I should have added that the federal government — prominently led by many religious conservatives — continues to resist the neutral, keep-government-out-of-it standard. Thus we’ve had the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the late 1990s) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (enacted in reponse to the Court’s invalidation of RFRA). The basic idea is that whenever a law affects religious practice, government should be required to satisfy a strict-scrutiny test — demonstrating that it has a compelling purpose for regulating and that the regulation is the least intrusive means of furthering that purpose.

In my view, for what little that is worth, it gets government into the business of judging doctrine as courts weigh religious tenets against public policy (which no religious person should want) and produces a flood of inane lawsuits, such as whether prison guards should be permitted to wear religious garb and whether prisoners must be permitted access to what we might call “dual use” items — i.e., items which can be used for both rituals and weapons.