(The Center Square) — New Jersey has become the latest legal battleground over the use of taxpayer dollars to repair church buildings and other houses of worship.
A religious liberty group is seeking to overturn a 2018 New Jersey Supreme Court ruling which held that the state constitution prohibits taxpayer dollars from being used to repair or maintain churches and other religious buildings.
Lawyers for the First Liberty Institute, a Texas-based conservative Christian group, have filed a lawsuit on behalf of two Morris County churches arguing that excluding religious organizations from government programs available to other entities is unconstitutional and discriminatory.
“States and local governments that choose to provide a generally available public benefit — such as historic preservation grants — cannot exclude an otherwise-qualified applicant solely because the applicant happens to be a house of worship,” they wrote in a 51-page complaint.
The Mendham Methodist church and the Zion Lutheran Church Long Valley applied for grants through the county’s historic preservation fund to repair their historic buildings, but the request was rejected because they were deemed “ineligible” for funding, the complaint alleges. The county cited the 2018 Supreme Court ruling.
“This exclusion discriminates against religion and penalizes Plaintiffs’ free exercise of their religion,” lawyers for the foundation wrote. “That is repugnant to the text and spirit of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and it is unlawful.”
Meanwhile, an atheist group is joining the legal fight to preserve its 2018 New Jersey Supreme Court win that barred public funding of church renovations.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation, which sued Morris County in 2015 over its disbursement of $4.6 million in public funds to repair 12 churches, has filed a motion to intervene.
“We will act to preserve the rights and interests of New Jersey taxpayers,” Annie Laurie Gaylor, the foundation’s co-president, said in a statement. “We won’t merely sit by and watch while religious entities maneuver to get the official funding spigot opened again.”
The Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling held that the expenditures by Morris County violated the Religious Aid Clause of the state’s constitution, which bars taxpayer funding for repairs and maintenance of houses of worship.
Following the ruling, Morris County and one of the affected churches petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 to take up the New Jersey case, but it declined. Still, Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed an opinion in the case arguing that the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling “is in serious tension with this court’s religious equality precedents.”
“At some point, this court will need to decide whether governments that distribute historic preservation funds may deny funds to religious organizations simply because the organizations are religious,” Kavanaugh wrote.
