In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, 582 U.S. 449 (2017), the Supreme Court held 7–2 that Missouri violated the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause when it denied a church a playground resurfacing grant solely because the applicant was a religious organization.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, concluded that a state cannot condition access to an otherwise available public benefit on an applicant giving up its religious identity.2Oyez. Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer The decision has since become the foundation for a broader rule limiting when states may exclude religious institutions from public funding programs.
The Grant Missouri Denied
Missouri’s Department of Natural Resources ran the Scrap Tire Surface Material Grant Program, which reimbursed qualifying organizations for the cost of installing playground surfaces made from recycled tires.3Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Scrap Tire Surface Material Grants The program served two goals at once: keeping scrap tires out of landfills and replacing hard playground surfaces with shock-absorbing rubber.
Trinity Lutheran Church operated a preschool and daycare called the Learning Center. In 2012, it applied to resurface the Learning Center’s gravel playground. The application ranked fifth out of forty-four submissions, and the department planned to fund fourteen projects. The church qualified on the merits. The department rejected it anyway, applying a blanket policy of excluding religious organizations from the grant program.4Supreme Court of the United States. Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer – Opinion
Free Exercise vs. Missouri’s No-Aid Clause
The denial set up a direct clash between two constitutional provisions. The First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause bars the government from penalizing organizations or individuals for practicing their religion.5Constitution Annotated. U.S. Constitution – First Amendment Article I, Section 7 of the Missouri Constitution states that no public money “shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion.”6Missouri Revisor of Statutes. Missouri Constitution Article I Section 7 – Public Aid for Religious Purposes
Provisions like Missouri’s appear in roughly thirty-seven state constitutions. They are commonly called Blaine Amendments, after U.S. Representative James Blaine of Maine, who proposed a similar federal amendment in the 1870s that passed the House but failed in the Senate. Many states adopted their own versions during that era or built comparable language into later revisions.
Trinity Lutheran’s argument was that whatever Missouri’s no-aid provision meant for direct religious subsidies, it could not justify shutting a church out of a competition for a secular safety grant open to everyone else. The federal district court dismissed the lawsuit, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court took the case.
What the Court Decided
The Court reversed 7–2. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined in full by Justices Kennedy, Alito, and Kagan. Justices Thomas and Gorsuch joined the opinion except for a single footnote. Justice Breyer concurred only in the result. Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg dissented.2Oyez. Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer
The holding was direct: denying a public benefit to an otherwise qualified applicant based solely on its religious character violates the Free Exercise Clause.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer Missouri could not identify an interest strong enough to survive the strict scrutiny that religious discrimination triggers.
Why Missouri Lost
Roberts built the majority opinion around one key distinction. Missouri did not deny the grant because Trinity Lutheran planned to use the money for anything devotional. Rubber playground surfacing has no religious function. The state denied the grant because of what the church was, not what it planned to do. That, the Court held, penalized the church for its religious identity.
The opinion drew on earlier cases holding that the government cannot force someone to choose between a public benefit and a constitutionally protected right. Roberts compared the situation to McDaniel v. Paty, where the Court struck down a Tennessee law barring clergy from serving as state legislators. In both cases, the state offered a benefit conditioned on the applicant shedding a religious character. The Court found that bargain constitutionally unacceptable.4Supreme Court of the United States. Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer – Opinion
Because the exclusion targeted religious identity, the Court applied strict scrutiny. Under that standard, a state must show its policy serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to it. Missouri argued that its no-aid provision was that compelling interest. The Court disagreed. A state’s decision to separate church and state more strictly than the federal Establishment Clause requires does not justify penalizing the free exercise of religion.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer
The Footnote That Didn’t Hold
One footnote in the majority opinion generated more debate than most of the surrounding text. Footnote 3 stated: “This case involves express discrimination based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing. We do not address religious uses of funding or other forms of discrimination.”4Supreme Court of the United States. Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer – Opinion Only four justices joined it (Roberts, Kennedy, Alito, and Kagan). Thomas and Gorsuch refused to sign on, taking the position that discrimination based on religious use is no less unconstitutional than discrimination based on religious status.
The footnote set the reach of the ruling. Read broadly, Trinity Lutheran meant religious organizations could not be excluded from generally available public benefits. Read narrowly through Footnote 3, it addressed little beyond playground rubber. Later cases resolved that question in favor of the broader reading.
The Dissent
Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ginsburg, dissented. She argued the majority broke from a long tradition of permitting governments to decline to fund religious institutions even while funding comparable secular ones. The dissent distinguished between the government actively interfering with religious practice, which the Free Exercise Clause forbids, and the government simply choosing not to subsidize religion, which she read the Constitution to permit.
Sotomayor warned the ruling would lead to more direct public funding of religious activities and said the Court was “profoundly” changing the relationship between religious institutions and the state.2Oyez. Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer Missouri’s no-aid provision, in her view, reflected not hostility to religion but a reasonable effort to keep government out of religious affairs.
What the Ruling Means Now
Trinity Lutheran’s reach expanded quickly through two later decisions.
In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), the Court struck down a Montana constitutional provision that barred religious schools from a state scholarship tax-credit program. Montana’s no-aid provision, like Missouri’s, excluded religious schools based on religious character. The Court held 5–4 that this triggered strict scrutiny and failed for the same reason Missouri’s policy had: a state’s interest in a stricter separation of church and state than the federal Constitution requires cannot justify singling out religious institutions.7Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue
Then, in Carson v. Makin (2022), the Court took up the exact question Footnote 3 had left open. Maine ran a tuition assistance program for families in rural districts without their own public high school. The program paid tuition at approved private schools but required participating schools to be “nonsectarian,” excluding religious schools that integrated faith into their curriculum. Maine argued this was a restriction on religious use of public funds rather than religious status, and therefore fell outside Trinity Lutheran.8Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Carson v. Makin
The Court rejected that argument 6–3. Roberts, writing again for the majority, held that “the prohibition on status-based discrimination under the Free Exercise Clause is not a permission to engage in use-based discrimination.”9Supreme Court of the United States. Carson v. Makin – Opinion Carson effectively erased the line Footnote 3 had tried to preserve.
Taken together, the three decisions produced a clear rule. Once a state makes a benefit available to private secular organizations or individuals, it cannot exclude religious counterparts either because of who they are or because of what they teach. The Blaine Amendment provisions still on the books in roughly thirty-seven state constitutions now face serious constitutional constraints when applied to deny religious organizations access to public programs. A dispute that began over recycled tire chips on a preschool playground became the starting point for one of the most consequential shifts in Religion Clause law in a generation.