Before the Cherokee were forced west onto the Trail of Tears, a Georgia missionary's arrest produced one of the earliest Supreme Court rulings on Native sovereignty, a case whose outcome the federal government simply declined to enforce. Samuel Worcester, a missionary who lived among the Cherokee in Georgia assisting Bible translation and other religious work, was arrested and imprisoned in 1831 for residing on Cherokee land without a license the state of Georgia had newly required, a law designed to pressure the Cherokee Nation by removing its sympathetic non Native residents. Worcester's case reached the Supreme Court, and in Worcester v. Georgia, decided in 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Georgia's law was unconstitutional and that the Cherokee Nation held sovereign authority the state could not override. President Andrew Jackson's administration made no effort to enforce that ruling, and Cherokee removal proceeded regardless, the Trail of Tears relocating the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations into what became Indian Territory within the decade.
Their descendants in Oklahoma today maintain both traditional ceremonial practice and, for many, Christian denominations adapted after removal, including Cherokee language hymn singing traditions still in use, while Tulsa became a center of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity in the twentieth century, anchored by Oral Roberts University, founded in 1963. Evangelical Protestant identification leads the state at forty seven percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study.