By Bob Allen / Baptist News Global
This is an abbreviated version of the story. For the full story, click here.
A church playground in Missouri has become the battleground for the next big religious liberty case coming before the U.S. Supreme Court.
This fall the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Trinity Lutheran of Columbia v. Pauley, a case that began in 2012 when the state rejected the church’s application to resurface its preschool playground with repurposed rubber from old tires.
Missouri officials said the church did not qualify for the program because of a provision in the state constitution “that no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion.”
Holly Hollman, general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said financial support was at the very core of what it meant to be an “established” church in colonial America.
“The move toward disestablishment was led by colonial Baptists and other religious dissenters who suffered at the hands of the government under establishments of religion,” Hollman said in a recent symposium about the case on Supreme Court of the United States Blog. …
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The BJC has filed a brief in the case arguing that the ban on government establishment of religion does not demonstrate hostility to religion but serves religious liberty by keeping church and state separate.
The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, meanwhile, filed a brief claiming that excluding churches from a program open to other nonprofits amounts to discrimination in government aid. …
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