A Religious Organization’s Autonomy in Matters of Self-Governance: Hosanna-Tabor and the First Amendment

The Constitution/Civil Liberties

A Religious Organization’s Autonomy in Matters of Self-Governance: Hosanna-Tabor and the First Amendment

by Carl H. Esbeck

Federalist Society

March 26, 2012

Engage

In Hosanna-Tabor, a unanimous Supreme Court took a discrete line of cases involving religious disputes and church property and enlarged on it so as to give rise to a full-throated protection of religious institutional autonomy. The Court did not assume that religious organizations act without error. But when mistakes are made of a certain subject-matter class, Hosanna-Tabor locates authority solely in the religious organization as a matter of self-governance. Far more harm than good would result if civil government were to intervene in this class of cases, harm that would flow from a disorder of relations between church and state.

URL: www.fed-soc.org/publications/detail/a-religious-organizations-autonomy-in-matters-of-self-governance-hosanna-tabor-and-the-first-amendment