A Court Ruling on Whether It Is Religion

Transcendental Meditation's organisation has long promoted the technique publicly as a secular, scientifically validated stress reduction and self improvement method rather than as a religious practice, a framing central to its marketing and to its introduction into secular institutional settings including some public schools, but this claim was directly and consequentially tested in United States federal court: in Malnak v.

Yogi, decided by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 1979, the court ruled that the Science of Creative Intelligence curriculum built around TM, as taught in a New Jersey public school programme, was religious in nature, citing among other evidence the puja, a devotional ceremony invoking Hindu deities, performed as part of the initiation each student underwent to receive their personal mantra, and on that basis held the programme's presence in public schools unconstitutional under the First Amendment's prohibition on government establishment of religion. The ruling remains a frequently cited legal precedent in American church-state law discussions of how courts determine whether a given practice counts as religious for constitutional purposes, and it sits in genuine tension with TM's continued public self presentation as secular technique, a tension the organisation has not abandoned even as the legal finding on the specific school programme has stood since 1979.