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1 1 (July 6, 2022)

handle is hein.crs/govehyl0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional_______ R fesearch Service Carson v. Makin: Using Government Funds for Religious Activity July 6, 2022 When the government decides whether to give public funds to religious entities, that decision can raise constitutional questions under both of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses. For many years, Supreme Court precedent focused primarily on whether federal, state, or local governments violated the Establishment Clause by funding religious activity. Accordingly, governments sometimes barred public funds from being given to religious activities or religious groups. In recent years, however, the Supreme Court has made clear that governments may violate the Free Exercise Clause by barring religious entities from receiving public benefits because of their faith. Under prevailing precedent, then, governments might sometimes be constitutionally or statutorily barred from giving public funds to religious activities but also cannot exclude religious entities from eligibility solely because of their religious character. In Carson v. Makin, issued on June 21, 2022, the Supreme Court held that states could not exclude religious schools from an indirect aid program based on the schools' religious use of the funds. This Legal Sidebar explains that decision and discusses possible implications for federal funding, as well as further implications stemming from the Supreme Court's subsequent Establishment Clause ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. Legal Background The First Amendment provides that the government shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof The intersection of these two clauses-the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, collectively described as the Religion Clauses-is a perennial issue in constitutional law. The Supreme Court has said the Establishment Clause forbids, among other things, financial support of religious activity. For example, the Court in 1973 invalidated a government tuition-reimbursement program that directly provided money to religious institutions but lacked safeguards to ensure that the money was used only for secular, neutral, and nonideological purposes. Subsequent cases, however, seemed to walk back such Establishment Clause restrictions, and in 1988, the Supreme Court upheld a federal grant program that did not expressly restrict the religious use of funds. That case said absent evidence to the contrary, and particularly when the funds were granted to institutions that were not Congressional Research Service https://crsreports. congress.gov LSB10785 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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