On June 16, the U.S. Supreme Court kicked back Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany v. Harris to the New York Court of Appeals (the state’s real supreme court). SCOTUS told the New York court to reconsider its earlier decision in light of last week’s ruling in Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission.

In Catholic Charities, the Supreme Court slapped down the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which tendentiously tried to pretend that Catholic Charities could not claim a tax exemption available to religious institutions because its work is “not primarily for religious purposes.” In Roman Catholic Diocese v. Harris, it instructed New York’s top court to reconsider its decision denying exemptions to the plaintiff to pay for abortion under its health insurance coverage. The New York court must determine whether the criterion for exemptions in Empire State law is “too narrow” (and thus violating the Catholic Charities precedent).

It’s telling that both defendant states are very blue. In the past few years they have tried to build very narrow exceptions to their policies to promote abortion and contraception or to penalize the Church. You hear it when you listen to liberal politicians: they like to talk about the “right to worship” rather than the “right to free exercise of religion.” Why?

Because their vision of “religion” is reduced to what you do on Sundays behind closed church doors. Religion for them is cultic activity; whatever you do that touches the secular world is, in their mind, secular, even if what you are doing is sponsored by a religious organization and motivated by religious intentions. It’s what George Weigel was getting at in a recent essay when he argued “public ≠ state” (see here). Truth be told, the fact that something is publicly accessible also does not mean it ceases to be religious. The Church’s contact with the public square does not bleach out faith.

In recent years this attempt to narrow the meaning of religion has largely been driven by the proselytizing faith of pro-abortionism. We had previews of this during the fight over Obamacare and the prolonged harassment by the Obama Administration of nuns to force them to pay for abortifacients. After the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision (private companies cannot be forced against their religious convictions to cover abortion under employee health insurance) many blue states doubled down by trying to make abortion coverage required coverage as far as they could under employee health insurance plans permitted in their states. That’s what New York did in 2017, which was the genesis of the Diocese of Albany case. Since the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe, this has only grown more intense.

Another factor in the attempt to narrow the definition of religion was the power grab in many states in the name of COVID. The narrower you define what is essential to “worship,” the more power little Caesars have to regulate it. Remember that there were states sending out instructions suggesting hymn singing was bad for public health (unless if done in a Nevada casino).

But while abortion and COVID may be the latest instantiations of a cramped definition of “religion,” the process has been going on a long time. Two sectors in which the Church has long been active — healthcare and education — are often targets. Paradoxically, although hospitals and universities were both the creations of the Catholic Church, secularists have long argued for the state’s right to control them. That the Catholic Church has a significant presence in the American healthcare system especially sticks in many secularists’ craws. They believe that institutions that adhere to the bishops’ “Ethical and Religious Directives” for healthcare institutions provide substandard care because they won’t perform abortions or sterilizations nor mutilate children. In the secularist mindset, those things are “standard” medical care that a facility should have to provide, especially in more remote areas where it might be the only healthcare facility around. Failure to do so is not, in their view, religious witness, because in their view “religious healthcare” is an oxymoron; there can be only one standard of healthcare, and that is what they say it is.

Religious schools have also been in the crosshairs of such targeted discrimination. The presence of religion has been taken as contaminating everything the school does when it comes to state financial support, but a narrow definition of religion can be used as a cudgel to regulate the institutions. That phenomenon is even worse regarding homeschooling because parents who might be religiously motivated, but aren’t a religious institution per se, are often targets of intrusive state supervision. Of course, we can trace that all the way back 100 years to Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the landmark 1925 Supreme Court parents’ rights case where Oregon nativists got slapped down in their effort to use compulsory schooling laws to say only public schools met their requirements (see here).

Knowing New York, that state is likely to obfuscate, split hairs, and drag its feet to avoid compliance with the Catholic Charities decision and admit how it wants to define religion is unconstitutionally too restrictive. But the Supreme Court sent it a message, one religious persons of whatever persuasion need to insist upon wherever usurpation of free exercise rights rears its head.