The case also established the Lemon test for establishment clause cases. The landmark Supreme Court case Lemon v. Kurtzman , U. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island enacted legislation permitting tax-funded reimbursement to church-affiliated schools, covering expenses such as teacher salaries and the costs of textbooks and other instructional materials.
Because educational costs were rapidly increasing, subjecting parochial schools to increasing budget constraints, the states offered financial assistance programs in an effort to secure the quality of education at church-affiliated schools. After district courts delivered conflicting decisions, the Supreme Court granted certiorari and consolidated the cases for review. Chief Justice Warren E.
After noting the vague constitutional language of the First Amendment, the Court turned to the question of creating a workable doctrine to determine whether an establishment had taken place. To discern a violation, the majority identified and combined three distinct approaches previously used in establishment clause controversies:. While the Lemon test is not used by the Court in every Establishment Clause case, and this test has been criticized by some justices on the Court, the Court has often used the Lemon test to determine Establishment Clause issues.
Lemon was a consolidation of two separate First Amendment challenges to Pennsylvania and Rhode Island statutes that provided state aid to parochial schools. Both statutes provided aid in the form of salary supplements to teachers of non-religious subjects at non-public schools, and the Pennsylvania statute further provided direct aid to non-public schools in the form of textbooks and instructional materials.
Our prior holdings do not call for total separation between church and state; total separation is not possible in an absolute sense. Some relationship between government and religious organizations is inevitable. Zorach v. Clauson , U. Verner Indeed, under the statutory exemption before us in Walz , the state had a continuing burden to ascertain that the exempt property was, in fact, being used for religious worship.
In order to determine whether the government entanglement with religion is excessive, we must examine the character and purposes of the institutions that are benefited, the nature of the aid that the state provides, and the resulting relationship between the government and the religious authority. Here we find that both statutes foster an impermissible degree of entanglement.
The district court made extensive findings on the grave potential for excessive entanglement that inheres in the religious character and purpose of the Roman Catholic elementary schools of Rhode Island, to date the sole beneficiaries of the Rhode Island Salary Supplement Act. The church schools involved in the program are located close to parish churches. This understandably permits convenient access for religious exercises, since instruction in faith and morals is part of the total educational process.
The school buildings contain identifying religious symbols such as crosses on the exterior and crucifixes, and religious paintings and statues either in the classrooms or hallways. Although only approximately 30 minutes a day are devoted to direct religious instruction, there are religiously oriented extracurricular activities. Approximately two-thirds of the teachers in these schools are nuns of various religious orders. Their dedicated efforts provide an atmosphere in which religious instruction and religious vocations are natural and proper parts of life in such schools.
Indeed, as the district court found, the role of teaching nuns in enhancing the religious atmosphere has led the parochial school authorities to attempt to maintain a one-to-one ratio between nuns and lay teachers in all schools, rather than to permit some to be staffed almost entirely by lay teachers. In short, parochial schools involve substantial religious activity and purpose. The substantial religious character of these church-related schools gives rise to entangling church-state relationships of the kind the Religion Clauses sought to avoid.
The dangers and corresponding entanglements are enhanced by the particular form of aid that the Rhode Island Act provides. Our decisions from Everson to Allen have permitted the states to provide church-related schools with secular, neutral, or nonideological services, facilities, or materials. Bus transportation, school lunches, public health services, and secular textbooks supplied in common to all students were not thought to offend the Establishment Clause.
We note that the dissenters in Allen seemed chiefly concerned with the pragmatic difficulties involved in ensuring the truly secular content of the textbooks provided at state expense. In Allen , the Court refused to make assumptions, on a meager record, about the religious content of the textbooks that the state would be asked to provide.
We cannot, however, refuse here to recognize that teachers have a substantially different ideological character from books. We cannot ignore the danger that a teacher under religious control and discipline poses to the separation of the religious from the purely secular aspects of pre-college education.
The conflict of functions inheres in the situation. In our view, the record shows these dangers are present to a substantial degree. The Rhode Island Roman Catholic elementary schools are under the general supervision of the Bishop of Providence and his appointed representative, the diocesan superintendent of schools.
Religious authority necessarily pervades the school system. Several teachers testified, however, that they did not inject religion into their secular classes. And the district court found that religious values did not necessarily affect the content of the secular instruction. But what has been recounted suggests the potential, if not actual, hazards of this form of state aid.
The teacher is employed by a religious organization, subject to the direction and discipline of religious authorities, and works in a system dedicated to rearing children in a particular faith. These controls are not lessened by the fact that most of the lay teachers are of the Catholic faith.
We do not assume, however, that parochial school teachers will be unsuccessful in their attempts to segregate their religious belief from their secular educational responsibilities. But the potential for impermissible fostering of religion is present. The Rhode Island Legislature has not, and could not, provide state aid on the basis of a mere assumption that secular teachers under religious discipline can avoid conflicts. The state must be certain, given the Religion Clauses, that subsidized teachers do not inculcate religion—indeed, the state here has undertaken to do so.
To ensure that no trespass occurs, the state has therefore carefully conditioned its aid with pervasive restrictions. An eligible recipient must teach only those courses that are offered in the public schools and use only those texts and materials that are found in the public schools. In addition, the teacher must not engage in teaching any course in religion.
A comprehensive, discriminating, and continuing state surveillance will inevitably be required to ensure that these restrictions are obeyed and the First Amendment otherwise respected. Unlike a book, a teacher cannot be inspected once so as to determine the extent and intent of his or her personal beliefs and subjective acceptance of the limitations imposed by the First Amendment. These prophylactic contacts will involve excessive and enduring entanglement between state and church.
There is another area of entanglement in the Rhode Island program that gives concern. The statute excludes teachers employed by nonpublic schools whose average per-pupil expenditures on secular education equal or exceed the comparable figures for public schools. This kind of state inspection and evaluation of the religious content of a religious organization is fraught with the sort of entanglement that the Constitution forbids.
A broader base of entanglement of yet a different character is presented by the divisive political potential of these state programs. In a community where such a large number of pupils are served by church-related schools, it can be assumed that state assistance will entail considerable political activity. Alton J. Lemon was one of the residents and taxpayers who challenged these laws in federal court, claiming they violated the First Amendment's prohibition against state establishment of religion.
After his suit was dismissed by the federal district court, he appealed to the U.
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