Kudos to our friends at Pacific Justice Institute and its affiliate attorneys who recently settled a student prayer case against Peralta Community College District in Alameda, California.  According to PJI, the College of Alameda (a campus in the District) punished two students for praying with a sick instructor.  Here are the basic facts:

The incident that ignited the case happened in December 2007 when an instructor at the College of Alameda complained about a private, consensual prayer in a shared faculty office between a student and a sick teacher. The administration swiftly reacted by issuing formal notices of intent to suspend both the student and a fellow bystander student, holding disciplinary hearings, and imposing written warnings.

The students filed suit, and the College moved to dismiss the case.

[The College argued] that prayer is akin to protests or demonstrations and presumptively disruptive. But federal district court judge Susan Illston disagreed, ruling that prayer is protected speech under the First Amendment. After the students appeared on Fox News in April 2009, the College also asked the court to censor the students from disclosing information about their case. The court refused. After these rulings the College eventually agreed to back down and also pay attorney’s fees after two years of litigation.

Among other points, the settlement contains an express acknowledgment that prayer on campus is protected free speech and free exercise of religion.

I find it most interesting that the College not only punished the students for their on campus prayer, but also that during the litigation it sought to further silence them in the media.   The ruling requires the College to protect student prayer on campus and to pay $90,000 of the students attorneys’ fees.  Censorship carries a heafty price tag.

On December 22, 2007, two students—Kandy Kyriacou and Ojoma Omaga—at the College of Alameda received letters from the Vice President of Student Services notifying them that the College intended to suspend them. What did Ms. Kyriacou and Ms. Omaga do to deserve suspension? Did they assault someone? Did they verbally abuse a fellow classmate or faculty member? Did they destroy property or commit some campus crime? No. They prayed.

Besides the self-evident absurdity of this situation, the details reveal a more troubling institutional problem. According to court documents, the students prayed with each other outside of class during class breaks, prayed silently to themselves in class, and on one occasion, engaged in a consensual and student-initiated prayer with an ill faculty member in her office. For these actions, Mr. Kerry Compton, the Vice President of Student Services at the College, informed the students that they were being charged with violating school policy against:

Disruptive or insulting behavior, willful disobedience, habitual profanity or vulgarity, or the open and persistent defiance of the authority of, refusal to comply with directions of, or persistent abuse of, college employees in the performance of their duty . . . .

So according to the College, engaging in student-initiated, private, and consensual prayer is the equivalent of disruption, insults, profanity, vulgarity and abuse. Really? While this charge alone is ridiculous, it is perhaps more astonishing that the College held its ground. After Ms. Kyriacou and Ms. Omaga explained their actions to Mr. Compton, he banned such “disruptive” behavior and issued an official warning that any similar actions in the future “may result in further disciplinary action, including, but not limited to suspension or expulsion.”

In light of this overt threat by a high university official, the students sought relief in federal court to protect their constitutional rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion, among others. But even then, the College would not back down. Instead, the College sought to throw the case out of court on the grounds that its actions were necessary to prevent a government endorsement of religion. The Court wisely rejected this argument, because it has been well-understood for decades that there is a “crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect.” See Bd. of Educ. of Westside Comty. Sch. v. Mergens, 496 U.S. 226, 250 (1990).

In the wake of the Court’s strong decision rejecting the College’s motion, the College agreed to settle the case. But what is telling here is how far the College was willing to go to resist clearly protected speech and the reasons for its resistance. Engaging in a year and a half of litigation is not the reaction of a university welcoming of its students’ religious freedoms. Instead, its actions reveal a deep, unsettling hostility to religion that is all too prevalent at America’s institutions of higher education.

Within the past few weeks, the topic of prayer—particularly public prayer—has appeared regularly in the headlines.  Last Thursday was the National Day of Prayer, which the majority of Americans support, despite Judge Crabb’s ruling that this tradition, which dates back to 1775, now violates the Constitution.  And as graduation season returns, the issue of prayer in schools and at graduation ceremonies returns to people’s minds.

What many people, including many university administrators, do not realize is that federal appellate courts have repeatedly upheld prayers at university graduation ceremonies.  In fact, this was news to officials at Mohave Community College, which had removed the traditional prayers from the pinning ceremony for its nursing graduates.  As a result, the ADF Center for Academic Freedom sent the officials a letter, explaining that the United States Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Seventh Circuits have both upheld university graduation prayers.  Both courts recognized that university graduation ceremonies involve adults, thus eliminating any remote chance of coercion or indoctrination.  And as the Sixth Circuit noted in its 1997 Chaudhuri decision, “[t]he people of the United States did not adopt the Bill of Rights to strip the public square of every last shred of public piety.”

To its credit, Mohave Community College responded to this information by assuring ADF that the pinning ceremony prayers would continue and that student speakers would be allowed to include religious remarks in their speeches.  Hopefully, more colleges and universities will follow this example and recognize that the Constitution protects religious speech and does not require them to purge it from every public ceremony.

Hope College isn’t backing away from its policy condemning same-sex sexual conduct, reports the Holland Sentinel newspaper.  At least for now.

Hope is affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, which continues to believe that same-sex sexual intimacy violates God’s standards.  (It is, however, engaged in a “dialogue on homosexuality.”)

According to the press account, Hope distinguishes between same-sex sexual conduct and same-sex attraction.  Persons who experience the latter are to afforded “fair and kind treatment”; persons who engage in the former (and in other forms of extramarital sexual conduct) are urged to repent.

This is quite similar to the position taken by Christian Legal Society, which has been involved in litigation across the country on this issue — including a case now pending in the Supreme Court.  CLS’s distinction between “orientation” and conduct has often been mocked, labeled as an idiosyncratic dodge.  This charge is untrue and unfair.  That Hope College maintains essentially the same position as CLS confirms that this understanding of and approach to human sexuality is widespread within Christianity.

In rejecting calls to change its policy, the Hope board of trustees stated as follows:

The college’s current position on homosexuality is based on its interpretation of scripture. It is recognized that well-intentioned Christians may disagree on scriptural interpretation. Still, humbly and respectfully, the college aligns itself in its interpretation with its founding denomination, the Reformed Church in America, the orthodox Christian Church throughout the ages, and other Christian colleges and universities.

The board simultaneously created a trustee committee to “expand the college’s 1995 position statement in the larger context of all human sexuality.”  The statement’s use of the words “current” and “still” suggests that changes might be on the horizon.

As far as I know, the government is not involved in any way in this internal dispute at Hope College.  And that’s the way it should be.  That is not to say I am personally agnostic about what Hope does — that I don’t care as long as the government is not exerting pressure on the college.  Instead, I pray that Hope stays true to its Reformed heritage and to traditional Christian sexual ethics.  Theological considerations should be dispositive, and, in my view, they dictate maintaining the standards.  But it is worth noting that the capitulation of some religious institutions to the “ways of the world” inevitably affects the fortunes of those that do no so capitulate.  The smaller the number of the “traditional” institutions, the easier it is for proponents of the new orthodoxy to target them, and the harder it is for them to resist.

Part I: The Christian Student Group That Was “Too Influential on Campus”

If you are — or have been in the past 30 years — part of a religious student group on a public university campus (or for that matter on a high school campus), you owe that privilege to the decision of a group of college students in Kansas City in 1977. At a time when courts were wrestling – in some cases unfavorably – with the question of whether the Establishment Clause required public universities to exclude religious student groups from campus, Cornerstone at the University of Missouri-Kansas City decided to defend their (and your) rights in court. The result was the Supreme Court’s 1981 decision in Widmar v. Vincent, holding that the First Amendment prevented public universities from discriminating against religious student groups.

One of the plaintiffs in the case, Jonathan Williams, is now a pastor at Grace Community Church near San Antonio and recently spoke to me about Cornerstone, the case and the environment on campus, the decision, and his words for today’s students who face discrimination by their universities. What follows is the first of a three post series taken from my interview with Pastor Williams:

In the early 1970s a group of churches were planted with the specific intent of reaching out to college students. It was from this movement that Cornerstone at the University of Missouri-Kansas City was born. According to the Supreme Court, Cornerstone at UMKC was “an organization of evangelical Christian students from various denominational backgrounds.” Its purpose was to “promote a knowledge of Jesus Christ among students.” Chess v. Widmar, 635 F.2d 1310, 1312 (8th Cir. 1980). Although affiliated with the local church plant, Cornerstone met on campus in university buildings just as the other one hundred student groups at UMKC did and told the school that its meetings addressed “various topics relating to Christianity and the Bible.” “We engaged in personal evangelism and open air preaching, but we also sought to give a reasoned presentation of the Christian faith in the academic environment,” said Jonathan Williams, then member of Cornerstone. The “backbone” of Cornerstone as the Supreme Court noted was about 20 evangelical Christian students and leaders who ran the group, but its meetings (which included worship) were open to everyone and drew as many as 125. Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U.S. 263, 265 n2 (1981). As noted in the District Court, “[a]ny students, be they Jewish, Christian, Moslem or any other persuasion are invited, and, in fact, actively recruited by the students in Cornerstone.” Chess v. Widmar, 480 F. Supp. 907, 910 (D. Mo. 1979).

In other words, Cornerstone’s policies were “identical” to those of the Christian Legal Society and most other Christian campus ministries today, said Williams. “Cornerstone hosted debates between non-Christians and Christian apologists and brought in speakers to talk about faith from the perspective of various academic disciplines. So [like CLS] we wanted non-Christians and people who disagreed with us to be involved,” said Williams. But its leaders and those who spoke for the group were Christians. UMKC had no nondiscrimination rule applicable to membership and officer positions in student groups, let alone did it try to apply such a rule to require Cornerstone to allow non-Christians to lead its worship. What if UMKC had tried? “That would have been a non-starter,” said Williams, “we would have had to challenge that too.” “Cornerstone was a Christian ministry. It wouldn’t have been the same group if it had non-Christians running it.”

Cornerstone had been meeting on campus for several years when, out of the blue in 1977 they received notice that they couldn’t hold their regular worship activities and meetings on campus. “We did still have some meetings,” said Williams, citing some videos they showed and held discussions on afterward but they were no longer permitted to meet explicitly “for purposes of religious worship or religious teaching.” Widmar, 454 U.S. at 266. Although this policy had been on the books for years, the school only enforced it for the first time four years after Cornerstone began. “We were told we were getting too influential on campus,” said Williams. While many students were apathetic about the situation, Williams described the tone from student government itself as “fairly hostile” toward Cornerstone in the meetings he attended where Cornerstone tried to plead its case.

Jonathan Williams and other students sought to persuade UMKC officials to change their stance, but they refused. UMKC officials told them that if they wanted to use buildings for worship there was an exception in the policy that would allow that in a campus chapel. Unfortunately, UMKC had no campus chapel. The nearest campus chapel was 125 miles away at the University of Missouri – Columbia campus. Williams met with a Mr. Hatch, the Chief of Buildings and Grounds at UMKC to ask about the possibility that a chapel might be built on campus, allowing Cornerstone to meet there. Hatch “stated that if we wanted a chapel, we would have to ‘get the ball rolling’ ourselves and that it would have to be funded by private donations.” Chess, 480 F.Supp. at 913 (D. Mo. 1979) (affidavit of Jonathan Williams). If they could just raise several hundred thousand dollars to build a chapel and give it to the school — then they could meet on campus. “It was comical,” said Williams, who saw the “offer” as an effort by the administration to “get rid of us or make us irrelevant.”

Rebuffed by school administrators, Williams recalls that the students received much counsel and prayer about their decision on how to proceed. And at first he was somewhat hesitant about litigation. Asked if the group got counsel from other Christians encouraging them that the Christian response was to bear this cross as a consequence of following Christ, Williams laughed, “that was actually my response at first.” “But the others agreed we should go forward and their wiser heads prevailed.” His concern was that litigating the case would diminish the group’s witness on campus. “That was my first immature response, but that was wrong. If you have a righteous Godly attitude it doesn’t have to diminish your witness. In fact, it can increase your witness.” Cornerstone and the thousands of Christian student groups on campuses across the country that have relied upon its victory in Widmar v Vincent is evidence of that truth.

To be continued…

The next post will examine more on the environment at the time, the arguments against them, how they found their attorney, and a story from Dean Widmar himself about the interesting reaction of other universities to UMKC’s decision.