Sherbert v. Verner (1963)

Summary

Courts have long struggled to strike a balance between the religious liberty of believers, who often claim the right to be excused from laws that interfere with their religious beliefs and practices, and the interest of the government in passing laws that serve important purposes and apply to everyone. This case involved a conflict between a state unemployment compensation law and the religious beliefs of a worker who was fired for keeping her sabbath rather than attending work. Adell Sherbert, a textile worker and Seventh-day Adventist, refused to work on Saturday—her day of Sabbath. After being fired, she was denied unemployment compensation under state law because she made herself “unavailable” to work. Sherbert challenged the law as a violation of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause.  In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the state’s eligibility restrictions violated the Free Exercise Clause. The Court determined that a state cannot deny unemployment benefits to people who refuse work opportunities for religious reasons when it permits absences for other reasons.

Excerpt: Majority Opinion, Justice William Brennan

Appellant, a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church was discharged by her South Carolina employer because she would not work on Saturday, the Sabbath Day of her faith. When she was unable to obtain other employment because from conscientious scruples she would not take Saturday work, she filed a claim for unemployment compensation benefits under the South Carolina Unemployment Compensation Act. The appellee Employment Security Commission . . . found that appellant’s restriction upon her availability for Saturday work brought her within the provision disqualifying for benefits insured workers who fail, without good cause, to accept ‘suitable work when offered  by the employment office or the employer ... .

The door of the Free Exercise Clause stands tightly closed against any governmental regulation of religious beliefs as such . . . Government may neither compel affirmation of a repugnant belief . . . ; nor penalize or discriminate against individuals or groups because they hold religious views abhorrent to the authorities . . . ; nor employ the taxing power to inhibit the dissemination of particular religious views . . . . On the other hand, the Court has rejected challenges under the Free Exercise Clause to governmental regulation of certain overt acts prompted by religious beliefs or principles, for ‘even when the action is in accord with one’s religious convictions, (it) is not totally free from legislative restrictions.’ . . . The conduct or actions so regulated have invariably posed some substantial threat to public safety, peace or order. . . .

Plainly enough, appellant’s conscientious objection to Saturday work constitutes no conduct prompted by religious principles of a kind within the reach of state legislation. If, therefore, the decision of the South Carolina Supreme Court is to withstand appellant’s constitutional challenge, it must be either because her disqualification as a beneficiary represents no infringement by the State of her constitutional rights of free exercise, or because any incidental burden on the free exercise of appellant’s religion may be justified by a ‘compelling state interest in the regulation of a subject within the State's constitutional power to regulate...

We turn first to the question whether the disqualification for benefits imposes any burden on the free exercise of appellant’s religion. We think it is clear that it does. In a sense the consequences of such a disqualification to religious principles and practices may be only an indirect result of welfare legislation within the State’s general competence to enact; it is true that no criminal sanctions directly compel appellant to work a six-day week. But this is only the beginning, not the end, of our inquiry. For ‘(i)f the purpose or effect of a law is to impede the observance of one or all religions or is to discriminate invidiously between religions, that law is constitutionally invalid even though the burden may be characterized as being only indirect.’  . . . Here not only is it apparent that appellant’s declared ineligibility for benefits derives solely from the practice of her religion, but the pressure upon her to forego that practice is unmistakable. The ruling forces her to choose between following the precepts of her religion and forfeiting benefits, on the one hand, and abandoning one of the precepts of her religion in order to accept work, on the other hand. Governmental imposition of such a choice puts the same kind of burden upon the free exercise of religion as would a fine imposed against appellant for her Saturday worship.

Nor may the South Carolina court’s construction of the statute be saved from constitutional infirmity on the ground that unemployment compensation benefits are not appellant's ‘right’ but merely a ‘privilege.’ It is too late in the day to doubt that the liberties of religion and expression may be infringed by the denial of or placing of conditions upon a benefit or privilege. . . . [T]o condition the availability of benefits upon this appellant’s willingness to violate a cardinal principle of her religious faith effectively penalizes the free exercise of her constitutional liberties.

Significantly South Carolina expressly saves the Sunday worshipper from having to make the kind of choice which we here hold infringes the Sabbatarian’s religious liberty. When in times of ‘national emergency’ the textile plants are authorized by the State Commissioner of Labor to operate on Sunday, ‘no employee shall be required to work on Sunday who is conscientiously opposed to Sunday work; and if any employee should refuse to work on Sunday on account of conscientious objections he or she shall not jeopardize his or her seniority by such refusal or be discriminated against in any other manner.’ . . . No question of the disqualification of a Sunday worshipper for benefits is likely to arise, since we cannot suppose that an employer will discharge him in violation of this statute. The unconstitutionality of the disqualification of the Sabbatarian is thus compounded by the religious discrimination which South Carolina’s general statutory scheme necessarily effects.

We must next consider whether some compelling state interest enforced in the eligibility provisions of the South Carolina statute justifies the substantial infringement of appellant’s First Amendment right. It is basic that no showing merely of a rational relationship to some colorable state interest would suffice; in this highly sensitive constitutional area, ‘(o)nly the gravest abuses, endangering paramount interest, give occasion for permissible limitation’ . . . . No such abuse or danger has been advanced in the present case. The appellees suggest no more than a possibility that the filing of fraudulent claims by unscrupulous claimants feigning religious objections to Saturday work might not only dilute the unemployment compensation fund but also hinder the scheduling by employers of necessary Saturday work. . . . [T]here is no proof whatever to warrant such fears of malingering or deceit as those which the respondents now advance. . . . [Furthermore,] [i]t is highly doubtful whether such evidence would be sufficient to warrant a substantial infringement of religious liberties. For even if the possibility of spurious claims did threaten to dilute the fund and disrupt the scheduling of work, it would plainly be incumbent upon the appellees to demonstrate that no alternative forms of regulation would combat such abuses without infringing First Amendment rights. . . .

In holding as we do, plainly we are not fostering the ‘establishment’ of the Seventh-day Adventist religion in South Carolina, for the extension of unemployment benefits to Sabbatarians in common with Sunday worshippers reflects nothing more than the governmental obligation of neutrality in the face of religious differences, and does not represent that involvement of religious with secular institutions which it is the object of the Establishment Clause to forestall. . . . Nor does the recognition of the appellant’s right to unemployment benefits under the state statute serve to abridge any other person’s religious liberties. Nor do we, by our decision today, declare the existence of a constitutional right to unemployment benefits on the part of all persons whose religious convictions are the cause of their unemployment. This is not a case in which an employee’s religious convictions serve to make him a nonproductive member of society. . . . Finally, nothing we say today constrains the States to adopt any particular form or scheme of unemployment compensation. Our holding today is only that South Carolina may not constitutionally apply the eligibility provisions so as to constrain a worker to abandon his religious convictions respecting the day of rest. This holding but reaffirms a principle that we announced a decade and a half ago, namely that no State may ‘exclude individual Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Baptists, Jews, Methodists, Non-believers, Presbyterians, or the members of any other faith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits of public welfare legislation.’ . . .
 

Excerpt: Dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan II

Today’s decision is disturbing both in its rejection of existing precedent and in its implications for the future. . . .

In the present case all that the state court has done is to apply . . . accepted principles [under the South Carolina unemployment compensation law]. Since virtually all of the mills in the Spartanburg area were operating on a six-day week, the appellant was ‘unavailable for work,’ and thus ineligible for benefits, when personal considerations prevented her from accepting employment on a full-time basis in the industry and locality in which she had worked. The fact that these personal considerations sprang from her religious convictions was wholly without relevance to the state court’s application of the law. Thus in no proper sense can it be said that the State discriminated against the appellant on the basis of her religious beliefs or that she was denied benefits because she was a Seventh-day Adventist. She was denied benefits just as any other claimant would be denied benefits who was not ‘available for work’ for personal reasons. . . .

What the Court is holding is that if the State chooses to condition unemployment compensation on the applicant’s availability for work, it is constitutionally compelled to carve out an exception—and to provide benefits—for those whose unavailability is due to their religious convictions. . . .

[T]he implications of the present decision are far more troublesome than its apparently narrow dimensions would indicate at first glance. The meaning of today’s holding . . . is that the State must furnish unemployment benefits to one who is unavailable for work if the unavailability stems from the exercise of religious convictions. The State, in other words, must single out for financial assistance those whose behavior is religiously motivated, even though it denies such assistance to others whose identical behavior (in this case, inability to work no Saturdays) is not religiously motivated.

It has been suggested that such singling out of religious conduct for special treatment may violate the constitutional limitations on state action. . . . My own view, however, is that at least under the circumstances of this case it would be a permissible accommodation of religion for the State, if it chose to do so, to create an exception to its eligibility requirements for persons like the appellant. The constitutional obligation of ‘neutrality’ . . . is not so narrow a channel that the slightest deviation from an absolutely straight course leads to condemnation. There are too many instances in which no such course can be charted, too many areas in which the pervasive activities of the State justify some special provision for religion to prevent it from being submerged by an all-embracing secularism. The State violates its obligation of neutrality when, for example, it mandates a daily religious exercise in its public schools, with all the attendant pressures on the school children that such an exercise entails. . . . But there is, I believe, enough flexibility in the Constitution to permit a legislative judgment accommodating an unemployment compensation law to the exercise of religious beliefs such as appellant’s.

For very much the same reasons, however, I cannot subscribe to the conclusion that the State is constitutionally compelled to carve out an exception to its general rule of eligibility in the present case. Those situations in which the Constitution may require special treatment on account of religion are, in my view, few and far between, and this view is amply supported by the course of constitutional litigation in this area. . . . Such compulsion in the present case is particularly inappropriate in light of the indirect, remote, and insubstantial effect of the decision below on the exercise of appellant’s religion and in light of the direct financial assistance to religion that today’s decision requires.
 

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