Compelling Interest Test

How much freedom is too much freedom? This is the question that has been debated for decades regarding religious freedom and state actions. With the rise of the regulatory state beginning in the 1940’s and the New Deal, the government has consistently come in conflict with religious freedom. Issues such as religious garb, zoning laws, unemployment benefits, military draft accommodations, religion in the public square, LGBT discrimination, and birth control are just some of the many issues that have arisen. To accommodate religious individuals in the face of generally applicable laws, the Supreme Court devised the Compelling Interest Test. The Compelling Interest Test can best be defined as “the state may justify an inroad on religious liberty
Strict scrutiny is the highest order of scrutiny that the Court can give to any case. Only the most basic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution are subject to such rigorous scrutiny. Some of these rights include voting rights, privacy rights, free speech rights, and free press rights. For decades, the Court applied the strict scrutiny standard to direct burdens on religious free exercise. For example, the outlawing of polygamy would be a direct burden on the Mormon faith. It was not until 1963 in the case of Sherbert v. Verner that the Court would start applying the strict scrutiny standard to indirect burdens on religious exercise. In this case, Adell Sherbert was fired from her job because she, as a seventh day adventist, would not work on Saturdays. She was then denied unemployment compensation from the state because she was able to work but was unwilling to due to her faith. This was viewed as an indirect burden on her faith. As such, the Court granted an accommodation on the basis that the state had not met their burden of proof on whether the state had a compelling interest to deny her unemployment benefits. While the Court had been using strict scrutiny and the Compelling Interest Test in other cases long before Sherbert, this was the beginning of the application of the compelling interest test to indirect burden on religious
Nearly ten years after the Sherbert decision, the Court upheld an exemption for Amish children in regards to mandatory schooling past the age of 16 in the case of Wisconsin v. Yoder in 1972. The Court found that the state did not have a compelling enough interest to justify the massive burden placed on the Amish faith. Nearly ten years after that, the Court faced a similar challenge to that of Sherbert in the case of Thomas v. Review Board in 1981. In this case, Thomas, a Jehovah’s Witness, worked in a foundry. When Thomas’s specific foundry closed, his company, Black-Knox, transferred him to a job manufacturing weapons. He refused to work due to his anti-war religious beliefs. When he was fired, he was denied unemployment compensation, much like in Sherbert. The Court ruled that Thomas should be accommodated for his religious belief and be given unemployment benefits. This is finally where the court solidified the notion of the Compelling Interest Test. In his majority opinion, Justice Burger compacted the criteria of the Compelling Interest Test in the statement that “the state may justify an inroad on religious liberty only by showing that it is the least restrictive means of achieving some compelling state interest” (Burger 222). The Court now had a concise definition to apply to other