Her Major Cost Her the Grant: A Virginia Student at the Supreme Court

A Liberty University student lost her state grant when she changed her major. Virginia does not need the Supreme Court to fix that.

In February 2023, Liberty University told Bethany Hall she qualified for five thousand dollars a year from the Virginia Tuition Assistance Grant. She enrolled that fall as a Music Education major.

Then, in the words of the federal court that later heard her case, she heard God’s call to ministry and changed her major to Youth Ministries. The grant disappeared. She tried Music and Worship instead. That did not qualify either. Hall went two academic years without the grant, a loss of ten thousand dollars, and she sued.

She lost in the trial court and she lost on appeal. Her case is now at the Supreme Court, which may or may not take it. But the argument of this piece is simpler than any of that, and it does not depend on nine justices. The rule that cost Bethany Hall her grant is written in Virginia’s own law. Virginia can repeal it.

What the rule says

The grant helps Virginia residents attend private, nonprofit colleges here in the Commonwealth. Students at religious schools are welcome. Students at Liberty, Regent, and Eastern Mennonite all qualify. The school is not the problem. The major is.

State law limits the grant to institutions that do not provide religious training or theological education. A state regulation then names the excluded majors by federal code number. Anything in what the federal government calls Code 39, the classification for programs preparing people for religious vocations, is out. Youth Ministries is in that code. Music and Worship is in that code. Music Education is not.

There is one accommodation. A student may keep the grant with a double major, as long as she takes no more credits in the ministry major than in the other one. So Bethany Hall could have kept her money by studying something else alongside her calling, or by giving the calling up.

Why she lost

A federal judge in Richmond dismissed her case. On May 13 of this year, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

The reason is a Supreme Court decision from 2004 called Locke against Davey. Washington State had a scholarship that excluded students pursuing a degree in theology. The Supreme Court said that was allowed. Hall’s situation was nearly identical, and she admitted as much. Her argument was that three later Supreme Court decisions had quietly killed the 2004 ruling. The Fourth Circuit said they had not, and that lower courts must keep applying it.

That is the whole reason Bethany Hall lost. Not that Virginia’s rule is wise. Only that an old Supreme Court case permits it.

The judge who ruled against her, and then said this

One of the three judges on that panel was Julius Richardson. He voted against Bethany Hall. Then he wrote a separate opinion explaining why he thought the law forcing that vote is wrong.

Court opinions belong to the public, so we can quote him freely. Richardson wrote that the 2004 ruling was wrongly decided, that it betrays the founding generation’s commitment to religious liberty, and that the Supreme Court should formally overrule it. He called it a moth-eaten shell. In a footnote about the Chief Justice who wrote it, he allowed five words: even a great Chief Justice can err.

Then the sentence that matters most. Without that 2004 case, Richardson wrote, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions would require holding that Virginia’s program violates the First Amendment. But a lower court is not free to bury a precedent the Supreme Court has not buried. He closed by calling the old ruling a stain on our religious liberty law, one that lower court judges must nevertheless keep applying.

Read that again. A federal appeals judge said, in a published opinion, that he believes the Constitution is on Bethany Hall’s side and that his office does not permit him to rule that way. That is not a loophole. That is a judge refusing to take power that is not his.

How strong is the case for change

Honest answer: the legal path is uncertain, and the legislative path is not.

On August 11, Hall’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to overrule that 2004 decision outright. Virginia’s answer is due September 14. One of the lawyers on her petition is a man named Joshua Davey. That is the same Davey in the case name. He was the student who lost in 2004. He is a practicing attorney now, and twenty-two years later he is back arguing the other side of his own defeat.

That is a remarkable story, and it is not a prediction. The Supreme Court turns away the large majority of petitions without explanation. Nothing about Virginia’s rule has changed. Nothing changes unless the Court both takes the case and reverses.

The strongest argument on the other side

Christians should be able to state it, because it has Virginia’s own fingerprints on it. The 2004 ruling leaned on the objection to taxpayer money supporting clergy, and that objection traces in part to James Madison, who wrote against a Virginia bill to pay teachers of the Christian religion. Keeping the state out of the business of training pastors has protected the church at least as often as it has burdened it. A government that funds ministers can eventually expect to have opinions about them.

That concern is real and it deserves respect. But it answers a different question. Madison opposed singling religion out for special funding. Nobody is asking Virginia to pay pastors. The question here is whether a young woman may keep a grant that every other student keeps, without editing her calling to qualify.

What this means for Virginians

Here is where the whole thing lands. The Supreme Court permits this exclusion. It does not require it. No federal court has ever ordered Virginia to withhold a grant from a ministry student. Virginia chose to, wrote that choice into its own statute and its own regulation, and has kept it there.

What a state writes into its own code, a state can rewrite. The General Assembly convenes in January. It could end this exclusion in a single session, and it would not need permission from Washington to do it.

Until then, the Commonwealth is telling its own young people that a call to ministry costs five thousand dollars a year.