Cite as: 508 U. S. 520 (1993)
Opinion of Souter, J.
While general applicability is, for the most part, self-explanatory, free-exercise neutrality is not self-revealing. Cf. Lee v. Weisman, 505 U. S. 577, 627 (1992) (Souter, J., concurring) (considering Establishment Clause neutrality). A law that is religion neutral on its face or in its purpose may lack neutrality in its effect by forbidding something that religion requires or requiring something that religion forbids. Cf. McConnell & Posner, An Economic Approach to Issues of Religious Freedom, 56 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1, 35 (1989) ("[A] regulation is not neutral in an economic sense if, whatever its normal scope or its intentions, it arbitrarily imposes greater costs on religious than on comparable nonreligious activities"). A secular law, applicable to all, that prohibits consumption of alcohol, for example, will affect members of religions that require the use of wine differently from members of other religions and nonbelievers, disproportionately burdening the practice of, say, Catholicism or Judaism. Without an exemption for sacramental wine, Prohibition may fail the test of religion neutrality.2
It does not necessarily follow from that observation, of course, that the First Amendment requires an exemption from Prohibition; that depends on the meaning of neutrality as the Free Exercise Clause embraces it. The point here is the unremarkable one that our common notion of neutrality is broad enough to cover not merely what might be called formal neutrality, which as a free-exercise requirement
Clause requires neutrality are also fairly read for the proposition that the Clause requires general applicability.
2 Our cases make clear, to look at this from a different perspective, that an exemption for sacramental wine use would not deprive Prohibition of neutrality. Rather, "[s]uch an accommodation [would] 'reflec[t] nothing more than the governmental obligation of neutrality in the face of religious differences.' " Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205, 235, n. 22 (1972) (quoting Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U. S. 398, 409 (1963)); see also Lee v. Weisman, 505 U. S. 577, 627 (1992) (Souter, J., concurring). The prohibition law in place earlier this century did in fact exempt "wine for sacramental purposes." National Prohibition Act, Title II, § 3, 41 Stat. 308.
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