c. 1996 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS (RNS)-City government said the old Spanish-style Catholic church that held only 350 worshipers was too beautiful to replace, even though the 1,300 families of St. Peter’s in growing Boerne, Texas, were having to gather for Mass in a nearby meeting hall.

But in a religious liberty case with national church-state implications, a federal appeals court in New Orleans this week sided with church officials who want to knock down the 83-year-old St. Peter’s for a bigger building.

More than historic preservation was at issue.

The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling issued Tuesday (Jan. 23), upheld the constitutionality of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The act gives religious practice special consideration when it collides with thousands of otherwise neutral laws governing everything from employment to zoning.

A lower court in Texas had ruled the act unconstitutional.

Religious groups that helped pass the act in 1993 were anxiously awaiting the decision, said Melissa Rogers, associate general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs in Washington, a watchdog group on religious liberty decisions.

It marked the first time the constitutionality of the act was considered at the federal appellate level, she said.

Essentially, the act requires that local, state and federal governments give religious practice special consideration when laws of “general applicability” place a burden on religion.

When that happens, government has to prove it has a “compelling interest” in applying the law, and that it is taking the “least restrictive” path in doing so.

The act thus gives special consideration to religious practice across the whole landscape of modern life, said Douglas Laycock, a University of Texas law professor who helped argue the case in New Orleans.

It protects Amish buggy drivers opposed for religious reasons to putting orange triangles on their buggies, he said. And it protects-or, he said, ought to protect-the bankrupt couple in Minnesota who seek to continue making donations to their church over creditors’ objections.

A bankruptcy judge in that case has ruled the act unconstitutional, and an appeal is pending.

In the case of St. Peter’s in the small town outside San Antonio, it meant that the Boerne City Council’s interest in historic preservation was not so compelling as to save the church, which Archbishop Patrick Flores wanted replaced with a larger place of worship.

“We’re not in the business of preserving buildings,” Flores told the San Antonio Express in an interview last year. “We’re in the business of serving people and we need to be free to respond to their needs.”

Congress passed the act in 1993, prodded by an extraordinary coalition of religious groups that included conservative Protestants, Jews and Muslims, as well as the the American Civil Liberties Union. The aim was to correct what some thought was increasing indifference to religion by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Three years earlier, the court upheld the denial of unemployment benefits to two men, members of the Native American Church in Oregon, who were fired for using the hallucinogenic drug peyote as part of a 1,000-year-old religious rite.

In doing so, the high court abandoned an earlier standard protecting religious practice. The justices held that so long as their intent was neutral, laws governing everyday life could legally impinge on religious practice as easily as other activity.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was designed to “make courts come up with some pretty good explanations for burdening religious practice in the future,” said Greg Baylor of the Center for Law and Religious Freedom in Annandale, Va.

“The act gives incredibly strong protection,” Rogers said. “It’s become a real bulwark against government intrusion in religious practice.”

MJP END NOLAN