The Supreme Court Corrects Wisconsin on Religious Freedom

On June 5, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion in Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission. The Court heard a challenge to the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s 2024 decision that Catholic Charities is not “operated primarily for religious purposes” and is therefore ineligible for an unemployment tax exemption. The Supreme Court held that Wisconsin’s decision violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. 

The outcome is a victory for religious liberty; it is ridiculous for a court to decide that an organization performing the Christian corporal works of mercy by aiding the poor and disadvantaged is not doing religious work. Such a decision attempts to limit the definition of religion to worship and proselytization, which is unacceptable. A wide range of works—from feeding the hungry and housing the homeless to preaching and praying in the streets—are clearly religious in nature when performed by a Christian organization. Judicial attempts to exclude certain religious works from the legal definition of what is “religious” must be vigorously opposed. The result in the Catholic Charities Bureau case is a laudable rejection of this anti-religious movement.

Justice Sotomayor, writing for the unanimous Supreme Court, correctly identified the problem at play here: The Establishment Clause, which prevents laws that respect “an establishment of religion,” is essentially a rule that “the government may not ‘officially prefe[r]’ one religious denomination over another.” And while it may not be obvious, that is exactly what Wisconsin attempted to do here.

Wisconsin’s decision was based on the argument that Catholic Charities was not operating primarily for religious purposes because it did not operate to proselytize people into becoming Catholic and did not limit its services to Catholics. But that definition explicitly includes certain religions or religious organizations and excludes others, based arbitrarily on who they choose to serve and how they choose to share their faith. What justification does the law have to decide that organizations that only proselytize or serve members of their own religious tradition are operating primarily for religious purposes? There is no good answer to this question. It is an arbitrary choice that excludes legitimate religious activity from the definition of “religious purpose.” 

Catholic Charities argued that the Catholic faith invites evangelization (the sharing of the gospel) but does not allow proselytization (influencing or coercing others to accept one’s religious views). And because Christianity is a universal religion that promotes charitable works toward all people, not just fellow Christians, it would be inappropriate for Catholic Charities to limit its services only to Catholics. These are legitimate doctrinal and religious justifications for the way Catholic Charities operates. The legal requirement of proselytization or serving only co-religionists is not a neutral application of law, but a choice concerning the doctrinal decisions of religious organizations. That is an unacceptable preference for some religious activities to the exclusion of others. Justice Sotomayor got this issue exactly right.

The Wisconsin ruling had focused on the argument that, because the services offered by Catholic Charities can (and often are) also offered by non-religious organizations, those services are secular and not religious in nature. This is nonsense. Is meditation not a religious practice because secular people meditate in order to seek mental clarity? Is fasting on Good Friday not a religious practice because secular people may also be fasting that day for the physical benefits? The idea that a practice is not religious because it has a similar secular equivalent is simply wrong. The dissenting opinion in the Wisconsin ruling had the right answer to this faulty logic: An organization is religious “when its motivations are religious, irrespective of the nature of its activities.” Feeding the poor may be done by secular humanitarians and be a secular activity; but when a Christian feeds the poor out of love for Christ and obedience to the gospel, that Christian motivation makes it a religious activity.

When pressed, the Wisconsin attorneys argued that the only activities that do not have a secular counterpart and therefore qualify as primarily religious are limited to those that “express and inculcate religious doctrine: worship, proselytization, religious education.” The U.S. Supreme Court rejected this argument as, again, this decision is not a neutral application of law but a doctrinal choice approving only of certain types of activities as religious. Therefore, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment was applicable. The government in Wisconsin was required to prove that there was a compelling interest justifying this limited interpretation of religious activity and that its interpretation of the law was narrowly tailored to further that compelling interest. Because Wisconsin could not meet that burden, the Court properly held that refusing the unemployment tax exemption to Catholic Charities violated the First Amendment.

This unanimous, common-sense opinion should be a source of encouragement. For decades, people of faith have been fighting against the notion that religion is limited to worship and preaching. A right understanding of religion is much broader—religious activities properly include many public actions that occur outside the walls of a church. Catholic Charities Bureau is a victory for those seeking to ensure that religion is not relegated to the realm of private worship but is rather accepted as a legitimate and necessary part of public life.