District Court Upholds True Meaning of Separation of Church and State

In the recent case of Klouda v. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary[1], U.S. District Judge John McBryde for the Northern District of Texas ruled in favor of Seminary President and past Southern Baptist Convention President Dr. Paige Patterson in an important decision for everyone concerned with the freedom of the church. The controversy began with Dr. Patterson’s biblical and historic view on the roles of men and women in the local church. This is not the first time Dr. Patterson has come under attack for this reason. Such attacks go back at least to 2004, when he addressed the Biblical passage of 1 Timothy 2:9-15, in which wives are instructed to submit to their husbands.

Now, as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, he again came under attack because he refused to continue employing Mrs. Sherri L. Klouda as a faculty professor of Old Testament languages in the School of Theology. Mrs. Klouda was hired in 2000 and Dr. Paterson assumed the presidency in 2003. In April of 2006 Mrs. Klouda was notified she would be terminated “effective December 31, 2006.” On February 7, 2007, Mrs. Klouda filed a charge of sex discrimination against the Seminary with the EEOC, and in March 2007, Mrs. Klouda sued Southwestern and Dr. Patterson for a myriad of issues, including breach of contract, fraud, promissory estoppel, defamation, sex discrimination under Title VII, and “constructive discharge.”

In the March 19 ruling, Judge John McBryde granted Southwestern and Patterson’s motion for Summary Judgment and dismissed all of the complaints in Klouda’s lawsuit against the Seminary and Dr. Patterson. The principle issue of the motions on behalf of Patterson and the Seminary against the Plaintiff were, to quote Judge McBryde, that the suit was essentially a “challenge [to] an ecclesiastical decision that is protected by the church autonomy doctrine under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, with the consequence that either the court does not have subject matter jurisdiction over the case or all of plaintiff’s claims are barred by the First Amendment religion clauses.”

The key issue here is one of church autonomy (see my previous article and forthcoming law review[2]article). Civil courts do not have the jurisdiction to tell churches what the nature and scope of their religious beliefs can be nor can they get involved in internal church matters such as church discipline or hiring or firing staff members. Judge McBryde citing a string of precedents by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote in his opinion, “the courts are prohibited by the First Amendment from involving themselves in ecclesiastical matters, such as disputes concerning theological controversy, church discipline, ecclesiastical government or the conformity of the members of the church to the standard of morals required.”

Judge McBryde concluded that Mrs. Klouda’s suit against Southwestern and its president, Dr. Paige Patterson, involved such an ecclesiastical matter. He believed this was akin to the “Ministerial Exception” and should be treated the same way the law would treat a dispute between a church and a minister—by keeping their noses out of the dispute.

“[T]he record establishes as a matter of law that the employment decision made by defendants [Southwestern] concerning plaintiff [Klouda] was ecclesiastical in nature,” McBryde wrote. “If the court were to allow plaintiff’s claims to go through the normal judicial processes, the procedural entanglements would be far-reaching in their impact upon [the] seminary as a religious organization.”

Commenting on this decision to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Dr. Patterson said Judge McBryde’s decision “has implications for all of our institutions and churches. Americans everywhere may still rejoice in freedom of faith and the ordering of their institutions accordingly.”

It is not known at this time whether or not Mrs. Klouda will appeal the decision. If she does, it is very unlikely that she will succeed on review, based upon the recent church autonomy decisions from other courts.[3]

The Klouda decision is one that we can be thankful for. This is a decision that gets the main issue, and gets it right. Pastors everywhere have yet another court decision that recognizes the independence of the church’s jurisdiction. This is as it should be; the church has autonomy from the state because it was ordained by, and answers to, its only head, Christ.