Jonas Yoder, Wallace Miller and Adin Yutzy, Old Order Amish and Conservative Amish Mennonite parents in Green County, withdrew their children, ages fourteen and fifteen, from public school after eighth grade in 1968, in keeping with a belief that high school attendance beyond that point endangered their community's way of life and their children's salvation alike. Wisconsin's compulsory attendance law required schooling until sixteen, and the three fathers were charged, convicted and fined five dollars each in Green County Court, a small penalty that nonetheless became the vehicle for a major constitutional case. Wisconsin v. Yoder reached the Supreme Court, and in a decision handed down May 15, 1972, the justices ruled that the state's interest in universal education did not outweigh the Amish families' First Amendment right to free exercise of religion, citing evidence that Green County's Amish community had never produced a criminal record, never drawn public assistance and never gone unemployed as proof that its alternative model of vocational education served its members without harming the wider public interest the state law was meant to protect.
Milwaukee's German and Polish Catholic population, dense enough to earn the city an unusually Catholic reputation for the Midwest, and the state's broader German and Scandinavian Lutheran settlement round out a religious landscape where no single tradition leads today, Nothing in Particular and Catholic tied at twenty percent of adults each, per Pew's 2023-24 study, recorded as two facts rather than an arbitrary winner.