Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye

In April 1987 the congregation leased a parcel in Hialeah, Florida, and said publicly what it intended to build: a house of worship, a school, a cultural centre and a museum. Within weeks the city council met in emergency session and began passing ordinances. The final set made it an offence to kill an animal in a public or private ritual, whatever was done with the carcass afterwards.

What the ordinances did not touch is the part the Supreme Court found decisive. Kosher slaughter was exempt. So was commercial slaughter, hunting, fishing, pest extermination, the euthanising of stray animals, and the feeding of live rabbits to racing greyhounds. A city genuinely worried about animals dying, or about waste in the street, would have written rules that caught all of those. These rules caught one.

Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520, was decided on 11 June 1993. Justice Kennedy wrote for the Court, and the judgment to reverse was unanimous, although the reasoning split several ways in concurrence. A law that is neither neutral nor generally applicable must survive the strictest scrutiny, and these ordinances did not: their stated interests in public health and animal welfare could have been served by rules far short of a flat prohibition on one religion's central rite.

The case is now cited far beyond this congregation, in litigation that has nothing to do with the orishas. It began because a small Lucumi church in Florida said out loud what it was going to do.

The subject of the litigation was a sacramental act, and it is worth stating what kind of act it is without turning the entry into a manual.

In Lucumi practice, offerings are made to the orishas, and some of those offerings are animals. The killing is done by a person with the standing to do it, in a setting with liturgical form, and in most ceremonies the animal is then cooked and eaten by the participants. That last point was in the litigation record and it is the point most often left out of writing about the religion, because a rite that ends in a shared meal is much harder to present as an atrocity than one that ends at the knife.

The atlas describes and does not instruct. There is no procedure here, no sequence, no list of which animal answers to which orisha, and no account of who may perform any of it. That material belongs to initiated practitioners, is transmitted within houses of the religion by people who have the standing to transmit it, and is not the atlas's to reproduce. Scholars who have written well about Lucumi, David H. Brown and Mercedes Cros Sandoval among them, are describing a living practice with its consent and its constraints, and reading them as a set of instructions is a misuse of their work.

The religion also came to Florida the way it came to Cuba, through people who were transported and who kept what they could of what they knew. Writing about its rites as an exotic problem of public order repeats, in a milder register, the frame that produced the ordinances.

Sources Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban ReligionDavid H. Brown with Worldview, the Orichas, and Santeria: Africa to Cuba and BeyondMercedes Cros Sandoval