Shift Seen in Court’s Religion Stand : Law: In three key rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court has moved to a non-discriminatory approach to church-state conflicts.

In three key rulings on religion this month, the U.S. Supreme Court has opted for a new approach toward church-state conflicts: The government may not discriminate against religion.

While that hardly seems like a startling development, it does mark a subtle shift in the law that could have a profound impact on schools, colleges and lawmakers.

Under the non-discriminatory approach, the justices are likely to uphold state-sponsored vouchers for children enrolled in parochial schools, child-care programs that operate through churches and school ceremonies in which students invoke God.

University of Chicago law professor Michael McConnell on Saturday called the recent decisions “a welcome corrective” to past rulings that demanded a rigid separation of church and state.

“Neutrality toward religion seems to be the theme this year,” said McConnell, whose writings on the history of the Constitution’s religion clauses are often cited by the high court. “These three cases all had to do with discrimination against religion, and the result was the same: The government may not discriminate in this way.”

Religious-rights advocates have long complained that the court’s insistence on a strict separation of church and state has resulted in discrimination against religion.

In 1989, a sympathetic Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, joined by three fellow conservatives, accused his more liberal colleagues of displaying “an unjustified hostility to religion” by insisting that all religious symbols be removed from public property and that any religious message be removed from the public schools.

Certainly the government may not fund or promote religion, Kennedy said, but neither should its courts “send a clear message of disapproval.”

This term, the conservatives’ stance of government “neutrality” toward religion seems to have taken hold.

On June 7, the justices unanimously rejected a New York school board’s policy that permitted civil and social groups to use its facilities but denied the same privileges to Christian groups that wanted to present lectures and a film stressing “traditional family values.”

A federal judge and a U.S. appeals court in New York had upheld this policy, but the high court disagreed. It is unconstitutional, wrote Justice Byron R. White, because it “discriminates” against the church speakers “solely because (they) dealt with the subject from a religious viewpoint.”

On June 11, the court struck down a Florida city’s law that made “ritual animal sacrifice” a crime. Again, a federal judge and a U.S. appeals court in Atlanta had upheld the laws over the objections of the Santeria church, whose members practice animal sacrifice.

Writing for the court, Kennedy said the key question was whether the law “discriminates against religious beliefs . . . or prohibits conduct because it is undertaken for religious reasons.”

He noted that the City Council in Hialeah, Fla., passed its new laws against “animal cruelty” only after residents complained about an influx of blacks from Caribbean islands who practiced the Santeria faith. The Constitution, he said, “protects against government hostility which is masked, as well as overt,” he wrote.

And Friday, the court ruled that tax money may be used to pay for a deaf child’s sign-language interpreter in a Roman Catholic school, the first time the justices have specifically upheld the use of public employees in a religious school.

Writing for the 5-4 majority, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist stressed that “religious institutions are (not) disabled” from participating in government-aid programs simply because they are church-related.

In this instance, a federal judge in Tucson and a U.S. appeals court in San Francisco had ruled that the deaf student could have a tax-supported interpreter with him in a public high school but not in Catholic high school. To do so, according to the lower courts, would create a “symbolic union” between church and state.

Disagreeing, Rehnquist said it “does not offend” the Constitution “when the government offers a neutral service on the premises of a sectarian school.”

By this standard, religious schools do not get a special subsidy, but nor do their students suffer a special disadvantage because they choose a parochial school.

Earlier this month, the justices also let stand a U.S. appeals court ruling from Texas that permitted high school students to offer a nonsectarian prayer during their graduation ceremony. The appellate judges said that while school officials may not advocate prayer, students acting on their own may do so.

These decisions are based on the First Amendment, which says government “shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

For the past 50 years, the justices have struggled to apply this command in the many instances where church and state intersect, attempting to permit the practice of religion without promoting it.

In 1947, the court officially adopted the view once voiced by Thomas Jefferson. The First Amendment was intended to erect “a wall of separation between church and state,” the justices said. In the 1960s, the court relied on this standard to outlaw prayers and Bible reading in the public schools.

Subsequent decisions went further to outlaw even a “symbolic linking” of church and state.

In 1985, for example, Justice William J. Brennan Jr., the court’s leading liberal, wrote an opinion for a 5-4 majority that struck down the common practice of sending of public school tutors into low-income, parochial schools.

A federal aid-to-education law required schools to provide extra tutoring for poor children wherever they were enrolled, but Brennan said that sending public teachers into a Catholic school created “an excessive entanglement” between church and state.

Since then, the high court has gradually retreated from the strict separation view. In recent years, Rehnquist has won a shaky majority for the view that “neutrality” toward religion is the better policy.

While none of this term’s rulings mark dramatic departures, even advocates of strict separation say the court’s position has evolved.

“Neutrality and discrimination are now the driving principles for the First Amendment. That’s what seems to motivate the justices,” said Steven R. Shapiro of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Still, Rehnquist’s majority has been narrow at times, and it could evaporate with White’s retirement.

The group Americans United for Separation of Church and State denounced the ruling in behalf of the deaf child as “forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for religious indoctrination.” Its officials voiced high hopes for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, newly nominated to be a justice.

“The whole equation could change with White’s departure,” said Joseph Conn of Americans United. “We think she will take a separationist view,” he added.