Reynolds v. United States
The Supreme Court upheld the bigamy conviction of a Utah man who practiced polygamy as part of his Mormon faith, ruling that religious belief cannot excuse a person from obeying a valid criminal law.
The Court drew a lasting distinction between religious belief, which the First Amendment fully protects, and religiously motivated conduct, which government may still regulate and punish when it violates the law.
“Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices.”
The Court's core distinction between protected religious belief and regulable religious conduct.
How it got here: A territorial district court convicted Reynolds of bigamy; he appealed to the Supreme Court raising jury-selection, evidentiary, and religious-freedom objections.
The Case in Depth
What happened
George Reynolds, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Utah Territory, was indicted for bigamy after marrying a second wife while his first wife was still living. He argued that his church taught polygamy as a religious duty for male members, that he had church permission to marry again, and that he believed refusing to practice it would bring damnation.
The question before the Court
Could a Mormon man convicted of bigamy in the Utah Territory use his sincere religious belief in polygamy as a defense to the crime?
Why it matters
The decision meant Mormons in Utah and elsewhere could not avoid bigamy prosecution by pointing to their faith, reinforcing federal anti-polygamy laws. More broadly, it set a framework future courts used for over a century to separate protected religious belief from unprotected religiously motivated actions, shaping how far religious liberty claims can go against generally applicable laws.
What changes now
On rehearing, the Court discovered that the lower court's sentence had improperly included hard labor, which the underlying statute did not authorize. The Court vacated its earlier affirmance, reversed only on that narrow sentencing point, and sent the case back with instructions to enter a new sentence identical to the old one except without the hard-labor requirement. The core holding on religious belief and criminal conduct remained undisturbed.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Congress could regulate purely religious belief or opinion — it said that remains fully protected. The ruling addressed only the narrow question of whether religious motivation excuses an admittedly criminal act (bigamy), and the eventual reversal on rehearing concerned only a sentencing defect, not the underlying free-exercise holding.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Field
Justice Field agreed with the Court on every point except the admission of Amelia Jane Schofield's prior testimony from an earlier trial under a different indictment. He argued that the very authorities the Chief Justice cited to justify admitting that testimony actually showed the opposite conclusion, meaning no adequate foundation had been laid for using it as evidence.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first addressed several procedural challenges — the size of the grand jury, jury-selection disputes, and the admission of a missing witness's prior testimony — and found no reversible error in any of them, noting that findings on such factual disputes should not be overturned absent manifest error.
- Turning to the religious-liberty question, the Court looked to history, particularly Thomas Jefferson's writings on the Virginia statute for religious freedom and his 'wall of separation between church and State' letter, to determine what the First Amendment's free-exercise guarantee was meant to cover.
- From that history the Court drew a rule: the First Amendment protects religious belief and opinion absolutely, but Congress may still regulate and punish actions, even when those actions are religiously motivated, if the actions violate social duties or disrupt public order.
- Applying that rule, the Court reasoned that criminalizing polygamous marriage regulates conduct, not belief, and used hypotheticals (a religious duty to commit human sacrifice, or to burn a widow on her husband's funeral pyre) to illustrate that religious motivation cannot excuse an otherwise criminal act.
- Because Reynolds knowingly entered a second marriage while his first wife was alive, and the law forbade this regardless of religious motive, the Court held that his sincere religious belief in polygamy did not entitle him to acquittal, and the trial court's refusal to instruct otherwise was correct.
- The Court also found no improper appeal to jury passion in the trial judge's remarks about the social consequences of polygamy, treating those remarks as a permissible reminder of the jury's duty rather than an inflammatory appeal.