education,7 and the contraceptive mandate,8 this article seeks to demonstrate how religious beliefs have influenced judicial decisions that have had a vast impact on contemporary American life. We will also review an instance where the High Court restricted the influence of religion9 and one where the Justices stepped in to protect a religious belief and practice many found repulsive and offensive.10 These cases have been and continue to be controversial, but in this writer’s opinion, they were correctly decided because a society without religious moorings is a society without meaning or purpose. II. INTERACTION OF LAW AND RELIGION In 1971, the Lowell Lectures on Theology delivered at Boston University sought to explain how law and religion in Western societies are interdependent.11 The presenter spoke of “law and religion in the broadest sense—of law as the structures and processes of allocation of rights and duties in a society and of religion as society’s intuitions of and commitments to the ultimate meaning and purpose of life.”12 Before we examine his presentation, a few comments on the nature of religious belief in general are in order. While definitions of religion vary,13 it is recognized that a common thread uniting all belief systems that can be termed “religious” is that they 7
Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), infra Section III D. Hobby Lobby, 134 S. Ct. 2751 (2014). 9 Emp’t Div. v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), infra Section III E. 10 Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993), infra Section III G. 11 BERMAN, supra note 1, at 7, 46. 12 Id. at 12. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that belief in the existence of God or a Supernatural Being is not a requirement for a religion. See Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961). For a recent discussion of the Court’s adjudication of Establishment Clause cases in the context of different religious perspectives, including religious majorities, minorities, and nonbelievers, see Samuel J. Levine, A Look at the Establishment Clause Through the Prism of Religious Perspectives: Religious Majorities, Religious Minorities, and Nonbelievers, 87 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 775 (2012). 13 The term “religion” derives from the Latin “religare” (“to bind fast”), and typically refers to “an institution with a recognized body of communicants who gather together regularly for worship, and accept a set of doctrines offering some means of relating the individual to what is taken to be the ultimate nature of reality.” W. L. REESE, DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 488 (1980). Certainly there is no dearth of definitions of “religion” in the theological and legal literature. See e.g., Dmitry N. 8
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