Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) (2024)

Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), (1993), U.S. legislation that originally prohibited the federal government and the states from “substantially burden[ing] a person’s exercise of religion” unless “application of the burden…is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and “is the least restrictive means of furthering that…interest.” In response to City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the RFRA could not be applied to the states, the U.S. Congress amended the law (2000) to limit its applicability to the federal government.

In enacting the RFRA, Congress codified a constitutional rule, the compelling-interest “balancing test,” that the Supreme Court had used until 1990 to determine whether generally applicable and religiously neutral laws that incidentally place a substantial burden on a person’s religious practices are inconsistent with the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (“Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]”). According to the balancing test, such laws are unconstitutional unless they serve a compelling governmental interest. In 2000 Congress also added a new statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which applied the principles of the RFRA to local and state governments.

The RFRA and RLUIPA were the basis of a U.S. Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), in which the court held that the religious freedom of Hobby Lobby Stores, a for-profit corporation, and its owners had been illegally infringed under the RFRA by the so-called “contraceptive mandate,” a regulation pursuant to the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010; PPACA) that required businesses employing 50 or more persons to provide health-insurance coverage of all contraceptive methods then approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).