Lemon v. Kurtzman
The Supreme Court struck down two state programs that used public funds to pay for teachers' salaries and secular instruction at religious schools, ruling that Pennsylvania's direct payments to Catholic and other church-run schools and Rhode Island's teacher salary supplements both crossed the constitutional line separating church and state.
The decision created a lasting three-part test for deciding whether a law violates the ban on government establishment of religion, requiring courts to ask whether a law has a secular purpose, whether it mainly helps or hurts religion, and whether it creates too much ongoing entanglement between government and religious institutions.
“We hold that both statutes are unconstitutional.”
The Court's core holding striking down both states' aid programs to religious schools.
How it got here: Separate three-judge federal courts in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island reached opposite results on similar school-aid laws, and both sides appealed those rulings directly to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Pennsylvania paid nonpublic schools directly for the cost of teachers' salaries, textbooks, and materials in secular subjects, while Rhode Island paid a 15% salary supplement directly to teachers at nonpublic elementary schools. Almost all of the participating schools were Roman Catholic. Taxpayers, citizens, and civil-liberties groups sued in both states, arguing the programs unconstitutionally aided religion.
The question before the Court
Could Pennsylvania and Rhode Island use tax money to pay part of the salaries of teachers at religious elementary and secondary schools?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that both states' programs crossed the constitutional line, even though each law had a genuine secular purpose of improving education. Because the participating schools were overwhelmingly religious in character, making sure subsidized teachers kept religion out of their secular teaching would require the kind of ongoing, intrusive government monitoring the Constitution forbids.
The Court found this problem in both states, worse in Pennsylvania because its money went directly to the schools rather than to parents, requiring detailed government audits of school finances. The Court also flagged a second danger: yearly appropriations for religious schools could stir up political division along religious lines, an evil the First Amendment's establishment ban was meant to prevent.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Religious schools and the families who send children to them lost access to two forms of state financial help, and state governments nationwide gained a clear (if demanding) legal framework — later known as the 'Lemon test' — for deciding whether any law aiding religious institutions is constitutional, shaping decades of later litigation over vouchers, tax credits, and school aid.
What changes now
The Rhode Island Salary Supplement Act was permanently invalidated and its enforcement enjoined. Pennsylvania's reimbursement program was reversed and sent back to the lower court for further proceedings consistent with the ruling, meaning the State could no longer make payments to schools under the statute as written. The decision's three-part test became the standard framework courts used afterward to evaluate government aid to religious institutions and other church-state disputes.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly declined to decide whether the states' restrictions were enough to keep the primary effect of the aid programs from advancing religion, resolving the cases on entanglement grounds alone. It also did not reach equal-protection claims that the programs discriminated based on race or religion in school admissions and hiring.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Douglas
Justice Douglas, joined by Justice Black, agreed with the result but went further, tracing the history of Protestant-Catholic conflict over public schooling and arguing that any state aid to sectarian schools inevitably supports the religious mission that is the schools' very reason for existing, regardless of bookkeeping distinctions between secular and religious expenses.
Concurrence — Justice Brennan
Justice Brennan agreed both statutes were unconstitutional but wrote separately to apply his own three-part framework from earlier opinions, emphasizing the long history of state constitutional bans on aiding sectarian schools and arguing that direct subsidies to sectarian institutions differ fundamentally from the tax exemptions upheld in Walz.
Dissent in part — Justice White
“But, while the decision of the Court is legitimate, it is surely quite wrong in overturning the Pennsylvania and Rhode Island statutes on the ground that they amount to an establishment of religion forbidden by the First Amendment.”White's objection to the majority striking down Rhode Island's teacher salary program.
Justice White concurred in the judgment reversing the Pennsylvania case but dissented from striking down Rhode Island's program, arguing the majority relied on unsupported assumptions that teachers could not separate secular from religious instruction and created a 'paradox' where states are damned for entangling themselves whether or not they police compliance.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court identified three cumulative requirements drawn from its earlier cases for judging whether a law violates the ban on government establishment of religion: the law must have a secular purpose, its main effect must neither help nor hurt religion, and it must not create 'excessive government entanglement' between government and religion.
- The Court found both states' stated purposes secular — improving the quality of education — so it did not need to resolve whether the programs' primary effect advanced religion, because it concluded both programs failed on the entanglement question regardless.
- Applying the entanglement inquiry to Rhode Island, the Court reasoned that because the participating Catholic schools were pervasively religious institutions, ensuring that subsidized teachers did not teach religion would require ongoing, intrusive state monitoring of individual teachers in a way it does not require for one-time inspections of textbooks.
- Applying the same inquiry to Pennsylvania, the Court found the entanglement problem worse because the aid went directly to the schools rather than to parents or students, requiring continuing state audits to separate 'secular' from 'religious' expenditures in the schools' own books.
- The Court added that recurring annual appropriations to support religious schools risked fostering political division along religious lines, which it treated as an additional and independent form of entanglement the Establishment Clause was meant to guard against.
- Weighing these entanglement concerns together, the Court concluded that both statutes' overall relationship between government and religious schools was excessive, even though each program had a genuine secular purpose.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Everson v. Board of Education (330 U.S. 1)
Unlike Everson's aid to parents for bus fares, Pennsylvania's aid went directly to religious schools themselves.
Reaffirms Board of Education v. Allen (392 U.S. 236)
The Court relied on Allen's approach but found these teacher-salary programs, unlike textbook loans, created excessive entanglement.
Reaffirms Walz v. Tax Commission (397 U.S. 664)
The Court adopted and built upon Walz's entanglement inquiry as a required part of Establishment Clause analysis.