The U.S. Supreme Court Has Never Defined \u201cReligion\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Debate about religion in American public life existed well before America\u2019s independence. Many talk about religious freedom, the First Amendment, and\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/07\/the-u-s-supreme-court-has-never-defined-religion.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The U.S. Supreme Court Has Never Defined \u201cReligion\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Debate about religion in American public life existed well before America\u2019s independence. 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{"id":511,"date":"2014-07-29T22:18:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-29T22:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/07\/the-u-s-supreme-court-has-never-defined-religion.html"},"modified":"2014-07-29T22:18:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-29T22:18:00","slug":"the-u-s-supreme-court-has-never-defined-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/07\/the-u-s-supreme-court-has-never-defined-religion.html","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Supreme Court Has Never Defined \u201cReligion\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Debate about religion in American public life existed well before America\u2019s independence. Many talk about religious freedom, the First Amendment, and mistakenly argue<\/a> that the U.S. Constitution delineates a \u201cseparation of church and state.\u201d Yet, the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court has never formally defined what actually constitutes \u201creligion.\u201d Nor has the Court ever defined \u201cGod.\u201d In fact, its standards for referring to \u201creligion\u201d evolve, change, and remain inconsistent.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, in 1890, the Court referred to religion in traditional theistic terms, referring to a \u201cCreator.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the 1960s, when interpreting the Establishment Clause<\/a> of the First Amendment, the Court referred to religion as it relates to both a person\u2019s belief in the existence of a particular God and another\u2019s disbelief in a particular God or belief in no God at all. When ruling on conscientious objector status, the Court expanded the concept of religion from believing in a \u201csupreme being\u201d to include \u201cdeeply held moral and ethical beliefs.\u201d<\/p>\n

But by the early 1980s the Court moved away from relating moral and ethical beliefs to religion, ruling that the Free-Exercise Clause<\/a> of the First Amendment only applied to a \u201creligious\u201d belief or practice and that only beliefs \u201crooted in religion are given special protection to the exercise of religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"