Another win for religious liberty at the Supreme Court

For all the passionate intensity and public debate that have surrounded church-state issues in recent years, the Supreme Court has been surprisingly unanimous when it decides cases about them. The most recent example of a unanimous opinion came this month. In Advocate Healthcare Network v. Stapleton, the Court issued an 8-0 decision authored by Justice Kagan, in which the Court recognized that churches, and not government bureaucrats, get to decide whether hospital ministries are part of the larger church body.  

The question before the Court in Advocate can be obscure for someone unfamiliar with the federal law that governs pension plans, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (commonly referred to as ERISA). Federal pension law is not something that comes up in casual conversation.

{mosads}But the nutshell version of the case is this: Over the last four years, a group of class-action lawyers have brought nearly 100 lawsuits against Catholic and Protestant hospitals around the country, arguing that these hospitals violated federal law by participating in nonprofit church pension plans for their employees, rather than offering lower-benefit pension plans utilized by large for-profit corporations like Exxon and Walmart.  

The outcome of the case touched on a crucial question: who gets to define what qualifies as a “church”? Does the IRS get to decide what activities qualify as a ministry?

The Supreme Court got it right on Monday, rejecting the claims that religiously run nonprofit hospitals must participate in for-profit pension plans. Churches — not government bureaucrats and certainly not ambulance chasers — should decide whether hospitals are part of the church. And it is simple common sense that nuns, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, seminaries, nursing homes, and orphanages are a central part of their churches, including their mission to care for others. 

My law firm, Becket, filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the hospitals, arguing that attempting to deny nonprofit pension plans to religious hospitals invites a host of constitutional problems under the First Amendment. The Court agreed that ruling against the hospitals would put the IRS in the constitutionally problematic position of having to decide just who is and isn’t a church.

So why is this decision important? Because if the legal definition of ‘church’ is so myopically narrow as to mean just a house of worship, protected religious activity in this country would become a matter of private belief alone, rendering a good part of the First Amendment meaningless.  

The reality is that religious belief and religious ceremonies are not the sum total of religious experience. Serving others — works of charity — are core parts of what churches do, not afterthoughts. Feeding the hungry, sheltering the refugee, caring for the sick, comforting the grieving, parenting the orphan — all of these ministries are crucial church activities.  

The Court’s decision in Advocate now joins a growing line of unanimous decisions that protect individuals of all faiths seeking to live out their faith, including  three Becket cases: Zubik v. Burwell in 2016, when the Court similarly protected religious ministries like the Little Sisters of the Poor; Holt v. Hobbs in 2015, when the Supreme Court upheld the right of a Muslim prisoner to grow a beard for religious reasons; and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC in 2012, when the Court protected the right of a church to choose its own ministers without interference from the government.  

Faith for most religious Americans means being out in the community serving with and for others, particularly the least among us. Thanks to this ruling, these hospital ministries can continue following their faith, helping their communities, and providing generous pension plans for their employees.

Eric Rassbach is deputy general counsel at Becket, a nonprofit religious liberty law firm that defends people of all faiths.

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