Virginia Is Telling Christian Students Their Faith Disqualifies Them From Equal Treatment

250 years ago, the Founders of this nation put their names to a document that declared certain truths to be self-evident – not granted by government but by God – among them liberty and the right to act according to one’s conscience.

The Founders had lived under a Crown that used its power to favor some faiths and punish others, and they were determined to build something different. The First Amendment was their guarantee: That in America, your faith would never be the reason the government singles you out for unequal treatment.

Virginia apparently didn’t get the memo.

The Virginia Tuition Assistance Grant Program (VTAG)  provides tuition assistance to Virginia students attending private colleges in the Commonwealth. It sounds straightforward enough. But buried in the program is an exclusion that would have troubled Madison, Jefferson, and every other Founder who understood what religious liberty actually means. Right now students pursuing degrees with the primary purpose of “religious training or theological education” are cut off from assistance available to every other Virginia student.

That’s not neutrality. That’s discrimination. Take action with ACLJ and sign our petition: Defeat the Left’s War Against Christians.

Three Liberty University students are challenging this exclusion in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The ACLJ has filed an amicus brief in their support, and the argument is straightforward: The government cannot open a public benefit to everyone and then slam the door on students simply because of their faith.

The district court ruled against the students based on the Supreme Court decision Locke v. Davey. The ACLJ had a special role to play here because of our work in that case, in which a divided Supreme Court ruled against our client Joshua Davey, who was then a college student. The state stripped Davey of a state scholarship after he announced his intention to major in theology and become a minister. In an unfortunate ruling, the Supreme Court approved the state’s barring of scholarship funds to him. Now, decades later, Joshua Davey himself has joined this fight – he has signed on to the ACLJ's amicus brief, standing alongside these Liberty University students to ensure no other young person of faith suffers the same injustice he did  

But here’s what the district court missed – and what we make clear in our brief: Locke has been systematically confined, limited, and distinguished by the Supreme Court itself in three successive decisions. In Trinity Lutheran (2017), Espinoza(2020), and Carson(2022), the Supreme Court reversed lower courts that had relied on Locke to justify excluding religious institutions and individuals from public benefit programs. The ACLJ filed at the Supreme Court in each case to defend religious liberty. Each time, the Court made it clearer: Locke was narrow, its facts were specific, and it cannot be stretched into a general license to discriminate against religion.

In fact, the Supreme Court said it plainly in Carson: “Locke cannot be read beyond its narrow focus on vocational religious degrees to generally authorize the State to exclude religious persons from the enjoyment of public benefits.”

Virginia’s VTAG goes far beyond anything Locke ever sanctioned. It doesn’t just restrict one narrow category of degree – it excludes entire institutions and penalizes students for pursuing degrees that, in many cases, are functionally indistinguishable from eligible programs at the same school. A student studying Organizational Leadership can receive VTAG funding. However, a student in Pastoral Leadership cannot. That’s not a principled constitutional line. That’s arbitrary discrimination against faith.

The Founders understood something that this case puts in sharp relief: When the government provides a benefit to the public, denying that benefit to citizens on account of their religion is not neutrality – it is hostility. The very first Congress – the same Congress that sent the Bill of Rights to the states for ratification – simultaneously reaffirmed the Northwest Ordinance, declaring that “[r]eligion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” They did not exclude religious schools. They did not exclude students of faith. They understood that a free society educates all of its citizens.

As we mark the 250th anniversary of American independence this year, the question before the Fourth Circuit is whether Virginia will honor that founding promise – or continue to tell Christian students that their chosen field of study makes them second-class citizens in the eyes of the Commonwealth.

The ACLJ was built to fight cases exactly like this one – and now Joshua Davey, who lived this injustice firsthand, is standing with us. We will continue to stand for the principle that religious liberty is not a privilege the government may selectively extend or withdraw.

Take action with ACLJ and sign our petition: Defeat the Left’s War Against Christians.