Missouri law shores up religious freedom on campus

Missouri last week became the latest state to protect the First Amendment rights of campus student organizations by ensuring they can freely elect leaders who share their values and beliefs. Experts are lauding the legislation as a victory for free association and religious rights.

“We would never tell an environmental group that was lobbying for a climate bill that they would have to allow someone that supports drilling in the Arctic,” said Matt Sharp, the director of Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Public Policy. “When it comes to ultimately making those decisions about who’s the leader, who’s the person that’s shaping the direction of our organization, we have to make sure that that person is aligned with the mission and values of [the] organization.”

Even though the First Amendment already protects these student rights, Sharp said that educational institutions have challenged them.

First introduced in the Missouri Senate in January, the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act primarily seeks to prevent discrimination based on a person’s hair texture. The multi-faceted law also addresses several other educational provisions, including students’ free association and speech rights, according to the governor’s office. The measure prohibits higher education institutions from taking “adverse” action against student organizations that have leadership requirements involving political, ideological, or religious beliefs.

The new law promises judicial or administrative relief for students if schools prohibit and punish them for electing leaders based on their beliefs. It enables all student groups, regardless of their beliefs, to have equal access to campus facilities, communication tools, and funding.

In 2023, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the free association right of a Fellowship of Christian Athletes group at a California high school after administrators kicked it off campus over its policy of choosing leaders with Christian beliefs.

In 2022, the Christian student organization Ratio Christi settled with the University of Houston-Clear Lake in a lawsuit over officials’ decision to exclude Ratio Christi from registered student organization status because of its religious leadership requirements.

Religious student groups have also won similar cases in Colorado and Iowa.

Laws like Missouri’s are necessary to avoid lawsuits like these, Sharp said, adding that Missouri marks the 20th state to pass this type of law. Senators unanimously passed the bill in May, and though some Democratic representatives voted against it later that month, the bill easily passed the House. Gov. Mike Kehoe signed it on Wednesday.

State Rep. Elizabeth Fuchs, a Democrat, told St. Louis Public Radio that the law could enable student groups to engage in discriminatory behavior. She contested that student groups would have access to campus funds even if their beliefs are actively discriminatory. WORLD reached out to Fuchs for further comment but did not receive a response before publication.

Though the Supreme Court has a long line of cases that back student free association rights, the high court’s 2010 decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez made that issue more complicated, said Tyler Coward, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The court upheld “all-comers” university policies, which can require student groups to accept any student as a member or leader, even those who oppose the group’s beliefs. The justices noted that if universities put these policies in place, they must enforce them uniformly for all student groups.

But that ruling is a burden on free association rights for religious and political groups, Coward said. He added that states like Missouri have passed laws to emphasize protections for free association rights, creating a “statutory re-interpretation” of the case.

Coward added that opponents of these laws often “misguidedly” believe that the legislation limits diversity within student groups. Instead, he argued that the law encourages a variety of different student groups to exist on a single campus.

“The reality is that a lot of these student organizations just would not exist if they [were] forced to adopt ‘all-comer’ policies,” Coward said. “This is actually a big win for the vibrancy of student groups on campus.”