THE SUPREME COURT AND RELIGION

Taxes and the Church

The Court continued to wrestle with religious issues during the decade. In 1970 the Court upheld the right of New York State to grant tax exemptions for church property used for religious purposes. This had national application since all fifty states and the District of Columbia gave such exemptions. It was estimated that this affected over seventy billion dollars worth of property in the nation.

Rights of Religious Belief

Issues in education continued to appear before the Court. In 1971 the Court upheld a decision of the Wisconsin Supreme Court which struck down a state law requiring Amish families to send their children to schools until they were sixteen. The Court ruled that the Amish were exempt from that law after their children completed the eighth grade. The three-hundred-year history of the educational practices of that group demonstrated that limited education was a religious tenet.

Evolution

The Court also grappled with the issue of public schools and the teaching of evolution. For a hundred years they had resisted scientific challenges to the biblical account of creation on the grounds that the Bible was infallible in all its parts and that if one part were wrong, the entire faith would be challenged. In 1974 the Court let stand a decision dismissing an action brought by parents in Houston to stop public schools from using textbooks that taught evolution but ignored the biblical creation story. The following year the Court let stand a district court ruling that a Tennessee law requiring textbooks to include various theories of creation, including the biblical story, violated both the First Amendment to the Constitution and the Tennessee state constitution.