Speaking at Vanderbilt University last week on a forum titled, “Threats to Religious liberty: on Campus, and Across the Nation (YouTube link),” law professor, Michael Paulsen confidently predicted that in the next 5-7 years, the Supreme Court will be forced to step into the fray and reverse its wrong 5-4 decision in CLS v. Martinez.  In the meantime, we need to roll up our sleeves and get ready for a long protracted battle to preserve our civil rights and civil liberties against institutions that seem determined to remake our society into their utopian dream.

Restoring the status quo that prevailed at the University until ten months ago, this
statement reflects the common sense understanding that religious groups should have leaders
who share the groups’ core religious beliefs. Nondiscrimination policies serve important
purposes. But to use a nondiscrimination policy that is supposed to protect religious students to penalize those students actually undermines the University’s nondiscrimination policy and the essential good it serves.
The statement would restore religious liberty and authentic pluralism to campus.

In addition, this brief video contains excellent material about Greek Life and the “all-comers”policy.  (Greek Life-2:20)

Video of Town Hall Meeting

Articles about the Town Hall Meeting:

The Hustler (2/1/2012)

The City Paper (2/1/2012)

January 27, 2012

•     Under this policy, must an ideological student journal like Vanderbilt’s Orbis accept editors or
publish columnists who disagree with, mock, or denigrate its progressive political views?

•     Many groups in the Occupy movement choose to make decisions by consensus. How could a Vanderbilt-based Occupy group operate if a
small group of students joined specifically to prevent the group from acting in any way by constantly preventing a consensus from forming?

•     If a student were to join an environmentalist group like Vanderbilt SPEAR and then use his membership in that group to increase his or her credibility when publicly criticizing the
group’s positions in the Nashville or Vanderbilt newspapers, what could the group do to prevent this?

FIRE, which wrote you regarding these concerns last September but received no response, is not alone in its concern. Twenty-three members of the United States Congress, the national Christian
Legal Society, Vanderbilt law professor Carol Swain, Roman Catholic Bishop David Choby of Nashville, and many others have warned Vanderbilt that a decision to deny religious or political
groups the right to require that their leaders believe in the group’s mission would severely impair the rights of Vanderbilt students.

Indeed, Vanderbilt promises that students “are entitled to exercise the rights of citizens,” yet the university’s decision now forbids them from doing so. Vanderbilt students now have fewer rights than their counterparts at the University of Tennessee—or their friends from high school who chose not to attend college at all.

We hope that you will provide honest and thoughtful answers to these important questions.

Sincerely,

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Ivory Tower is a love song written by Jack Fulton and Lois Steele popularized in 1956.  Many of its lyrics remind me of the battle that some of us are engaged at Vanderbilt University where we confront what often feels like a cold and indifferent administration.  Last Friday, Chancellor Zeppos sent out an e-mail defending a policy that many of us have decried.  It concluded with a call for town hall meetings and conversation. Conversation is good.  But it is suspect when it is issued by an Administration that started the last conversation by having officials state that it had no intention of reinstating the protections that were stripped from religious organizations when the University decided to re-examine its anti-discrimination policy.  

To refresh your minds, last September after months of behind the scene maneuvering by groups trying to negotiate an acceptable arrangement with the University, I wrote an op-ed informing alumni, students, and trustees of a new policy that stipulated that student organizations could no longer require their leaders to share their beliefs or in the case of Christian groups lead Bible study and worship services.  In reaction to the shocking new development, the Christian Legal Society and some of the other Christian groups on campus engaged in a futile attempt to negotiate a satisfactory resolution and each organization attempted to revise its constitution while adhering to its core beliefs. Unfortunately, our good faith effort was not enough for the University.  Therefore, the Christian Legal Society is one of a few remaining groups who remain on provisional status and will lose their rights and privileges at the end of the academic year; unless, the University reinstates its previous policy which protected religious organizations from situations like the one that has arisen on our campus.  

 Although we are disappointed with the University’s example to the world, we are heartened by the fact that on January 11, 2012, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court issued an in the case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. E.E.O.C. that recognizes the “ministerial exception” and upholds the right of religious organizations to select and dismiss their leaders.  One would hope that this decision would make a positive difference when it comes to Vanderbilt University’s stance on religious freedom.  We would hope that Vanderbilt’s leaders would have the wisdom to see the relevance of Hosanna-Tabor to the situation it has created on campus.  We would hope that an institution that prides itself in training the leaders of tomorrow would show enormous respect for our Constitution, by embracing and defending the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, as well as the statutory law that protects the religious freedom of Americans from non-discrimination. 

 The Chancellor will hold his town hall meetings where he will eloquently defend his anti-discrimination policy.  Those of us who understand what is at stake can only wish that the Administration would come down, come down from the ivory tower.  It’s cold, so cold, in the ivory tower.

Jeremiah 29:11 ”For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

When I share my Christian testimony I often call myself the accidental professor because academia was not a career choice that I consciously sought. In the early years, when I earned my GED and started my education at a local community college, my modest goal was to get a college degree and earn enough income to support my family without a man’s income. I considered careers as a nurse, a store manager, and a marketing director before circumstances unfolded that pushed me towards academia. God’s plan for my life included increased education, a series of mentors, and eventually a born again Christian experience that removed a lifelong fear of public speaking and sent me on a journey I never anticipated.

I was born and raised in abject poverty in rural Virginia in a broken family that included 11 siblings. I dropped out of school at age 16, married a slightly older neighbor and soon became the mother of three children. After spending a few miserable years as a Jehovah’s Witness and struggling with deep depression and suicide gestures, I divorced my husband, earned a GED and eventually five college and university degrees. I was steered towards academia where I met with worldly success. I earned early tenure at Princeton University and won three national awards. Despite my success, I was never happy. In fact, my life was wracked with guilt whenever I looked at my siblings and their impoverished lifestyle. After tenure, I found my life pitched into a darkness that sent me on a search for meaning that took me through New Age and Eastern religions. It eventually culminated with my having a born-again Christian experience that totally changed my life and how I see my place in the world. I am now an openly Christian professor of political science and of law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Jeremiah 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart…”

One of the turning points for me was a hospital experience where I thought I was dying. I heard an internal voice narrating my life and asking me to choose. I chose Jesus Christ even though I was certain that I was dying as an unsaved person. The hospital in Princeton happened to have a black Pentecostal chaplain, which was unusual given the affluence and racial makeup of the surrounding community. The chaplain and a cleaning lady witnessed to me in the hospital and arranged for me to be baptized. That year I had four hospitalizations and three operations. It took a couple of years for me to understand enough to become a devout believer.

Jeremiah 33:3 “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”

When God filled me with his Spirit, he removed my fear of public speaking. Before the in-filling of the Holy Spirit I was painfully shy, so much so that I turned down an opportunity to be a guest on Good Morning America. Now I have given hundreds of interviews and I see television, radio and print as essential for reaching the public and changing the culture. Growing up in rural Virginia, I always knew I was different. Even though I didn’t know the Lord, I knew that there was something much larger than me guiding and directing my life. As a child and young adult, I can remember strangers approaching me and saying I would be famous. Although I’m not famous, I have come a long way since southwestern Virginia. God has equipped me and called me to speak truth to power. I am a prayer warrior who has witnessed many miracles of healing and salvation. I don’t know the future but I feel God’s power working to shape my life. Whatever happens—successes and failures, both the good and the bad–I am secure in the knowledge that he orders and directs my footsteps.

1 Corinthians 1: 27-29 “. . . 27 God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, 28 and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, 29 so that no]man may boast before God.

Colleges and universities pride themselves as being vanguards of pluralism.  Nevertheless, in the past decade, more and more institutions have been quietly, but systematically, restricting freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly under the guise of non-discrimination.

Vanderbilt University is seeking to lead the latest of these challenges. It has removed from its anti-discrimination policy language that would protect religious groups and it has gone so far as to challenge the practice of having leaders of Christian organizations lead Bible studies.  In a letter to the President of the Christian Legal Society, the acting director of religious life explains that requiring leaders to lead Bible Studies “would seem to indicate that officers are expected to hold certain beliefs.” What an idea!  The president of The Democratic Club does not need to know, believe, and promote the principles of the Party?

Carried to its logical extension, the policy means that no organization can maintain integrity of beliefs.  Christians can seek to lead Muslim organizations, Muslims can seek to lead Jewish ones, and Wiccans can lead Catholic fellowships.  The policy now allows for, and is most likely designed to encourage negative activism where students holding views antithetical to an organization use Alinsky-esque techniques of deception, infiltration and manipulation to assume leadership positions in organizations they seek to destroy from the inside.

Mary Poplin, Professor of Education at Claremont Graduate University and author of a new manuscript titled Is Reality Secular: What if Christianity is True, argues that this is one more step in the West’s long march to secularize the world.  Not content with secularizing public life, they have now turned to religious organizations themselves.  These efforts are intended to dilute the beliefs of the religiously minded. Nevertheless, young people are defying the secular trend. The Astins’ annual college survey suggests today’s college students are more committed than ever to pursuing spirituality.

The Obama administration has supported secularization in multiple ways from rescinding aspects of the freedom of conscience to requiring faith based initiatives become multi-faith efforts. This past spring, The President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge was sent to thousands of college presidents urging them to create interfaith service projects designed to “build understanding between different communities.” Mark Eddington of Harvard suggests that the campus chapel become an “interfaith laboratory.”

The Obama Administration seemingly believes an unproven but commonly held assumption that it is faith communities that are divisive when in fact, faith communities often fare better together than with secular ones. Filling the campus chapel with interfaith dialogue and projects supports the secular agenda by keeping religious dialogue at the lowest common denominator.

Interfaith work is not new to believing communities and their efforts have never needed secularist prompting. However, interfaith work projects cannot substitute for religious groups on campus because they do not help religious people study and practice their own beliefs.

Clearly, we are witnessing the death of ideological pluralism on campus. The carefully orchestrated assault on religious organizations on college and university campuses contradicts our Constitutional freedoms and it works against the interests of God-fearing students, staff, and faculty.  We must never forget that many of our elite educational institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, and Vanderbilt Universities were started by great men of faith who would turn over in their grave if they could see the march of secular humanism and the advance of atheism at the institutions they founded.

Carol M. Swain is Professor of Political Science and of Law at Vanderbilt University. Her most recent book is Be the People: a Call to Reclaim America’s Faith and Promise. E-mail: carol.swain@vanderbilt.edu, Website: www.carolmswain.net, Twitter: carolmswain

Evangelical Christians are increasingly under attack for their biblically-based worldviews. Shortly after graduation last spring, Vanderbilt University’s Office of Religious Life quietly deferred its annual approval of several mostly conservative Christian organizations.

Groups affected included the Christian Legal Society, InterVarsity and the graduate chapter of Campus Crusade. These organizations face an uncertain future because of a new policy that prohibits religious organizations from requiring that their leaders share the same beliefs and goals of the organizations they seek to lead. The policy goes one step further by hamstringing Bible studies.

According to a letter from the acting director of the Office of Religious Life, Bible studies are suspect because they “would seem to indicate that officers are expected to hold certain beliefs.’’ The letter goes on to explain: “Vanderbilt policies do not allow this expectation/qualification for officers.’’

If this policy is implemented, it will make it harder for the students to have on-campus fellowship with like-minded believers and it will make it more difficult for them to grow in or even maintain their faith while on campus. The policy sends a clear message to students: religious associations are not a valued or respected part of the university’s ideological diversity.

This hastily conceived policy has the potential to destroy every religious organization on campus by secularizing religion and allowing intolerant conflict. Carried to its logical extension, it means that no organization can maintain integrity of beliefs. Christians can seek to lead Muslim organizations, Muslims can seek to lead Jewish ones, and Wiccans can seek to lead Catholic fellowships. The policy encourages people holding antithetical views to infiltrate organizations they seek to destroy.

Universities and colleges around the country are increasingly seeking to impose secular ideology upon religious organizations under the guise of political correctness.

Recently, the Supreme Court allowed a public law school to require all student groups to accept any and all student-comers for leadership positions, regardless of whether the students agreed with the groups’ goals and purposes; however, the Court carefully pointed out that the policy applied to all groups, not just religious groups.

By adopting a more restrictive policy than the Supreme Court allowed, the university aims to get national publicity for its aggressive policy.

Perhaps donors and alumni should weigh in on Vanderbilt’s new policy. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of worship, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits religious discrimination. It is not too late for Vanderbilt University to honor and respect the principles and traditions that helped make our nation and the Western university great.

Carol M. Swain is professor of political science and of law at Vanderbilt University. Her most recent book is Be the People: a Call to Reclaim America’s Faith and Promise.