Austin, USA - The Texas Supreme Court sided with unaccredited schools of theology Friday, ruling that the state had no authority to intervene in their religious curriculum or prohibit them from conferring degrees.
"This is a huge victory for religious freedom," said Kelly Shackelford, an attorney with the Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute, which represented three religious schools against the state.
"The state," he added, "has no competence to control the training of pastors and ministers and rabbis. The state can't tell us what's good theology or bad theology or what a substandard degree in theology is or isn't."
The ruling by the court affects schools that offer purely theological education.
A decade ago, fearing the rise of degree mills that offer diplomas with little required course work, the Legislature passed a law requiring schools that call themselves seminaries to be accredited just like colleges and universities. The state also set standards for accreditation.
It required, for example, that seminaries only hire instructors with at least master's degrees and couldn't exclude those who didn't consider themselves religious. A certain percentage of coursework also had to be secular in nature.
In a divided ruling, the court said that kind of regulation amounted to government intrusion in religious expression and violated free speech.
The case began nearly a decade ago when the Fort-Worth-based Tyndale Theological Seminary was fined $173,000 for conferring 34 degrees without being accredited.
Three religious schools — Southern Bible Institute, Hispanic Bible Institute and HEB Ministries, which is unrelated to the grocery company with a similar name — sued the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which issued the fine.
Stephanie Elsea, a spokeswoman for the Coordinating Board, declined comment, saying attorneys were still reviewing the decision.
Two organizations that advocate separation of church and state, the Texas Freedom Network and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, also declined comment.
University of Texas professor emeritus of law Doug Laycock, who wrote a brief supporting the schools, said he hoped the state would now come up with "a more sensible set of regulations" like requiring schools to clearly disclose if they had state accreditation.
The court's decision left Betty Anderson eagerly anticipating an influx of students at the theological school she and her husband, David, run in The Woodlands.
She said when the school opened about five years ago, they envisioned a non-denominational institution that would confer degrees to as many as 3,000 students. To date, they've enrolled only about 250 students, and none have been able to earn degrees. "We had to pull back," she said.
Because the school couldn't get accredited, it couldn't use "seminary" in its name, so the Andersons had to change the original name, Houston Seminary, to the current Grace School of Theology.