The Constitution resembles a basket of kittens. It is a tangle of fuzzy edicts pushing, pulling and scratching to test at each others boundaries. For most of American history, people relied on the OG of religious liberty protections the Free Exercise Clause in the First Amendment. It says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

What does the Free Exercise Clause actually promise? Constitutional lawyers can argue about it for days on end not only because many are nitpickers by nature but because these few words offer scant guidance.

In the first 200 years, the Free Exercise Clause was interpreted cautiously. Clearly the government could not specifically target religious groups or compel people to join a church. But otherwise, if people of faith objected to a neutral law, they had to asklegislators forexemptions. People who challenged laws in court using a religious freedom argument tended to be unsuccessful, as law professor Michael McConnell explained in a history of these cases for the Harvard Law Review.

That all changed in 1963 with Sherbert v. Verner, a Supreme Court case involving a woman who lost her job because her religion prohibited her from working on Saturdays. Adeil Sherbert filed for unemployment benefits, but the state of South Carolina denied her, saying it was her own fault she couldnt find work.

By that time, the justices had significantlydeveloped theirview of civil rights law. Rulings in Korematsu v. United States the Japanese internment case and later in Brown v. Board of Education established a procedure for reviewing laws in conflict with peoplesrights.

First, the government had to prove there were very important goals at stake. Then it had to prove that there was no good way to accomplish those goals except to infringe on peoples rights with such a law. In legalese, laws had to serve a compelling interest and also had to be narrowly tailored to serve that interest.

This standard became known as strict scrutiny, and it offers the legal systems strongest protection, used against laws that interfere with constitutional rights.

Laws that discriminate based on race are subject to strict scrutiny because the14th Amendment promises the equal protection of the laws. Laws that limit certain kinds of speech are also subject to strict scrutiny because the First Amendment promises there will be no laws abridging the freedom of speech. They are presumed unconstitutional unless the governmentshowsthey are extremely important and necessary.

In 1963, the Supreme Court decided in Sherbert v. Verner that laws infringing on the exercise of religion should also be examined with strict scrutiny.

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GovBeat: How religious freedom laws were praised, then hated, then forgotten, then, finally, resurrected