There’s a government line being drawn between which kinds of religious study the state will bless and which it won’t.
There’s a government line being drawn between which kinds of religious study the state will bless and which it won’t.
I f the commonwealth of Virginia uses taxpayer funds to provide college grants, can those grants be denied to students because the government deems their chosen degree fields “too religious?” No; not according to the First Amendment.
Should the U.S. Supreme Court overturn a problematic decision that has sown confusion in this area of the court’s jurisprudence? Absolutely.
These are the questions and desired answers that attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the National Legal Foundation (NLF) presented to the Supreme Court last week in a petition to hear the case of Johnson v. Fleming. The case revolves around three Virginia college students who were excluded from educational grants worth thousands of dollars because the government deemed their chosen degrees “too religious,” even though similar degrees were eligible.
Cameron Johnson is a 2025 high school graduate who majors in pastoral leadership at Liberty University. Luke Thomas plans on majoring in music and worship at Liberty. The students are suing the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia for denying them tuition grants because it arbitrarily decided their religious degrees didn’t qualify for the Virginia Tuition Assistance Grant (VTAG). Trace Stevens, a Liberty graduate student and a second lieutenant in the Virginia Army National Guard, is challenging the Virginia Department of Military Affairs, which maintains a similar unconstitutional policy.
Stevens graduated with a degree in religion last summer and is currently in a Master of Divinity program. And although he is a chaplain candidate in the Guard, the Department of Military Affairs refuses to provide him with a grant for his master’s degree — a prerequisite for becoming a chaplain.
A federal district court ruled against the three students based on a 2004 Supreme Court decision, Locke v. Davey.
These students are not seeking special or preferential treatment but merely to be treated equally under the law. The road to religious freedom in America is paved with many Supreme Court decisions that have well established the principle of application of the First Amendment’s religion clauses. Government must not discriminate against the religious in favor of the secular or between religions.
This is why Locke was such a dangerous detour when the Court permitted the state of Washington to provide scholarship funds for secular degrees but deny them for theology. In the 22 years since that case was decided, the Court has taken several steps back toward the right path.
In Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), the Supreme Court held that a state cannot deny a qualified organization a public benefit solely because of its religious character. The Court called this type of religious discrimination “odious to our Constitution.” In Espinoza v. Montana (2020), the Court extended that principle to students, holding that states cannot deny public educational benefits to students at religious schools. And in Carson v. Makin (2022), the Court explicitly declared that the government cannot exclude students from public tuition benefits based on the anticipated religious use of the funds.
Virginia’s grant exclusions cause precisely the type of “odious” discrimination that the court condemned in this trilogy of cases. And yet, the students at the center of Johnson v. Fleming — and Hall v. Fleming, a similar lawsuit — are pleading their cases to the Supreme Court because of Locke.
Bethany Hall is a full-time undergraduate student at Liberty University. When she changed her major from music education — an eligible program — to youth ministries, Virginia declared her ineligible. She then switched to Christian leadership & church ministries, then music & worship, but every major tied to her religious calling was excluded, denying Hall grants for the 2023–24 and 2024–25 academic years.
Meanwhile, Virginia still funds other religious majors at Liberty, like Christian studies, Christian counseling, evangelism, and theological studies — proof that this isn’t a blanket ban on funding religious education, but a government line drawn between which kinds of religious study it will bless and which it won’t.
Judge Julius Richardson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit authored a concurring opinion in Hall’s case, stating that he believed Locke controlled the decision but, “. . . until the Court formally buries Locke, we lower-court judges must keep applying it.”
Whether states should be involved in funding higher education at all is a larger debate for the policymaking branches of state governments. However, as long as states do so, they must do so without religious discrimination. On that our judicial branch must be unwaveringly clear. Education is a key to a promising future. Religious students should not be Locked out.