Just over a year ago, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a major victory for religious liberty in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association. In the landmark 7-2 decision, the Court jettisoned the infamous Lemon test and found that established monuments, symbols, and practices that use religious symbols or references are presumed lawful.
The Lemon test, first used by the Court in the eponymous 1971 decision Lemon v. Kurtzman, wreaked havoc on religious freedom jurisprudence for nearly fifty years. Far from preserving religious freedom, it ushered in an era of subjective analysis, arbitrary results, and jurisprudence hostile to religion that often banished religious references from public practices, symbols, and monuments. In American Legion, however, the Court broke Lemon’s curse. As Justice Neil Gorsuch explained in his concurring opinion, “Lemon was a misadventure. It sought a ‘grand unified theory’ of the Establishment Clause but left us only a mess.”
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