Let the churches decide

Recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued an opinion that, while receiving scant media coverage, is one of the more important decisions in recent years that protects the right of churches and ministries from government interference.

In McRaney v. The North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, Judge Andrew Oldham wrote that courts cannot “interfere with matters of church government, matters of faith, [and] matters of doctrine,” dismissing a lawsuit brought against the North American Mission Board (“NAMB”) by a former employee of one of the organization’s key ministry partners.

The church autonomy doctrine protects the religious liberty of religious organizations and local churches by preventing courts from even considering a case challenging how they pursue their religious mission. In this case, NAMB could not carry out its mission of helping support churches to share the gospel, engage in compassion ministry, and plant new churches across North America if courts insisted that it cooperate with those the Mission Board does not believe are able to effectively carry out that same mission.

NAMB partners with Southern Baptist churches, local associations, and state conventions to share the Christian faith by caring for refugees, fighting human trafficking, supporting adoption/foster care, coordinating the response to natural disasters, and planting new churches. A former executive director of a state convention of Southern Baptist churches sued, claiming that NAMB influenced his termination. The district court dismissed the case, concluding that the case would require secular courts to evaluate NAMB’s decision making regarding religious leadership—a purely religious matter that the First Amendment prevents secular courts from addressing. 

But previously on appeal, a different three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit reversed, allowing the lawsuit to move forward. Nine judges on the Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed its panel decision over the objection of eight dissenting judges. The Supreme Court declined review, sending the case back to district court.

This time around, the Fifth Circuit came to the right conclusion. Judge Oldham found that, “The independence of religious institutions to govern their own affairs free from government intrusion has ‘ancient roots’ in Anglo-American legal history,” dating to to the time of “Saxon kings of the seventh to the tenth centuries, [when] civil courts categorically lacked jurisdiction over clergymen unless the bishop ‘secularize[d]’ them first.”

Judge Oldham further stated, “In general, the church autonomy doctrine ‘protect[s] the right of churches and other religious institutions to decide matters of faith and doctrine’ without the ‘intrusion’ of secular courts.” There should be no doubt, according to the decision, that religious institutions—not judges—have the freedom to choose how to fulfill their religious missions and by whom.

As Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit explained in his earlier dissent from the denial of en banc review, “If religious liberty under our Constitution means anything, it surely means at least this much: that the government may not interfere in an internal dispute over who should lead a church—and especially not when the dispute is due to conflicting visions about the growth of the church.”

Essentially, if a court can evaluate the religious character of NAMB, it can also tell the local church who it must hire to preach its beliefs, teach its faith, and carry out its mission. But the Fifth Circuit concluded that the First Amendment already struck that balance for us in favor of church autonomy, determining that secular courts are not competent to evaluate religious matters.

No court should be able to tell a church who it must hire to preach its beliefs, teach its faith, or carry out its mission. The Fifth Circuit’s decision goes a long way in once again protecting the autonomy of religious institutions. The clarity of this ruling should be appreciated.