First things first: I made a major error the other day in my post about a Religion News Service report about an Iowa judge’s ruling in a legal clash between InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and leaders at the University of Iowa.
This wasn’t a typo or a misspelling.
My main point in the post was wrong and I want to correct that and also thank the experts at BecketLaw.org for alerting me to my mistake.
Here is the top of the original RNS report. This is long, but essential. After that, I’ll show the section of the RNS story that led to my error:
(RNS) — Yes, a Christian student group can require its leaders to be Christian.
That’s the decision a judge reached last week in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA v. the University of Iowa, a lawsuit the evangelical Christian campus ministry brought against the university and several of its leaders after the school booted InterVarsity and other religiously affiliated student groups for requiring their leaders to share their faiths.
Those groups also included Muslims, Sikhs and Latter-day Saints, according to a statement from InterVarsity.
“We must have leaders who share our faith,” InterVarsity Director of External Relations Greg Jao said in the written statement. “No group — religious or secular — could survive with leaders who reject its values. We’re grateful the court has stopped the University’s religious discrimination, and we look forward to continuing our ministry on campus for years to come.”
At least three University of Iowa leaders are being held personally accountable to cover the costs of any damages awarded later to InterVarsity, according to U.S. District Judge Stephanie M. Rose’s Friday (Sept. 27) ruling, provided by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented InterVarsity.
A paragraph later there was this:
Rose’s decision comes on the heels of a ruling she made earlier this year in a similar case involving the university and a student group called Business Leaders in Christ. Because she felt university leaders should have understood after that case how to treat the groups fairly, the judge is holding them personally accountable. …
The lawsuit came in August 2018 after the University of Iowa claimed InterVarsity was violating the university’s human rights policy by requiring leaders to affirm the organization’s statement of faith. That policy prohibits discrimination based on race, creed, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or other attributes.
Here’s where I erred. I thought, when I read this section of the RNS story, that the two decisions pivoted on the same section of that University of Iowa policy.
In the two decades that I have been covering these kinds of First Amendment clashes, the key has been that InterVarsity and other groups have been attacked and pushed off state and private campuses because of their requirement that ministry leaders and officers accept centuries of traditional doctrines on sex and marriage.
That was the case in the Business Leaders in Christ case.
It was not in the InterVarsity case discussed at the top of the RNS story. To be blunt, I misunderstood the reference to “The lawsuit” at the start of that crucial quotation:
The lawsuit came in August 2018 after the University of Iowa claimed InterVarsity was violating the university’s human rights policy by requiring leaders to affirm the organization’s statement of faith. That policy prohibits discrimination based on race, creed, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or other attributes.
I thought both cases pivoted on the same familiar conflict, centering on LGBTQ issues.
In the InterVarsity case, Iowa leaders were saying (.pdf here) that religious groups could not require their leaders to share their faith — period. It wouldn’t have mattered if InterVarsity had officers who were from the LGBTQ community. They could not be Christians — period.
To be honest, I still think that doctrines linked to LGBTQ issues were crucial in both cases, based on a close look at all of the groups that were punished in the Iowa InterVarsity case (.pdf here). I see only one punished group from a denomination or faith tradition that is liberal on sexuality and marriage issues.
Nevertheless, I clearly misunderstood a key fact in this story about “The lawsuit.” I was wrong when I wrote the following:
The issue here isn’t whether InterVarsity requires its leaders to be Christian, but whether the group can remain on a taxpayer-funded state university campus while requiring its leaders to affirm a specific set of traditional Christian doctrines.
But liberal Christians are “Christians” too. Correct? Whether the InterVarsity leaders were “Christians” was not the issue in this case. The RNS report draws a bright red line in the wrong place, in this case.
I regret the error, to say the least. I have not taken the other post down, put I did clearly mark it with a “correction” banner and a link to this new post.
This doesn’t happen often. This is the second correction post in the nearly 17-year history of this website.