The Supreme Court Ruled on 4 Major Religious Liberty Cases This Term. The Record Is Genuinely Mixed.

2025-2026 was an exceptionally active term for religious liberty at the Supreme Court

The Court issued rulings in four major cases squarely addressing religious liberty during the 2025-2026 term, according to both the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Center for American Progress tracking, a notably high concentration of cases on this specific topic in a single term. Two produced clear victories for religious liberty claims, one produced a split decision, and one, notably, ruled against a religious claimant on procedural grounds.

In Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, the Court ruled in favor of the Catholic Charities Bureau, which had sued after being denied a religious exemption from state unemployment tax requirements. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court held that the government cannot condition the benefit of public education on parents accepting instruction that poses a genuine threat to religious beliefs they wish to instill in their children, specifically affirming parents' right to opt their children out of certain curriculum content on religious grounds.

But the term also produced a real, notable loss for a religious liberty claimant

In June 2026, the Court ruled 6-3 in Landor v. Louisiana that a Rastafarian inmate whose dreadlocks had been forcibly cut by prison officials, in violation of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), could not actually sue those officials for monetary damages. Justice Neil Gorsuch's majority opinion did not dispute that the officials had violated the inmate's religious rights; it ruled instead on narrower procedural grounds, that the officials hadn't "voluntarily and knowingly" consented to being sued for damages personally under the law.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, arguing the ruling curtailed the practical rights of religious inmates going forward. The National Council of Jewish Women specifically noted this decision as a departure from the pattern of the Court's other recent religious liberty rulings, which had more consistently favored the religious claimant, illustrating that the term's overall record for religious liberty claims was genuinely mixed, not uniformly favorable.

The specific 6-3 vote split recurred across multiple major cases this term

• Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond produced a split decision that left in place a lower court ruling denying a proposed religious charter school's funding request, with advocacy groups like the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty specifically arguing that approving direct public funding for the school would have "fundamentally undercut the institutional separation of church and state"
• In U.S. v. Skrmetti, a case primarily about transgender rights rather than religious liberty specifically (covered in more detail in our companion piece on that topic), the Court's decision not to classify transgender status as a protected class under the Equal Protection Clause was specifically welcomed by religious liberty advocacy groups, who argued the opposite ruling would have created significant complications for religious institutions
• The Court has already granted review in additional cases for the 2026-2027 term addressing similar questions, including O'Connell v. U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which concerns constitutional protection for church autonomy specifically
• Advocacy groups on both sides describe the broader pattern across these rulings as the Court "positioning itself," in the words of Center for American Progress analysis, toward a more accommodationist reading of the Constitution's Free Exercise Clause, sometimes at the expense of a stricter separation under the Establishment Clause

Related state-level cases on sex-based sports eligibility also intersect with this debate

The Court separately granted review in cases from Idaho and West Virginia, both involving state laws requiring school sports teams to be separated by sex, after lower appeals courts had reached different conclusions (the 9th Circuit found Idaho's law unconstitutional; the 4th Circuit found West Virginia's law violated both equal protection and Title IX). While not a religious liberty case in the traditional sense, the USCCB's own amicus brief in this case specifically focused on the Title IX interpretation question, illustrating how closely intertwined religious liberty advocacy has become with the broader legal debate over gender identity and Title IX interpretation.

The core disagreement

Religious liberty advocates generally argue recent rulings like Catholic Charities and Mahmoud correctly restore meaningful protection for religious institutions and religious parents against government requirements that substantially burden their sincerely held beliefs, and view the overall term's pattern favorably despite the Landor exception. Church-state separation advocates generally argue the same rulings represent a concerning erosion of the historical wall between government and religion, citing the Oklahoma charter school case's stakes (direct public funding of religious education) as an example of what's genuinely at risk, and view the cumulative direction of the Roberts Court's religion-clause jurisprudence as consistently favoring an accommodationist approach over strict separation. Both sides broadly agree the Landor ruling, going against a religious claimant on procedural rather than substantive grounds, complicates any simple narrative that the current Court reliably favors religious liberty claims across the board, regardless of the broader ideological trend both sides otherwise point to.