Intra-Church Property Disputes and the Failure of Neutral Principles: A Call for a Return to the Deference Standard

The issue of intra-church property disputes is one that is simultaneously quite old in American history and perhaps of greater relevance now than ever before. Given ever-increasing dissension within Christian church bodies over issues including homosexuality, women's ordination and racial justice, there are currently numerous church property disputes outstanding in the courts, and there are likely to be many more in the near future. From 1871 until 1979, the Supreme Court of the United States consistently took a deferential approach in property cases that involved church bodies with their own authorities and tribunals. When a dispute arose over church doctrine, polity or discipline and a hierarchical church reached its own decisions regarding proper ownership of the church's property, the Supreme Court determined that civil courts should defer to that church's internal decision-making process. The court first created this doctrine as a matter of ‘federal common law’ but in 1952 anchored it in the First Amendment's Free Exercise and Establishment clauses, applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. During the mid-twentieth century, the Supreme Court consistently extended the deference standard against any state-level attempts to restrict or circumvent it. However, in the 1979 case of Jones v Wolf the court changed its standard significantly and adopted a ‘neutral principles’ approach, which weighs a church's internal documents and deliberations against property deeds, state property and trust statutes, and other sources, in an attempt to allow secular courts to rule on such cases while avoiding potential First Amendment concerns.