Eroding the Necessary Separation

Justices’ ruling threatens constitutional line between church and state

That this Supreme Court seems dedicated to eradicating the sharp line that has historically divided church and state is now undeniable. Last Thursday, on the last day of the court’s session, a bare 5-4 majority held that a public university had wrongly refused to subsidize a student-run Christian magazine. This far-reaching decision is profoundly troubling and a clear break with the court’s long and honorable tradition of upholding the separation of church and state called for in the First Amendment.

The issue before the court involved the University of Virginia’s requirement that all full-time students pay $14 per semester into a student activities fund that supports student groups and publications. In 1990, a student group began to publish a magazine to foster, in the group’s words, “an atmosphere of sensitivity to and tolerance of Christian viewpoints.” The publication was named Wide Awake: A Christian Perspective at the University of Virginia.

The group applied for reimbursement from the student fund for printing expenses. The university denied the subsidy and the publication soon folded. Both the trial and appellate courts agreed with the university that the magazine was a “religious activity” and that its subsidization by a public university with funds collected from every student would be unconstitutional.

The high court decided otherwise: “The university provides printing services to a broad spectrum of student newspapers. . . . Any benefit to religion is incidental to the government’s provision of secular services for secular purposes on a religion-neutral basis. By paying for outside printers, the university in fact attains a further degree of separation from the student publication.” To deny reimbursement, the court continued, would unconstitutionally infringe the group’s speech.

That logic is nonsensical and dangerous. As one advocate of keeping the wall between religion and government said, “Everyone agrees that religious groups have free speech, but today the high court made the government award them space and buy them a bullhorn.”