In a 5-4 decision in Espinoza v. Montana , the U.S. Supreme Court held that Montana could not exclude religious schools from a government subsidy program for private education. The Court’s reasoning in Espinoza is that denying government aid to religious schools because of their “religious character” violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause . The effect of the Espinoza decision, however, is that the other half of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty, the Establishment Clause , has been stripped of its stated objective and protection. In plain language, the Establishment Clause prohibits the government from enacting any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” As to what “respecting an establishment” means, in Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, 330 U. S. 1, 13 (1947), the Supreme Court “recognized that the provisions of the First Amendment […] had the same objective and were intended to provide the same protection against governmental intrusion on religious liberty as the Virginia statute” for religious freedom. In his infamous work explaining and defending religious liberty in Virginia, James Madison stated that to grant churches access to government funds was a contradiction to religion itself as “every page of it disavows a […]
