Bob Jones v. United States

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Reminder to journalists (again): Private schools -- left, right -- can defend their core doctrines

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Reminder to journalists (again): Private schools -- left, right -- can defend their core doctrines

Back in the late 1970s, during the cornerstone seminar in Baylor University’s Church-State Studies program, my major professor made an interesting prediction while reviewing some documents that would eventually surface with the Bob Jones University v. United States ruling at the Supreme Court in 1982.

That case pivoted on questions of racism and claims linked to religious doctrine. At some point in the future, my professor said, the high court would face similar cases in which centuries of religious doctrine would clash with beliefs at the heart of the modern Sexual Revolution.

The U.S. Supreme Court would be challenged to equate the facts of racism with the mysteries of sexual identity (or words to that effect). At that point, traditional forms of Christian education would be at risk.

Anyone who has followed American politics in recent decades has watched this conflict march through religious and educational structures and into the headlines. The question, all along, would be if “progressive” thinkers — the word “liberal” is problematic — would find a way for the Sexual Revolution to trump existing legal standards defending free speech, freedom of association and freedom of religion.

Thus, Julia Duin wrote a recent post describing coverage of SCOTUS moves linked to clashes between the modern Orthodox Judaism of Yeshiva University and LGBTQ groups on its New York campus. See this post: “New York Times pursues ultra-Orthodox yeshivas in massive story that raises (some) Jewish ire.”

One of the stories she discussed was a Jewish Telegraphic Agency piece with this headline, linked to an earlier stage in this legal struggle: “Yeshiva U can block LGBTQ club for time being, Supreme Court says.” This case provides, Duin noted, an:

… interesting counterweight on what’s happening in Christian colleges across the country. Last week a group called Campus Pride released a list on what it considers “the absolute worst, most unsafe campuses” for LGBTQ students. Not surprisingly, Yeshiva University is one.

She then stressed this crucial passage in the JTA report:

Yeshiva University’s case could be complicated by the fact that it removed religion from its charter, essentially the text that gives it permission to operate in New York State, in 1967 in an effort to secure more state funding.


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Mark Hemingway: Campus free-speech fights almost always include religion landmines

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On one level, arguments about free speech on secular college and university campuses are “secular” arguments.

However, if you know anything about the First Amendment wars in recent decades you know that topics linked to religion — especially when they involve the Sexual Revolution — are frequently in the mix. Things also get dicey when religious believers start talking about salvation, heaven, hell, etc.

Someone like Mark Hemingway totally gets that. As a former GetReligionista, Mark (click here for obligatory 30 Rock nod to Hemingway) knows the landscape of media coverage in the battlefield where fights about religious liberty and free speech frequently overlap.

This brings me to a RealClearInvestigations.com piece that he wrote recently that ran with this headline: “A Push in States to Fight Campus Intolerance With 'Intellectual Diversity' Laws.” Here is a key passage:

In March of last year, President Trump issued an executive order making federal research funding contingent on universities having adequate free speech protections. At the state level, Texas last year became the 17th state since 2015 to enact legislation protecting First Amendment rights on campus. Currently, the conservative National Association of Scholars is working with four states – Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Arizona – to go further: pass laws to increase “intellectual diversity” at public universities.

South Dakota has already done so, and the law’s requirements amount to the most sweeping campus reforms in the country. It was triggered last year by a minor controversy over the stifling of a planned “Hawaiian Day” on one campus -- a last straw for critics of cultural hypersensitivity, which revived intellectual diversity legislation opposed by the state Board of Regents.

Under intellectual diversity laws, not only must dissenting views be tolerated, but college administrations are required to actively take steps (yet to be specified) to ensure that students are exposed to competing cultural and political viewpoints.

So what would “competing cultural” viewpoints look like in campus debates about gender, sex and marriage? Is it more accurate to say that there are “Republican” beliefs involved there doctrines linked to traditional forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc.?

It was on Twitter that I saw Hemingway connect some dots in ways that I thought would be of interest to religion-beat writers and religion-news readers. For example:


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Are the Sexual Revolution vs. religious liberty wars over at Supreme Court? Let's ask Bluto ...

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Want to hear a depressing question?

How many years, or even months, will it take for someone to pull the Little Sisters of the Poor back to the U.S. Supreme Court for another case linked to the status of Obamacare’s contraception mandate?

That’s right. The odds are good that we can brace ourselves for yet another Little Sisters of the Poor vs. the United States of America (or maybe the leaders of a blue-zip-code state or local government).

I predict that we will see Little Sisters of the Poor Round 4 in the headlines sooner or later, for reasons that host Todd Wilken and I discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

For starters, in this recent case the high court upheld an executive order from the Donald Trump White House, as opposed to grounding its decision in the defense of a specific piece of legislation — as in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993. You may recall that this bill defending a liberal (in the old sense of that word) take on religious freedom passed with an impressive margin — 97-3.

One of the sponsors of that legislation — which was backed by a Clinton-Gore era coalition of liberals and conservatives — had this to say about its importance:

Today I am introducing legislation to restore the previous rule of law, which required the Government to justify restrictions on religious freedom. …

Making a religious practice a crime is a substantial burden on religious freedom. It forces a person to choose between abandoning religious principles or facing prosecution. Before we permit such a burden on religious freedom to stand, the Court should engage in a case-by-case analysis of such restrictions to determine if the Government’s prohibition is justified. …

This bill is needed because even neutral, general laws can unnecessarily restrict religious freedom.

That was U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, of course, during an era when he was considered a moderate who tended to stand with the U.S. Catholic Bishops on quite a few social and moral issues.

The question now is this: What are the odds that one of the first things President Joe Biden’s team will do is erase most, if not all, of the Trump-era executive orders linked to religious liberty and the First Amendment?


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Podcast: Will preachers fighting 'shelter in place' rules create a church-state disaster?

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For several weeks now, churchgoers — and journalists — have been waiting to see what would happen at Easter, Passover and Ramadan.wisely,

We don’t have all the answers, yet. But it’s clear that in the overwhelming majority of cases, Christians in North America and around the world will be observing Holy Week and Easter at home, watching small teams of clergy and musicians celebrate the holiest rites of the Christian year while striving to follow the fine details of “shelter in place” orders.

In my own church — Eastern Orthodoxy — we will celebrate Pascha a week after Western Easter. Clergy in the Diocese of the South (Orthodox Church in America) just learned that our Archbishop Alexander has (I believe) set strict standards (.pdf here) for his parishes all across the Sunbelt. People will stay home through it all — Holy Week and Pascha — watching five-person teams of clergy and chanters do as many of the long, ancient rites as they can. Click here for Rod Dreher’s poignant post on that, which includes:

Did you know that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the one built over the site where Jesus died, was buried, and was resurrected, has been closed for the first time since … the Black Plague, in the 14th century? The right way to see this is that we Orthodox Christians are being asked to make an absolutely extraordinary sacrifice for the life of the world — so that this plague which has killed, and will kill, so many, and will have reduced so many to poverty, can be defeated. As the old-school Catholics like to say about sacrifice, we should, “offer it up” as an extreme sharing of Christ’s passion. We will know in a way we never have the meaning of the crucified Jesus’s words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

All of that loomed in the background as “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I recorded this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in).

For the most part, we tried to look past that story and down the road at the long-term legal implications of other religion-beat headlines caused by the coronavirus crisis.

I am referring to the small number of evangelical Protestants who have been rebelling against government orders to “shelter in place.” Julia Duin and I wrote about the coverage of some of these cases here (“About Rodney Howard-Browne and what happens to Easter, Passover and the hajj during a plague“) and then here (“All megachurches are not alike: NYTimes noted Howard-Browne arrest, but didn't leave it at that“).

What happens if — as some are planning — clashes between a few churches and state officials end up in court?


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Democrats' 2020 surprise: Should churches that oppose same-sex marriage lose tax exemptions?

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Democrats' 2020 surprise: Should churches that oppose same-sex marriage lose tax exemptions?

THE QUESTION: 

Should U.S. religious groups that oppose same-sex marriage lose tax exemption?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

At CNN’s recent “Equality Town Hall” for Democratic presidential candidates, co-sponsored with the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, anchor Don Lemon prodded Beto O’Rourke on whether “religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities” should “lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage.”

O’Rourke (who self-identifies as Catholic) immediately answered “yes,” because “there can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break, for anyone, or any institution, any organization in America” that opposes such rights. “As president, we’re going to make that a priority.” The other candidates on stage assailed discrimination without specifying tax exemption. O’Rourke has, of course, dropped out of the White House race.

Later, Pete Buttigieg (an Episcopalian in a gay marriage) agreed that religious organizations such as schools “absolutely … should not be able to discriminate” and remain tax exempt, but he said rival O’Rourke hadn’t thought through that penalizing houses of worship would create a divisive “war.”

If government were to tax income or property or end tax deductions for donations due to traditional beliefs on sexuality, the targets would include the Catholic Church, the two biggest U.S. Protestant denominations and the largest African-American church body, countless evangelical congregations, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Orthodox Judaism and all Muslim centers and mosques.

O’Rourke subsequently seemed to back off, emphasizing that exemptions should be denied tradition-minded agencies that provide public services like “higher education, or health care, or adoption,” whereas practices within religious congregations are not the government’s business. (That might mean the government wouldn’t impose tax penalties due to sermons, parish education or refusal of gay weddings and clergy ordinations.)

The tax proposal poses palpable danger for a vast number of U.S. institutions, whether congregations or religious schools and agencies.


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Evangelical colleges have much to say about the Billy Graham epoch and its aftermath

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Pundits say evangelical Protestantism, so long led by the late Billy Graham, is faltering in the United States (though not overseas) and split over Donald Trump-ism in politics and morals as well as certain religious differences.

Upon Graham’s passing, by handy coincidence, journalists can obtain fresh insight from the new “Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education” (Oxford University Press) by Adam Laats, professor of educational history at Binghamton University. Unlike many scholars not personally part of  this subculture, Laats takes these believers seriously on their own terms, minus scholarly condescension.

Laats thinks dozens of Christian colleges undergird the movement’s cultural impact and political conservatism in the U.S. They also demonstrate the interrelations between militant “fundamentalists” and the somewhat more open “evangelicals.” His book and its very title apply those two tricky terms confusingly and interchangeably, but the details provide writers valuable context on the historical definitions.

He spent endless hours in archives at six non-denominational campuses to document their achievements and conflicts. (Laats largely bypasses theologically similar denominational colleges, seminaries, and ministries on secular campuses.) The findings would enrich a journalistic visit to profile one of these six. Fresh reporting will be essential because the book’s narrative largely trails off  before recent developments.

Here are the campuses, listed in order of founding.

* Wheaton College (of Illinois, not the Massachusetts Wheaton):  Graham’s alma mater has been a liberal-arts college throughout history that traces to 1853 with re-founding by slavery foes in Lincoln’s 1860. Selective and often dubbed the movement’s equivalent of Harvard, it leads evangelicalism’s elite vs. fundamentalism. But it remains staunchly conservative, recently forcing out a tenured professor over affinity with Islam, and winning federal court exemption from Obamacare’s contraception mandate.


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