Virginia’s ‘Religious Test’ for College Students Is Unconstitutional

Virginia has apparently decided it can grade theology. The state's college aid program will hand out money for religious study as long as it's the right kind of religious study, the kind that stays comfortably academic and doesn't ask a student to actually believe anything or prepare for ministry. Cross that line into training someone to be a pastor, an imam, a rabbi, and the check stops. That's not neutrality. That's a bureaucrat deciding which faith commitments are serious enough to disqualify you and which are safely decorative.

This is the same trick governments have pulled for decades: fund religion as a subject to be studied from a distance, defund religion as a thing people actually practice and want to pass on. It sounds tidy on paper, keep the state out of doctrine, but in practice it does the opposite. It forces the state to sit in judgment of what counts as "too religious," which is a judgment no state agency is qualified or permitted to make. The Supreme Court has already told states this kind of line-drawing doesn't survive contact with the Constitution, most notably in Espinoza and Carson v. Makin, where excluding religious options from otherwise generally available aid got tossed out.

What's actually happening here is simple discrimination dressed up as caution. A student who wants to study comparative religion gets a check. A student who wants to become clergy, who is arguably doing something harder and more consequential, gets shown the door. Nobody asks the philosophy major whether they intend to "practice" philosophy for a living before cutting the check.

If Virginia wants to run a neutral aid program, it needs to actually be neutral, not neutral toward religion in the abstract while penalizing anyone who takes it seriously enough to live it out.