Freedom of Religion

The First Amendment protects religious freedom through two separate clauses: the Establishment Clause, which prevents the government from officially establishing or favoring a religion, and the Free Exercise Clause, which limits the government's ability to ban or specifically target someone's religious practice. This protection has a real limit: the Supreme Court held in Employment Division v. Smith (1990) that a neutral law that applies to everyone equally can still incidentally burden a specific religious practice without violating the Free Exercise Clause, and these two clauses can pull in different directions in a specific case, since accommodating one person's religious practice can sometimes look, to others, like the government favoring that religion.

This explanation is AI-generated and can occasionally be wrong. 🚩 Report