Search
-
January 25, 2012WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The religious freedom history lesson that Chief Justice John Roberts gives in writing the Supreme Court’s Jan. 11 unanimous ruling affirming a “ministerial exception” to federal employment laws goes back to the Magna Carta, the English law created in 1215.
The decision in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC held that fired teacher Cheryl Perich could not sue under federal disability discrimination laws, because the Michigan Lutheran school where she worked considered her a “called” minister.
In getting to the ruling, Roberts described the judicial and legislative path to the recognition of a ministerial exception, beginning with one of the three provisions of the Magna Carta that remains on the books today: a grant of freedom to the Church of England:
“We have granted to God, and by this our present charter have confirmed, for us and our heirs forever, that the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole rights and liberties inviolable,” says the Magna Carta.
“We have granted also, and given to all the freemen of our realm, for us and our heirs forever, these liberties underwritten, to have and to hold to them and their heirs, of us and our heirs forever.”
Roberts drew a line through the history of colonial America’s efforts to establish -- or to pointedly not establish -- state religions. In colonial Virginia, for instance, the governor had the power to induct ministers presented to him by church vestries.
When the first Catholic bishop in the United States, John Carroll of Maryland, asked the government who should be appointed to manage the church’s affairs in the newly acquired territory of the Louisiana Purchase, Secretary of State James Madison was clear, Roberts explained.
“The selection of church ‘functionaries’ was an ‘entirely ecclesiastical’ matter left to the church’s own judgment,” Roberts wrote.
Madison, he said, explained that the “scrupulous policy of the Constitution in guarding against a political interference with religious affairs” prevented the government from rendering an opinion on the “selection of ecclesiastical individuals.”