Tax Supported Ministerial Students?

Well, they've hauled off from courthouse grounds yet another monument to the Ten Commandments, this time in North Carolina. While touchy Christians wrangle with each over what happened there and why, the reflective among us might consider turning our attention to a more serious church-state issue that has gone all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Of all things, it is about studying for the ministry at taxpayer expense.

In 1999, Joshua Davey enrolled at Northwest College, an Assemblies of God school near Seattle, on a scholarship that he thought would help him become a pastor. Unfortunately for this particular Joshua, his was not the kind of scholarship that could take him to the Promised Land. It was a "Promise Scholarship" all right, but it was funded by the State of Washington and not his church.

And that is where the trouble started. Apparently, the state's Constitution has a provision that prohibits the appropriation of public money for "religious instruction." But Joshua filed a lawsuit that eventually led to an appeals court ruling that the prohibition violates the First Amendment. It will be interesting to see if the High Court will weigh in on what Washington State's own Constitution says about religious instruction, or whether it will issue its decision on narrower grounds. I am hoping it will opt for the former.

There a lot of ways that Joshua Davey could have saved all of us a good bit of time and money. He might have chosen either to blow the whole college thing off, or to cough up the $1,125 in lost scholarship funding himself. Or, he might have stuck with his original plan to include a major in business, taken a lot of academically-oriented religion courses as electives, and left for later all the stuff "designed to induce religious faith." If I had been his advisor, I would have suggested that he at least consider going at things this latter way. And he well might have.

Frankly, though, I am glad that he rejected all three of these relatively easy ways out, and that he was courageous enough to stick with his plan to get an important issue before the country. Given the proclivity of so many in our churches to pop off at anything that even remotely resembles interference with the work of good and dedicated Christians, it can be very helpful to our understanding of religious freedom that all of us keep looking at the First Amendment from new vantage points. (Sadly, Joshua's own struggles may have weakened fatally his sense of calling to pastoral ministry; he now seems to be headed for some other line of work.)

For a long time now, the Supreme Court has been saying that schools not only can but should make available many opportunities to study religion from literary, historical, and cultural points of view. What the Court has also insisted on, though, is that religion courses have as their primary aim the advancement of learning, and not of personal faith. As someone who has spent over half a lifetime teaching religion from both a pastoral and an academic point of view, I can testify with some confidence that there is a big difference between the two, and that both our churches and our society are best served by keeping the difference firmly in mind.

As far as I can tell, most colleges and universities that offer religion courses understand that studying religion is pretty much like studying anything else. There are things to learn, questions to ask, and minds to be kept open. When a religion class cuts off questions and pressures students to make up their minds in a certain way, then it is no longer a religious studies class. It is more an exercise in indoctrination. The same thing, of course, can be said of other courses in the curriculum. But it is certainly fair to ask for a little extra vigilance when the subject matter is religion rather than, for instance, political science, sociology, or American history. (Come to think about it, though, I had some not very subtly biased profs in these areas, too, once upon a time.)

If the Supreme Court gets down and dirty with Northwest College, and finds more indoctrination than inquiry in its religion department, it will not bother me too much if the justices affirm the state's prohibition against using public monies to support it. If the Court decides instead to go after the state's Constitution, it will bother me a lot if the justices do not offer a little more clarity about what they think the differences are between religious instruction and religious indoctrination. The Joshua Davey case offers what might be their once in a lifetime opportunity to do so.