Everson v. Board of Education (1947)

Everson v. Board of Education (1947) concerned a New Jersey statute authorizing local school districts to reimburse parents of parochial schoolchildren (as well as those whose children attended public schools) for fares spent to reach their schools on regular buses of the public transportation system. The appellant, Arch R. Everson, alleged that the use of public money for reimbursing parents of Catholic students for bus fares constituted the use of state power to support churches. At issue for the court was whether the New Jersey law violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In a 5–4 decision, the court held the statute to be constitutional. It was the first ruling by the Supreme Court to apply the Establishment Clause to the states and consequently to the actions of local school districts.

In his majority opinion, Justice Hugo Black defined the Establishment Clause in ways that have continued to shape the Court's interpretation of it. First, Black clarified the constraints imposed on federal and state governments by the Establishment Clause to mean that neither could pass laws that aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Under this interpretation, the Establishment Clause effectively required states to be neutral among religions and neutral in their relations with groups of religious believers and nonbelievers. This means that the state cannot promote or be hostile toward religions or exclude individual adherents from the benefits of public welfare legislation because of their faith or lack thereof. Because the benefits in question went to children and their parents—and not the parochial schools—and were distributed neutrally to parents of children attending both public and private schools (much like provisions for fire and police protection), Black argued they had a secular purpose. As such, they were indisputably marked off from a religious function, so they did not violate the Establishment Clause.

Although the Court voted to uphold the statute, a second element of Black's interpretation of the Establishment Clause helped establish the principle of a metaphorical division among church and state. In the ruling, Black alluded to a metaphor employed by Thomas Jefferson in a private letter written in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist congregation and later used by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite in Reynolds v. United States (1878). Using this metaphor, Black reasoned that the First Amendment required not only government neutrality toward religion but also a “wall of separation” between church and state. Both interpretive principles established by Black—separation and neutrality—set the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court to employ a dominant separationist paradigm for a host of questions concerning religion and public education. All four dissenters supported Black's interpretation of the Establishment Clause but protested that the principles he laid down should logically have led to the invalidation of the challenged law. In his minority opinion, Justice Wiley B. Rutledge, Jr. insisted that the Constitution forbade “every form of public aid or support for religion.”