(2016-0433-F) Religious Freedom Restoration Act

The materials in FOIA 2016-0433-F are a selective body of documents responsive to the topic of the FOIA. Researchers should consult the archivist about related material. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (also known as RFRA), is a federal law that “ensures that interests in religious freedom are protected.” It was passed by a unanimous vote in the House of Representatives, a nearly unanimous Senate vote and was signed into law by President Clinton on November 16, 1993. The law reinstated the “Sherbert Test”, named for the Supreme Court decision in Sherbert v. Verner that provided for judicial relief for citizens whose religious liberties were restricted by laws that were religiously neutral, not just openly hostile to religious freedom. The RFRA states that the “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.” For most of the Nation’s history, the Supreme Court had held in numerous cases, (Reynolds v. US), (Cantwell v. Connecticut) for example, that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause only applied to “private belief and not to public conduct”. This strict interpretation allowed employers and governments to require certain believers to violate their religious convictions in order to comply with rules such as working on their Sabbath. In Sherbert v. Verner (1963), the Supreme Court greatly modified this interpretation of the First Amendment to require states to meet a "strict scrutiny" standard when restricting religiously motivated conduct. This meant that the government needed to have a "compelling interest" regarding such a restriction. The case involved Adele Sherbert, who was denied unemployment benefits by South Carolina because she refused to work on Saturdays, something forbidden by her Seventh-day Adventist faith. In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the Court ruled that members of the Amish faith need not comply with universal education laws because laws that "unduly burden the practice of religion" without a compelling interest, even though they might be written as neutral to religion, would still be unconstitutional. However in 1990, the Supreme Court ruled in Employment Division v. Smith, that the State of Oregon could deny unemployment compensation to two Native-Americans who had failed an employment drug test because they had used Peyote in a religious ritual. This ruling in favor of the State of Oregon that critics viewed as sharply different from the earlier Sherbert and Yoder rulings, resulted in Congressional action in the form of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Later Supreme Court rulings have further modified the relationships between the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause and laws which have been seen to impinge on religious freedom. See – City of Boerne v. Flores and Gonzalez v. O Centro Espirita Benifecente Uniao do Vegetal, among others. This collection contains memos from Congress to the President, official reports of the Senate and House on the RFRA, correspondence with concerned citizens and activist groups, speech drafts and talking points, briefing papers and copies of the legislative record.