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The majority opinion in Everson (1947) cited a number of earlier cases dealing with the Religion Clauses. Often the cases do not discriminate between the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Though none of these is much used in contemporary Establishment Clause discussion, a brief summary of them might help in providing background breadth.

1. Reynolds v. U.S. (98 US 145 (1878)). Free Exercise Case. Reynolds was a Mormon and a bigamist who resided in the Utah Territory. Congress had passed an anti-bigamy statute (sec. 5352 of the Revised Statutes), and Reynolds was indicted and convicted for violating the law. On appeal he argued several points, many of which are interesting from the perspective of criminal or civil procedure (such as juror challenges, jury instructions and use of testimony from earlier cases), but for our purposes the central issue is whether his firmly held religious belief in the propriety, and even duty, of bigamy overrides the power of Congress to make that act criminal. Though this case is more properly a Free Exercise case, the Court concluded, through Chief Justice Waite, after examining some of the early Virginia and Congressional debates on religious liberty, that Congress "was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order." The Court then surveyed Western attitudes toward polygamy and concluded that "it is impossible to believe that the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom was intended to prohibt legislation in respect to this most important feature of social life."

2. Cochran v. Louisiana State Board of Education (281 US 370 (1930)). Fourteenth Amendment/Establishment Clause case. At issue in this case was whether the use of any part of the Louisiana severance tax fund in purchasing school books for children in public and private schools violated either the Guarantee Clause (art 4, sec. 4) of the US Constitution or the Fourteenth Amendment. The former was dismissed summarily and the latter relied on a long quotation from the Louisiana Supreme Court to the effect that there was no constitutional problem in this instance because the school children and not the schools are the beneficiaries of this program. The US Supreme Court only commented briefly: "we cannot doubt that the taxing power of the state is exerted for a public purpose." The easy identification of state action with public purpose is a thread running through to Everson.