By 1873, Russell had published his first tract, “The Object and Manner of the Lord’s Return,” in which he stated that all “living saints” would be miraculously swept away to be with their Lord when Armageddon came about. On Good Friday 1878, Russell and several of his adherents assembled on the Sixth Street Bridge in downtown Pittsburgh for ascension to Heaven. Clad in white robes and standing for several hours, they waited and waited but nothing ever happened. The embarrassing incident was reported in local newspapers, adding to Russell’s reputation as a charlatan among established religious leaders.

Russell’s early rough patches in establishing his new religious movement did little to discourage his increasing number of adherents, who were drawn to his charismatic leadership and religious prophesies. In 1884, Russell established the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, which became the base for the Jehovah’s Witnesses movement in the United States. Russell died in 1916, and was succeeded by Joseph Rutherford, who took the Witnesses public in a much more aggressive way than Russell.

Jeohvah’s Witnesses & our free- exercise jurisprudence

Rutherford exhorted the Witnesses to protest against World War I, and protest they did, so much so that Rutherford and other Watch Tower directors were briefly jailed in 1918 for allegedly violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Adversity did not discourage Rutherford. If anything, Rutherford believed that there were millions of people who were waiting for rescue and redemption, and encouraged the Witnesses to herald the Witnesses’ message far and wide.

By the early 1930s, the Witnesses had put together an extensive body of literature, and began spreading the Word through door-to-door canvassing and proselytizing in public places. And it was this public proselytizing that vaulted the Witnesses into their dramatic confrontation with government authorities over their right to follow the commands of their faith.

The Witnesses’ insistence on their right to the free exercise of their religious beliefs, and not merely the right to hold them, manifested itself into a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions, culminating in West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), which held that Witnesses attending public schools could not be compelled to salute the American flag. This decision came three after Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940), in which a unanimous Court held that a New Haven ordinance crafted to prevent the Witnesses from public proselytizing was unconstitutional. Simply put, the Jeohvah’s Witnesses, through a blend of faith-driven determination and legal skill, are largely responsible for the modern law of free- exercise jurisprudence.

Animal Sacrifices & Religious Freedom

In Animal Sacrifice & Religious Freedom: Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, David O’Brien has told the story, reminiscent of the struggles of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, of how a small, misunderstood and not terribly well-liked religious movement, controversial for the central place of animal sacrifice in its rituals, took its grievances with local governing authorities who attempted to squelch the practice of their faith all the way to the Supreme Court and won. And he has done so in a way that David O’Brien does best, weaving together a scholarly yet accessible narrative that links history, political science and legal analysis.

Even better news is that O’Brien retains his sprightly writing style while giving nothing away in sophistication, a trait that is rare among professional academics writing for a broader audience. Animal Sacrifice & Religious Freedom is another entry in the University Press of Kansas’s excellent Landmark Law Cases and American Society series. Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as scholars and lay professionals, will learn a great deal about the history of free exercise litigation before the Supreme Court, the importance of interest group participation in such litigation, the struggles that small, outlying religious movements had faced in asserting their constitutional rights, and the background and practices of the Santeria religious movement in the United States.

I understood O’Brien’s book as comprising three distinct sections. First, he discusses the arrival of the Santeria faith to the shores of the United States from Cuba, where many of its adherents had decided to flee Fidel Castro’s revolution. About sixty-thousand practitioners of Santeria live in the United States, with almost all of them located in South Florida. A central component of the practice of Santeria is the ritual sacrifice of animals. Goats, chickens, ducks, pigeons, turtles and guinea pigs are among the animals sacrificed in marriage ceremonies, funerals, birth celebrations and other life-passage events important to the Santeria faith. O’Brien spares no detail in describing the ritual killings involved in Santeria, so you might want time the reading of his book accordingly.

Second, O’Brien describes the face-off between the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye and the City of Hialeah, which, acting upon complaints from citizens and public health authorities, enacted several ordinances outlawing the killing of animals under certain conditions. There was never any doubt about whether the Hialeah laws were targeted towards the practice of Santeria – one law prohibited the killing of animals for food outside of commercial areas zoned for such practices; another prohibited the killing of animals for “any type of ritual.” O’Brien captures the ebb and flow of the political maneuverings between the city and the church. Here, especially, O’Brien’s narrative benefits from the extensive interviewing he did with officials involved in this battle, including Ernesto Pichardo, the co-founder of the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye.

The third and final section of O’Brien’s book turns to the legal battles that began in the lower federal courts and worked their way up to the Supreme Court. The reader receives a wonderful treatment of the trial strategies on each side, the framing of arguments on appeal and then how the church prepared its case for the Supreme Court. Like so many other landmark constitutional cases, Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye benefited from interest group expertise and the advantage that highly skilled counsel, and O’Brien makes clear that it is not just what one side argues that determines the outcome of litigation; it is who argues a position and how. That interest group expertise comes not just from the principal lawyers in a case, but from the numerous groups participating as amicus curiae.

Conclusion

O’Brien offers a coda that describes and assesses the Court’s free exercise jurisprudence after Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, and what happened to the cast of characters who participated in this drama. This book will work well on its own, if you want to learn more about this case and the history of free exercise law, or as a supplement in classes on constitutional law, civil liberties, constitutional history and the like.