Methodist universities should not be forced to hire Roman Catholic priests to teach theology. Lutheran colleges should not be forced to hire Oneness Pentecostal ministers to teach religion classes. This is common sense, but a federal court is having trouble seeing it.
Moody Bible Institute, a Calvinist college in Chicago, wants to hire faculty who share its views. At issue in a pending federal court case is the college’s view that ordained ministers should only be males. Religious liberty scholars want to see the full 7th Circuit Court of Appeals protect Moody’s autonomy to decide doctrinal matters.
A former instructor, Janay Garrick, claims she faced sex discrimination, but the college argues those allegations are directly related to its doctrinal views. The instructor believes women can be ministers and publicly advocated them to be admitted into the college’s pastoral ministry program.
She also accused the college of evaluating her differently and refusing her accommodations while she finished a degree even though male employees had received them.
But her conflict with Moody is related to theology, as she has testified. “Garrick admitted in a sworn declaration that she and Moody parted ways because their theology differed,” Alliance Defending Freedom wrote in an amicus brief on behalf of other Christian educational employers. “She can’t evade Moody’s First Amendment rights by ignoring theological disputes and applying a sex-discrimination label.”
A dissenting opinion in the March decision, the one now being appealed, warns of what will happen if the instructor’s claims can move forward.
“Garrick will ask a jury to attribute secular, sex-based motivations to Moody, even while admitting that Moody had religious motivations and that the parties had a religious dispute about sex-based religious distinctions for religious leadership roles,” Judge Michael Brennan wrote.
“Her claims will thus entangle the courts and a jury in questions over the development, meaning, and strength of Moody’s church-leadership doctrines,” he wrote. This will include “its internal religious deliberations regarding Garrick’s rejection of its doctrine; and its religious decisions involving other professors and students that violated its doctrine.”
It is important for the judiciary to protect the religious freedom of universities and other employers to hire on the basis of theological beliefs. The First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom is weakened if organizations must hire people who take different doctrinal views than their own.
Moody Bible is facing a lengthy and expensive legal battle because it has a mission: to train Christians to evangelize. To do so, it must be able to hire and fire professors based on their compatibility with its own views.
Some problems in higher education can be traced back to a lack of clear views for universities, beyond generally supporting the latest leftist beliefs. Universities should have missions. Some land grant schools were started to invest in the agricultural or engineering fields. Military academies exist to train the next generation of armed forces officers.
And Moody Bible Institute “exists to Proclaim the Gospel through equipping people to be biblically grounded, practically trained, and to engage the world through Gospel-centered living.”
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Amid campus unrest, rapid growth in LGBT identification among college students, and targeting of Republicans on the basis of their views, we need more colleges such as Moody that have a mission.
The federal courts should protect Moody’s First Amendment rights and, by extension, those of other religious universities to operate free of undue secular influence.
Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for the College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.