The decision provided the third of the big, unanimous conservative wins delivered by the Court today.

When are charitable works acts of faith? The Supreme Court had to decide that question this morning in Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission. The decision provided the third of the big, unanimous conservative wins delivered by the Court today, and it, too, was written by one of the Court’s three liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Religious organizations and institutions have long played an important role in American communities. In recognition of that, federal and state laws can and do provide some exceptions for those groups from generally applicable laws. There’s a tension between this and the First Amendment rules that religious groups can’t be barred from equal participation in secular benefits and can’t be singled out for discriminatory punishment, but the benefits specific to religious groups usually come in the form of tax exemptions and similar efforts to disentangle government from involvement in how religions are run. Thus, for example, the Court has recognized a fairly narrow “ministerial exception” under which employment and other laws cannot interfere with a religious group’s choice of ministers. The core personnel decisions of a church are free from government interference, even if the same decisions are pervasively regulated in secular institutions, because we don’t want the government running the churches.

In Catholic Charities Bureau, Wisconsin exempted from unemployment-compensation taxes those institutions that are “operated primarily for religious purposes.” While nobody disputed that Catholic Charities is religious, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that it is not operated primarily for religious purposes because it neither restricts its charity to Catholic recipients nor uses the opportunity to proselytize the Catholic faith. Catholic Charities argued that both of these practices are the results of Catholic doctrine rather than symptoms of a lack of religious purpose. As the U.S. Supreme Court concluded, it violates the First Amendment to discriminate against Catholics merely because the Catholic faith doesn’t treat charity and proselytization the same way that other denominations do:

Take, for instance, a law that treats a religious service of Jehovah’s Witnesses . . . differently than a religious service of other sects because the former is less ritualistic, more unorthodox, and less formal. Or consider an exemption that applies only to religious organizations that perform baptisms, engage in monotheistic worship, or hold services on Sunday. Such laws establish a preference for certain religions based on the content of their religious doctrine, namely, how they worship, hold services, or initiate members and whether they engage in those practices at all. . . .

Wisconsin’s exemption, as interpreted by its Supreme Court, thus grants a denominational preference by explicitly differentiating between religions based on theological practices. Indeed, petitioners’ eligibility for the exemption ultimately turns on inherently religious choices (namely, whether to proselytize or serve only co-religionists), not secular criteria that happen to have a disparate impact upon different religious organizations. . . . Much like a law exempting only those religious organizations that perform baptisms or worship on Sundays, an exemption that requires proselytization or exclusive service of co-religionists establishes a preference for certain religions based on the commands of their religious doctrine. . . . An exemption provided only to organizations that engage in proselytization or serve only co-religionists is not, on its face, available on an equal basis to all denominations. [Quotations and citations omitted]

Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who joined the opinion, each wrote separately. Thomas argued that even if various Catholic organizations (such as Catholic Charities) may be separate corporations for secular purposes, any inquiry into their religious purpose should treat the church as a unitary organization sharing a common purpose — a great commission, if you will:

Church and state are two rightful authorities, each supreme in its own sphere. . . . This concept has deep roots in the history of Western civilization. Jesus famously said to render “unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” . . . From antiquity onward, many Christians have interpreted this statement to mean that church and state are distinct, and that each has a legitimate claim to authority within its sphere. [Quotations and citations omitted]