Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer — Supreme Court Bars Religious-Status Exclusion from a Public Benefit Program

Docket No. 15-577. Argued April 19, 2017 (date argued). Decided June 26, 2017 (date decided). Certiorari to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Vote and authorship, precisely. The syllabus records: “ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, except as to footnote 3. KENNEDY, ALITO, and KAGAN, JJ., joined that opinion in full, and THOMAS and GORSUCH, JJ., joined except as to footnote 3. THOMAS, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, in which GORSUCH, J., joined. GORSUCH, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, in which THOMAS, J., joined. BREYER, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG, J., joined.” The judgment was 7-2: Chief Justice Roberts, joined in full or in part by Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kagan, plus Breyer concurring in the judgment, formed the majority reversing the Eighth Circuit; Sotomayor, joined by Ginsburg, dissented.

The holding, verbatim. “The Department’s policy violated the rights of Trinity Lutheran under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by denying the Church an otherwise available public benefit on account of its religious status” (Syllabus). The opinion’s closing line: “the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution all the same, and cannot stand” (slip op. at 15). The Missouri Department of Natural Resources had denied Trinity Lutheran Church’s daycare center a Scrap Tire Program grant to resurface a playground — a grant it would otherwise have qualified for — solely because it was a church.

What the majority opinion explicitly did NOT decide — and who signed onto that limitation. Footnote 3 states: “This case involves express discrimination based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing. We do not address religious uses of funding or other forms of discrimination.” Critically, footnote 3 was not joined by a majority of the Court on the merits of that limiting language: the syllabus specifies Kennedy, Alito, and Kagan joined Roberts’s opinion “in full,” while Thomas and Gorsuch joined except as to footnote 3 — meaning only four justices (Roberts, Kennedy, Alito, Kagan) committed to the footnote’s status/use distinction. Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, wrote separately to argue the majority did not need the footnote’s limitation at all, contending that “the Court’s endorsement of that principle, which is not natural to the Free Exercise Clause, is troubling” and suggesting religious-status discrimination is per se unconstitutional without the footnote’s carve-out. Sotomayor’s dissent (joined by Ginsburg) warned the majority’s reasoning “can be manipulated to call for a similar fate for lines drawn on the basis of religious use” (slip op. at 25-26 n.14, dissenting) — a prediction the Court confirmed five years later in Carson v. Makin (2022), which held that “any status-use distinction” the footnote gestured toward “lacks a meaningful application not only in theory, but in practice as well” (Carson, 596 U.S. ___, slip op. at 17).

Analytical note. Trinity Lutheran is the first leg of a three-case sequence — Trinity Lutheran (2017) → Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue (2020) → Carson v. Makin (2022) — that steadily narrowed and then eliminated the status/use distinction footnote 3 had reserved. That sequence is a real doctrinal pattern, documented in each opinion’s own citations to the ones before it. It is not, on this record, evidence of coordination among litigants: the slip opinions do not identify counsel or funders, and no claim about which organizations litigated or financed which case should be made without a separate documentary source for that fact.

Provenance note (conductor, 2026-09-01). This entry was written by a worker whose process was killed mid-task by a machine sleep — an environment interruption, not a worker or sourcing failure — after this entry was complete but before it was committed. The conductor verified it independently (valid type: timeline_event, quoted dates, tier-1 slip-opinion source, argued-vs-decided distinguished, footnote-3 authorship quoted verbatim from the syllabus) and committed it rather than let complete work be lost to an uncommitted working tree.

The companion entry for Carson v. Makin (2022) was NOT written — the worker died at exactly that step. Its ticket remains open for that half. Do not assume the Carson entry exists because this one does.