The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case on Friday to determine whether states can provide grant money to religious institutions as they do to secular organizations.
Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Mo., applied for state funds to resurface its preschool playground. Though the church’s application was ranked highly, it was rejected from the Playground Scrap Tire Surface Material Grant Program.
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources said in a letter that a state constitutional provision prohibits state money from going to support religious institutions.
The provision states that “no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, or denomination of religion.”
The church challenged the application of the provision and two lower federal courts upheld the decision of the state.
The Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian nonprofit organization, is representing Trinity and filed a brief to the Supreme Court.
“No state can define religious neutrality as treating religious organizations worse than everyone else,” said ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman in a statement on the organization’s website. “That isn’t neutrality; it’s a hostility to religion that violates the First Amendment. That’s the primary issue that the Supreme Court will address. In this case, the state should not have excluded this preschool from the recycled tire program simply because a church operates the school.”
The Supreme Court took the case on Friday and is expected to be heard by March and decided by July.
