Lemon v. Kurtzman

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” Lemon v. Kurtzman is a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down laws in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island that included provisions that allowed public funding to be paid to parochial schools. The Court held that such laws were a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Court heard arguments on the case on March 3, 1971, and issued its decision on June 28, 1971. In delivering the opinion for the Court, Chief Justice Warren Burger provided a three-point test that has been used to determine the constitutionality of a law with regard to separation of church and state. First, the law must have a nonreligious purpose. Second, the law must not advance or inhibit religion or religious practice. Third, the law cannot involve excessive government entanglement with religion or religious practices. These three points have come to be known as the Lemon Test. If any law violated any of the three points of the Lemon Test, it was deemed to be unconstitutional.

The case involved the Pennsylvania 1968 Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Pennsylvania Act included provisions that allowed the Pennsylvania Superintendent of Public Instruction to reimburse nonpublic schools for costs related to textbooks, instructional materials, and teacher salaries. An examination of this practice revealed that most of the schools receiving these funds were Catholic schools being administered by the Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church. This decision also upheld a similar case in Rhode Island where the First Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that the Rhode Island Salary Supplement Act was unconstitutional. The Rhode Island Act provided state funds to offset 15% of the salaries for nonpublic elementary schools. The Rhode Island law also heavily favored mostly Catholic schools. While the Act stated that the funds could be used only for teachers who taught courses that were offered in the public schools using only materials used in the public schools and could not teach any religion courses, the First Circuit found that the only teachers benefiting from the law were 250 teachers in the Catholic school system.

The Court found that the laws were unconstitutional and upheld the decisions of the appellate court. Regarding the Rhode Island case, Chief Justice Burger wrote that the extensive religious character of these religious schools gave rise to [Page 516]entangling church-state relationships of the kind the Lemon Test sought to avoid. His writing regarding the Pennsylvania case stated the Pennsylvania Act, moreover, had the further defect of providing state financial aid directly to a religious school. The issues argued in both of these cases provided the framework for the Lemon Test.

The evolution of the issue of separation of church and state has its roots in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The term was first used by Baptist theologian Roger Williams, the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, when he first wrote regarding a wall of separation between the church and the wilderness of the world. This was in response to his personal experiences of being persecuted for his religious beliefs and practices. The phrase gained its current prominence when it was used by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to a group of Connecticut Baptist leaders who had written to him with concerns regarding the emerging dominance of the Congregationalist Church. Jefferson reaffirmed believing that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god,” that man owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, and that the legitimate powers of government reach to actions only, and not opinions. Jefferson considered as critical that act that declared that the people's legislature “should make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or barring the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” The Lemon Test seeks to maintain this separation.

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