differ from those of the majority.