The state has no business inside a religious court

The story reported by National Review is brief in its facts and enormous in its implications. A state court has commanded an Orthodox Jewish citizen to go before his own rabbinical tribunal and demand that it reverse a religious ruling. The Supreme Court has now been asked, on an emergency basis, to put a stop to it. I confess that when I consider this posture — a civil magistrate directing the internal deliberations of a faith community — I find myself reaching for the same language I used when drafting the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: the opinions of men are not the proper subject of civil government, and the moment a government undertakes to coerce them, it has overstepped the only legitimate ground it ever possessed.

The architecture of religious liberty, as I understood it and as the better angels of our constitutional tradition have affirmed it, rests on a clean division of jurisdictions. The civil magistrate governs conduct that injures others in the secular world; the community of faith governs the conscience and the internal discipline of its own members. These two realms may coexist — must coexist, if a republic is to be worthy of the name — only so long as each respects the boundary. A court order that reaches inside a rabbinical proceeding and instructs its outcome does not respect that boundary; it abolishes it.

I am mindful that the details of this particular dispute, whatever private grievance gave rise to it, have not been fully laid before me. National Review provides only the lead, and I will not pretend to reconstruct the record. But the principle does not wait on the particulars. If the state may compel a citizen to perform a religious act — even the act of filing a petition within his own faith system — then no religious practice is safe from the long reach of civil power. The precedent, once established, does not confine itself to cases where we approve of the outcome.

There is, I will admit, a genuine tension here that honest minds must acknowledge. Religious tribunals can themselves become instruments of coercion over individual members. A person trapped in an unjust religious proceeding, with no recourse, is not free in the fullest sense. The republic has a legitimate interest in ensuring that no institution — ecclesiastical or secular — becomes a private government from which citizens cannot escape. But the remedy for that danger is not for the civil court to step inside the faith community and command its deliberations. The remedy is to ensure that the civil law remains available to vindicate secular rights — property, contract, the physical safety of the person — without conscripting religious bodies as instruments of the state's will.

The Supreme Court's emergency docket is precisely the instrument the Constitution provides for moments when a lower court has, in the urgency of a particular dispute, lost sight of a foundational principle. I can only hope the Court seizes this occasion to draw the line with clarity: civil authority governs civil matters; the court of conscience belongs to the citizen and to whatever community of faith the citizen has freely chosen. To order otherwise is not justice — it is the old tyranny in a new robe.