Pennsylvania and Rhode Island enacted statutes providing state financial support to nonpublic schools, most of which were religiously affiliated. Pennsylvania reimbursed nonpublic schools for teachers’ salaries, textbooks, and instructional materials used in secular subjects, while Rhode Island supplemented the salaries of teachers in nonpublic elementary schools. The programs were limited to secular education on their face, but they required ongoing state oversight to ensure public funds were not used for religious instruction. Taxpayers challenged the statutes as violations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
Do state programs that subsidize teachers’ salaries, textbooks, and instructional materials in religious schools violate the Establishment Clause because they create excessive government entanglement with religion?
To satisfy the Establishment Clause, a law must have a secular legislative purpose, its principal or primary effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion, and it must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion. This three-part framework became known as the Lemon test.
Yes. The Court held that both the Pennsylvania and Rhode Island statutes violated the Establishment Clause because, although they had secular purposes, they created excessive entanglement between government and religion.
Chief Justice Burger explained that the religious character of the aided schools, combined with the need to monitor teachers and classroom materials to ensure that state aid supported only secular instruction, would require comprehensive and continuing state surveillance. That supervision risked both political divisiveness and intrusive state involvement in religious education. The Court emphasized that the cumulative relationship between government and sectarian schools under these statutes produced an impermissible entanglement, even if the statutes were limited to ostensibly secular uses. Thus, the statutes failed the third prong of the Establishment Clause analysis.
Lemon is one of the Supreme Court’s most important Establishment Clause decisions because it articulated the three-part Lemon test, which dominated church-state analysis for decades. It built on earlier school-aid cases such as Board of Education v. Allen, 392 U.S. 236 (1968), and Walz v. Tax Commission of the City of New York, 397 U.S. 664 (1970). The Court later applied, criticized, and modified Lemon in cases including Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203 (1997), and eventually stated that Lemon had been abandoned in favor of an approach grounded in historical practices and understandings in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 597 U.S. 507 (2022).
Board of Education v. Allen, 392 U.S. 236 (1968) |
Abstain |
Walz v. Tax Commission of the City of New, 397 U.S. 664 (1970) |
Abstain |
Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203 (1997) |
Abstain |
Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 597 U.S. 507 (2022) |
Abstain |
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