628
Souter, J., concurring
views of some,7 such accommodation does not necessarily signify an official endorsement of religious observance over disbelief.
In everyday life, we routinely accommodate religious beliefs that we do not share. A Christian inviting an Orthodox Jew to lunch might take pains to choose a kosher restaurant; an atheist in a hurry might yield the right of way to an Amish man steering a horse-drawn carriage. In so acting, we express respect for, but not endorsement of, the fundamental values of others. We act without expressing a position on the theological merit of those values or of religious belief in general, and no one perceives us to have taken such a position.
The government may act likewise. Most religions encourage devotional practices that are at once crucial to the lives of believers and idiosyncratic in the eyes of nonadherents. By definition, secular rules of general application are drawn from the nonadherent's vantage and, consequently, fail to take such practices into account. Yet when enforcement of such rules cuts across religious sensibilities, as it often does, it puts those affected to the choice of taking sides between God and government. In such circumstances, accommodating religion reveals nothing beyond a recognition that general rules can unnecessarily offend the religious conscience when they offend the conscience of secular society not at all. Cf. Welsh v. United States, 398 U. S. 333, 340 (1970) (plurality opinion). Thus, in freeing the Native American Church from federal laws forbidding peyote use, see Drug Enforcement Administration Miscellaneous Exemptions, 21 CFR
7 See, e. g., Thomas v. Review Bd. of Indiana Employment Security Div., 450 U. S. 707, 726 (1981) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting); Choper, The Religion Clauses of the First Amendment: Reconciling the Conflict, 41 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 673, 685-686 (1980); see also Walz v. Tax Comm'n of New York City, 397 U. S. 664, 668-669 (1970); Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U. S. 398, 414, 416 (1963) (Stewart, J., concurring in result); cf. Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S., at 83 (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment).
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