Not by Faith Alone: Religion, Law, and Adolescence

5 Regulating Adolescents’ Religious Environments

Regulating Adolescents’ Religious Environments Adolescents occupy a peculiar place in law and in policy-making . What constitutes adolescence for the purposes of legal regulation varies, the law typically classifies adolescents either as children or as adults. The legal system’s response to adolescents’ religious beliefs, development , and environments is similarly dichotomous. As already described in chapter 1, sometimes the legal system presents adolescents as especially vulnerable to religious ideas and to normative social pressures (Lee v. Weisman, 1992; Santa Fe School District v. Doe, 2000), while at other times the system emphasizes adolescents’ maturity and ability to resist religious ideas and social pressures (as in Board of Education of Westside Community Schools v. Mergens, 1990). In other contexts, adolescents ’ abilities are not even considered worth mentioning; the legal system either views adolescents’ vulnerabilities as adequately protected by their parents (Good News Club v. Milford Central School, 2001) or frames adolescents’ rights as clashes between parental rights and governmental obligations (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972). In yet other contexts, the state’s higher interests may be at stake, and those interests may be so compelling that there is no inquiry into parents’ right to direct their children’s upbringing or of adolescents’ abilities to resist the effects of religious proselytizing or to decipher the state’s role in supporting religious beliefs (see Bowen v. Kendrick, 1988). Last, the legal system remains silent in the vast majority of decisions that directly impact adolescents’ religious development and environment; as a result, it often bestows on parents and communities plenary authority to direct adolescents’ religious development and environment (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925). Although we may lament the lack of an overarching approach to regulating adolescents’ religious environments, an understanding of the legal 5 114 regulation of adolescents necessarily requires a close examination of the rights of adolescents in different contexts and across different relationships . This chapter details the current understanding of jurisprudence that affects adolescents’ religious development and religious environments . The previous chapter already has established that the law in fact highly regulates religion; it remains for us to explore how the law balances the state’s interests in protecting religious liberties and the religious rights of parents, communities, service providers, and adolescents themselves . Parents’ Religious Rights The nature of parents’ religious rights mirrors, and even buttresses, their broad parental rights. The law pervasively grants parents enormous power to control their children’s upbringing and even assumes that parents take that responsibility seriously. The law charges parents with their children’s basic care and with the duty to protect them from harm. As a result, parents enjoy the highest protection against laws that may interfere with their ability to raise their children as they see fit. That authority includes parents’ right to make decisions on adolescents’ behalf on matters broadly ranging from nutrition, medical treatment, and residence to the choice of friends and reading materials. Although the state firmly recognizes parental rights, it places important limitations on the exercise of those rights. Given that society eventually may bear the burden of parental failures, the state subjects parental authority to governmental supervision. As a result, and most notably, if parents fail to provide adequate care, the state can intervene to protect their children’s welfare. Much of the policy debate in this area of law, then, focuses on the allocation of authority between parents and the state. Understanding how the legal system envisions parental rights and delineates its boundaries helps clarify the magnitude and the nature of parents’ religious rights. Parents’ right to direct the upbringing of their children was established in a now famous trilogy of cases that balanced the role of parents and states in fostering children’s development. In the first case, Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), the Supreme Court established that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects parents’ broad authority to raise children as they see fit. The Court unequivocally held Regulating Adolescents’ Religious Environments | 115 that parents could provide for their children’s education without reasonable interference. In Meyer, a teacher had violated a statute that prohibited the teaching of a foreign language to any student who had not passed eighth grade. After having read a German passage to a ten-yearold pupil, the teacher was convicted and fined. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction. Rather than focusing on the rights of teachers, however, the Court held that the statute violated the rights of parents...