WASHINGTON

The First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom has barred the government from meddling with or taxing churches and other faith-based institutions.

In exchange, religious institutions generally have not been entitled to receive taxpayer funding.

No more.

In a major decision, the U.S. Supreme Court began erasing the line separating church and state as it wrapped up its 2016-17 term June 26 and recessed for the summer.

In a 7-2 decision, the court ruled that taxpayer-funded grants cannot be denied to church-run schools that otherwise would except for their connection to a religious group.

While the decision involved a small state grant for playground equipment, the ruling is widely seen as opening the door to requiring states to provide financial support to parochial schools.

The case, which appears to some scholars to upend two centuries of constitutional understanding about church and state, joined other significant decisions in the final days of the court’s term. The nation’s top court also:

• Allowed President Trump to partially impose his Muslim ban against refugees and immigrants who have no immediate relatives in or documented ties to the United States.

• Struck down a federal law that barred trademarks of names that promote hate, violence, bigotry and discrimination and threw out a North Carolina law that barred people on the sexual offender registry from going onto social media sites like Facebook and Snapchat.

• Knocked down a barrier that made it harder for gay married couples to obtain birth certificates for their children.

• Made it more difficult for the government to deny citizenship to immigrants who provide false information.

The church-state ruling involved a Missouri state grant to pay for recycled rubber for school playgrounds.

Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Mo., sued the state for denying the grant to pay for rubberizing the church’s preschool playground because the preschool is part of a church. Like 36 other states, Missouri’s constitution bars support for religious schools.

Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts stated that the exclusion from the grant solely because Trinity Lutheran is a church is “odious to our Constitution and cannot stand.”

According to the chief justice, the state is penalizing the free exercise of religion when it denies a benefit to a school solely because of its religious character.

Two members of the majority, new Justice Neil Gorsuch and veteran Justice Clarence Thomas, filed separate opinions arguing that the court should have used the case to overthrow all limits on taxpayer funding of religious institutions.

Five justices, including the chief justice, sought to limit the decision, stating it applied only to benefits to which a religious group would otherwise be qualified.

The dissent came from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Justice Sotomayor, who attended private Catholic schools while growing up, took the rare step of reading her dissent from the bench.

Calling the decision a “radical departure” from settled law, she wrote that the court has blinded itself “to our history and leads us instead to a place where the separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.”

School choice advocates have for decades sought to funnel public funds to private religious schools, only to be stymied by state constitutional provisions like the one in Missouri.

University of Missouri law professor Carl Esbeck, who filed a brief in the case on behalf of the National Association of Evangelicals, said there would be immediate consequences for other states, such as Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, New Hampshire and Florida, with pending cases involving parochial school funding.

Mr. Esbeck called the decision “profound” in potentially reshaping constitutional understanding of the church-state relationship at the state level.

The high court, in a 9-0 decision, partially rejected lower courts’ decisions to block President Trump’s travel ban against Muslims from six counties.

Those with provable ties and connections to close relatives or to entities in the United States can enter the country, the high court ruled, but the president can proceed with his temporary ban on those who don’t have such familial ties. The court also said the president could not ban those awarded visas for study and other purposes.

The court also agreed to review the merits of the president’s order after it reconvenes in October.

In the trademark case, the court ruled 8-0 that the First Amendment barred the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from any discretion in accepting names for government protection, no matter how disgusting.

While the case applied to a band seeking to trademark its name “The Slants,” a slur against Asians, the decision cleared the way for restoration of trademarks for the name of Washington’s professional football team, an insult to Native Americans.

The decision also cleared the way for trademarks for the “n” word and other insults and debasing terms for African-Americans and other minorities.

Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote that the First Amendment barred the government from seeking to use trademark law to tamp down the use of names that promote bigotry and create the prospects for a violent reaction.

The court also found that North Carolina’s restriction on sexual offenders using the internet was overly broad, a violation of the First Amendment.

Separately, the court struck down an Arkansas law that barred issuance of birth certificates for children of married gay couples, stating that the issuance of state documents must be on the same basis as for heterosexual couples.

The court also agreed to hear in the fall a Colorado case involving a bakery that refused to prepare and sell a wedding cake to a gay couple. The bakery calls its decision an expression of its religious views. The couple calls it discrimination.

In a setback to foes of the death penalty, the court ruled 5-4 that defendants can be put to death even if their appellate attorney botched the case.

The court earlier decided that that a death row inmate could raise issues on appeal if it could be shown the trial attorney had incompetently failed to do so.

Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, stated that protecting death row inmates from the incompetence of appeals attorneys would simply open the door to a flood of appeals.

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer noted that one-third of all death penalty sentences are altered necause of appeals.

The court also ruled 8-0 that federal pension rules don’t apply to religiously affiliated hospitals.

The June 5 ruling reverses lower court decisions that sided with hospital workers who argued that the exemption from pension laws should not extend to hospitals affiliated with churches.

The high court ruling in favor of the hospitals — two with Catholic and one with Lutheran ties — also will affect other religiously affiliated institutions and their employees.

The case, Advocate Health Care Network v. Maria Stapleton, revolves around ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, passed by Congress to ensure that companies invest and manage employee pension funds responsibly.

Hospital workers argued that it’s unfair that religious employers, who operate hospitals as for-profit subsidiaries that compete with secular hospitals, get a pass on pension laws designed to protect employees.

Justice Gorsuch did not participate in the decision because he was not on the court when the case was argued in March.