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Only a religious-equality amendment will resolve what a split high court cannot.

With the help of the U.S. Supreme Court last month, Ron Rosenberger, a Christian student at the University of Virginia, taught public colleges nationwide a vital civics lesson: When the government subsidizes student speech, it may not disqualify religious viewpoints.

Although the university paid the printing costs of 15 student publications, it refused to give the same benefit to Ron's magazine because it was religious. In a major step toward equal treatment of religious groups, the high court agreed that the First Amendment does not require second-class status for those who offer religious messages in the public square.

But the Rosenberger decision underscores the reasons evangelicals should join the campaign for a constitutional amendment for religious equality, which is a broad affirmation of the role of religion in American society and not a narrow attempt to return prayer to the public schools.

Decades of litigation to come?

A religious-equality amendment appears to be the only earthly alternative to additional decades of costly litigation. Rosenberger's appeal touched a hot button issue for the high court. Must government disqualify religious groups and institutions from receiving otherwise neutrally available aid?

In Rosenberger, the Court had another prime opportunity to stake clear constitutional boundary markers in this foggy bog. But instead, the justices, intractably split five to four once more, gave religious student publications a welcome victory-but without casting much light on the surrounding terrain.

The Rosenberger case involved a clash between the right to free speech and the requirement of nonestablishment of religion. The University of Virginia maintains a program to encourage private student speech on campus. It collects $14 per semester from every student for the support of extracurricular student organizations, including many different publications.

In 1990, Rosenberger, an evangelical Christian, formed Wide Awake Productions, a student group on campus that published a newspaper with an evangelistic mission and a biblically based perspective on secular topics. But when Rosenberger asked the university to pay the printing costs of his periodical, he was turned down, unlike 15 other student newspapers. The reason: because his publication "primarily promotes or manifests a particular belief in or about a deity or an ultimate reality."

When the dust of four years of litigation settled on June 29, Rosenberger had won. The high court majority held that the university may not create a public forum for expression and then discriminate among the private speakers on the basis of their viewpoint. By a more tenuous majority, the court ruled that the nonestablishment clause does not require or justify such discrimination, because the university was not endorsing a religious message by simply treating it neutrally.

Make no mistake: the Rosenberger ruling is a momentous victory for the right to free religious speech. At stake was "the suppression of free speech and creative inquiry in one of the vital centers of the nation's intellectual life, its college and university campuses," as Justice Anthony Kennedy warned.

In its ruling, the Court rejected two dangerous arguments by the university. First, the majority agreed that religion is not just a subject that the government may choose to exclude. "[Religion] also provides a specific premise, a perspective, a standpoint from which a variety of subjects may be discussed and considered," wrote Justice Kennedy. When the government proposes to exclude religion from public discussion, it skews the debate.

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August 1 1995, Vol. 39, No. 9