President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is weighing in on a religious liberty case before the U.S. Supreme Court — in favor of religious liberty. Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Superior in Wisconsin is slated to go before the Supreme Court later this year after Wisconsin’s highest court determined that the organization is ineligible for tax exemptions afforded to religious organizations.

A Wisconsin state labor board determined in 1972 that Catholic Charities, which had been operating under the Catholic Diocese of Superior since 1917, did not qualify to be exempt from paying state unemployment tax, classifying the organization’s activities as “charitable,” “educational,” and “rehabilitative,” not “religious.” Nearly four decades later, a county court ruled that a subsidiary of Catholic Charities was “operated primarily for religious purposes” and was therefore exempt from the tax. Consequently, Catholic Charities sought a similar classification from the Department of Workforce Development (DWD), which denied the request. However, an administrative law judge then overturned the DWD’s decision, and the case began making its way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Varying state agencies and courts reached differing conclusions in the case, with some finding that the religious patronage and operation of Catholic Charities qualified it for exemption from the tax and others determining that charity work was not unique to the Catholic Church and, thus, the charitable organization should not be exempt from the tax. Finally, Wisconsin’s state supreme court ruled that Catholic Charities is not exempt from the tax: even though the organization’s motives and purposes in carrying out charity work are religious, Catholic Charities administers charity to non-Catholics and non-religious persons, disqualifying the organization from the tax exemption. The court wrote, “The record demonstrates that [Catholic Charities and its subsidiaries] neither attempt to imbue program participants with the Catholic faith nor supply any religious materials to program participants or employees.” The ruling added, “Both employment with the organizations and services offered by the organizations are open to all participants regardless of religion.”

Late last year, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case brought by Catholic Charities, represented by attorneys from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. “Does a state violate the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses by denying a religious organization an otherwise-available tax exemption because the organization does not meet the state’s criteria for religious behavior?” the petition to the Supreme Court asked.

On Monday, a host of religious organizations and religious liberty legal scholars were joined by Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and a coalition of 19 states in an amicus brief encouraging the Supreme Court to rule in favor of Catholic Charities. The brief filed by religious groups explained that Wisconsin’s supreme “court adopted a constitutionally implausible interpretation of a Wisconsin law that generally exempts from the state unemployment insurance program religious organizations ‘operated, supervised, controlled, or principally supported by a church or convention or association of churches.’” The brief continued, “Although any reasonable interpretation of that statute would include the Catholic Charities Bureau … the Wisconsin Supreme Court reached the far-fetched (and legally wrong) conclusion that the Bureau is not ‘operated primarily for religious purposes,’ but is, instead, engaged in ‘activities [that] are primarily charitable and secular.’”

“Thankfully, the First Amendment — as correctly construed and applied by this Court — forbids governmental second-guessing of religious authorities on such ‘matters of church government,’” the brief stated. It went on, “Amici respectfully urge the Court to reverse the Wisconsin court’s decision in an opinion explaining that ‘matters of church government’ include large swaths of a religious organization’s internal activities, including their decisions about how to best organize and pursue what they sincerely view as their religious missions.” The brief noted, “The Religion Clauses demand as much.”

The DOJ made a similar argument in its brief, stating that the Wisconsin court’s decision “conflicts with the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment.” The DOJ claimed that the Wisconsin court’s ruling is effectively unconstitutional. “By inviting inquiries into whether an action is intrinsically religious or nonreligious, the state supreme court’s reasoning would permit government officials or judges to second-guess the sufficiency of religious values, inspect practitioners’ adherence to religious doctrine, and discriminate among various faiths,” the Justice Department explained in its brief. “Under the proper understanding of the religious-employer exemption, petitioners — organizations that serve as the social-ministry arm of a diocese of the Roman Catholic Church — are ‘operated primarily for religious purposes.’ And because it is undisputed that petitioners satisfy the remaining statutory prerequisites, they are entitled to the exemption,” the DOJ brief declared.

A coalition of 19 state attorneys general, led by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, likewise posited that the Wisconsin court’s ruling is unconstitutional. “For millennia, charity has been intertwined with religion. That was true long before colonists arrived in New England. It was true at the Founding and the ratification of the Bill of Rights. It remains true to this day,” the states’ brief averred. “But the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s definition of charity as inherently ‘secular,’ … flies in the face of centuries of religious practices and teachings on charitable works across a variety of faiths. It also ignores the original public meaning of religious exercise,” the brief continued.

“More fundamentally, the Wisconsin Supreme Court erred by arrogating the power to define religious practice for Wisconsinites in the first instance. This Court has long understood that the Constitution forbids government intrusion into religion, and few maneuvers are so intrusive as the government taking it upon itself to define religious practice,” the states argued. “The result is both doctrinally offensive and practically harmful; the reasoning underlying the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s opinion has no logical stopping point. If any religious activity, no matter how deeply rooted in doctrine and practice, becomes secular the moment the nonreligious adopt it, then no religious exercise is safe from government regulation.”

In a statement to The Washington Stand, Eric Rassbach, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, commented, “Wisconsin is trying to make sure no good deed goes unpunished. Penalizing Catholic Charities for serving Catholics and non-Catholics alike is ridiculous and wrong. We are confident the Supreme Court will reject the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s absurd ruling.”