In Sincerely Held, Charles McCrary asks how the legal standard for religious protection under the First Amendment’s free exercise clause came to rest on the concept of “sincerely held religious belief” (3). After the Supreme Court decided in Reynolds v. United States (1879) that free exercise covered only religious belief, not religious actions, subsequent cases involved judging whether or not the religious beliefs in question were true or false. In most cases involving traditions other than Christianity, the default assumption was false. A turning point came with United States v. Ballard (1944), which reversed the Ballards’ previous conviction for mail fraud, based as it was on the contention that the I Am Movement’s beliefs were inherently incredible. Now the Supreme Court decided that what was at issue was not the veracity of a religious belief, but whether that belief was “sincerely held.”
The “sincerity test” (24) took on added...
University of California Press