Written by Don Byrd
An appeals court in New Jersey has ruled unlawful capital improvement grants awarded to the Princeton Theological Seminary and Beth Medrash Govoha (a Yeshiva), because the state funds will be used in support of religious instruction. Even if the federal constitution may permit such funding, the court ruled, the state “has a rich tradition” of protecting individual rights “more broadly” than federal law requires.
Article I, Paragraph 3 of the New Jersey Constitution states that “no person shall be . . . obliged to pay tithes, taxes, or other rates for building or repairing any church or churches, place or places of worship, or for the maintenance of any minister or ministry . . .” Plaintiffs argued successfully that because the seminary and the yeshiva are sectarian institutions, the constitutional provision disallows the state grants.
Here is an excerpt from the opinion, in which the court describes the importance of a 1978 NJ Supreme Court case, Resnick v. East Brunswick Township Board of Education. In Resnick, the plaintiffs challenged a school’s practice of allowing religious organizations, along with other local groups, to rent public school facilities below cost.
The majority opinion in Resnick ruled that Article I, Paragraph 3, when “fairly read, specifically prohibits the use of tax revenues for the maintenance or support of a religious group.” The majority cautioned that the provision should not be carried to “an extreme,” and the State need not withhold police or fire protection because of a property’s sectarian use. The majority provided no further analysis of the issues under Article I, Paragraph 3, other than to repeat its holding under the provision as signifying that “the state constitution does require that religious organizations be singled out among nonprofit groups in general as being ineligible for certain benefits which are partly subsidized by tax-generated funds[.]”
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it was the sectarian nature of the groups renting the space for such instruction that was of primary concern to the Court in striking down the subsidized arrangement.
Here, unlike other broad-based liberal arts colleges that received grants, both the Yeshiva and the Seminary are sectarian institutions. Their facilities funded by the Department’s grants indisputably will be used substantially if not exclusively for religious instruction. The planned uses by these sectarian institutions clearly fall within the prohibitory ambit of Resnick.
At first glance, it may seem as if government funding for building improvements, if awarded through a religiously neutral process, would not pose a threat to church-state separation. In fact, awarding money directly to sectarian institutions for use on facilities that further their religious mission does undermine the wall of separation.
As the BJC’s Brent Walker put it in a 2013 column, “Simply put, we do not allow taxpayer dollars to build churches; we should not allow taxpayer dollars to be used to rebuild churches either.”
An earlier version of this blog post had the yeshiva’s name misspelled.
