NJ public school officials discriminate against Christian athletes

Controversy has again arisen over religious freedom as public school officials in New Jersey have ignored the First Amendment rights of student members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) in their district. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a highly successful non-profit, public-interest legal and educational institute with a mission to protect the free expression of all faiths, filed suit in the federal trial court for the District of New Jersey to protect the religious freedom rights of high and middle school chapters of the FCA.

In Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. Board of Education of the Hopewell Valley Regional School District, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRA) sent a letter of complaint to the board because the Hopewell Valley Regional School District had allowed adults to participate in FCA Club meetings. After the board adopted a revised policy banning outside volunteer adult mentors for religious clubs, yet allowed them at every other student organization, the Becket Fund filed suit to protect the FCA’s rights to religious freedom, most notably under the First Amendment and the Federal Equal Access Act.

This column reviews the facts in this dispute as a prelude to offering analysis and commentary on how it negatively impacts the religious freedom rights of public school students.

Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. Board of Education of the Hopewell Valley Regional School District

The FCA, founded in 1954, with branches in 77 countries, involves 103,663 students in 24,326 huddles, or local chapters, “in which they study the Bible, pray, support one another in their journeys of faith and athletics—and eat pizza.” A non-denominational Christian organization that challenges professional, college, high school, junior high, and youth level coaches and athletes “with the transforming power of Jesus Christ,” the FCA focuses on serving local communities “by engaging, equipping and empowering coaches and athletes to unite, inspire and change the world through the gospel.”

Turning to New Jersey’s Hopewell Valley Regional School District, in particular, its FCA student-initiated and led chapters, like other clubs on campus, often invited local members of the regional FCA staff and other adults to participate in their gatherings. The huddles began at the high school in 2010 and in middle school in 2024 without incident. Within days of receiving a letter from the FFRF in March 2025, demanding that the board investigate what it claimed was granting the “FCA’s ‘outside religious representatives’ … ‘unique access to’ District students and ‘treat[ing] schools as a recruiting ground for their religious mission,’” though, officials acquiesced by going even further than demanded.

In response to the FFRF’s letter, the board’s directive to the FCA singled it out in “categorically forbidding any ‘outside individuals’ from attending any meetings of ‘religious clubs’ at all, [mistakenly] claiming that ‘the law’ (they didn’t say which one [but presumably the Equal Access Act, discussed below] ‘stipulates’ it.” As detailed in the FCA’s complaints, other clubs solicit outside adult involvement, even permitting them to manage group operations.

The students filed eight claims against the board for violating their rights. The students’ first charge is that officials violated their First Amendment rights by discriminating against them for being religious. The second was because the policy is neither neutral nor generally applicable insofar as it treated the FCA differently from other groups. Third, the FCA charge is that the board violated the Equal Access Act. In the related fourth and fifth charges, the FCA alleges that the board violated its First Amendment rights to speak freely as a form of expressive association and assembly by being unable to gather freely with those they wish.

The FCA’s sixth charge is that the board violated its First Amendment right to free speech by forbidding it from inviting outsiders in what amounts to content and viewpoint-based discrimination. The sixth complaint is that the board violated the FCA’s Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection by treating it differently from similar student groups. Seventh, the FCA alleged that the board violated the First Amendment by engaging in a discriminatory denial of equal access to faculty participation in its activities. The FCA’s final charge is that the board violated New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination under which “[a]ll persons shall have the opportunity to … obtain all the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of any place of public accommodation … without discrimination because of … creed.”

In light of the violations of the FCA’s rights, it seeks orders that the board violated its federal and state rights to gather as the huddles wish. The clubs also request preliminary and permanent injunctions preventing the board from enforcing the policy, along with reasonable attorney fees and other relief the court might deem appropriate.

Analysis and commentary

The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized what should be a basic principle in American society and life, namely that the government, in and through its officials, including public school educators, simply cannot “single out the religious for disfavored treatment.”

Yet, under the apparent threat of litigation from an advocacy group hostile to people of faith that stands this basic principle on its ear by trying to eradicate any trace of religion from American public schools and life, administrators in New Jersey’s Hopewell Valley Regional School District ignored the Supreme Court’s clear directive. In so doing, school officials infringed on the rights of student members of the FCA by banning them from welcoming adult guests.

Rather than stand up for the students’ rights, school officials caved to the threatened litigation rather than defend their fundamental constitutional right applicable to States since 1940’s Cantwell v. Connecticut. In Cantwell, the Supreme Court expanded the reach of the Free Exercise Clause by invalidating a state law limiting the rights of a Jehovah’s Witness father and his two sons as they proselytized on a Sunday to the annoyance of some residents.

Turning specifically to the religious freedom rights of members of the FCA huddles in the Hopewell Valley middle and high schools, district officials misrepresented the students’ rights in claiming that an unspecified law “stipulates” the barring of any outside adult involvement in the club’s activities. In trying to give school officials the benefits of the doubt, they at best failed to identify and misrepresented the Equal Access Act.

Adopted in 1984, according to the relevant portions of the Equal Access Act,

[i]t shall be unlawful for any public secondary school which … has a limited open forum to deny equal access or a fair opportunity to, or discriminate against, any students who wish to conduct a meeting [of a non-curriculum related organization] … on the basis of the religious, political, philosophical, or other content of the speech at such meetings.

As to any student gathering, the Act specifies that

(1) the meeting is voluntary and student-initiated;

(2) there is no sponsorship of the meeting by the school, the government, or its agents or employees;

(3) employees or agents of the school or government are present at religious meetings only in a nonparticipatory capacity;

(4) the meeting does not materially and substantially interfere with the orderly conduct of educational activities within the school; and

(5) nonschool persons may not direct, conduct, control, or regularly attend activities of student groups.

The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Equal Access Act in 1990’s Board of Education of Westside Community Schools v. Mergens. The Justices found that Congress was convinced that because most high school students could recognize that allowing a religious club to function in school does not imply the endorsement of religion, the Act passed constitutional muster.

In reviewing the Act and the facts here, whether due to fear of litigation by the FFRA, anti-religious prejudice, or the unlikely scenario of simply not understanding the law, school officials clearly misrepresented its terms as applied to the FCA. To this end, a plain reading of the Equal Access Act reveals that it clearly permits adults, whether school staff or other, to participate in the huddles as long as they do not control activities, a situation for which there was no evidence.

As reflected in two recent cases, this is not the first time school officials have attempted to discriminate against chapters of the FCA due to their religious beliefs. For example, in another case in which the Becket Fund was involved in 2023, the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of a branch of the FCA in California. The court reasoned that officials violated the FCA’s rights as a recognized student group by expelling it from campus due to hostility towards its belief that sexual relations should be limited within the context of a marriage between one man and one woman. The court decided that because the FCA’s leaders established the likelihood of success on the merits of their Free Exercise Clause and Equal Access Act claims the branch would have suffered irreparable harm absenting at its reinstatement, the balance of equities and public interest favored granting preliminary injunctive relief.

A year later, in a third successful case filed by the Becket Fund, the federal trial court in the District of Columbia reached a like result. The court enjoined educators from suspending and later removing the FCA as an official student high school group due to its beliefs about marriage and human sexuality.

Moving forward, if this case gets as far as a trial, one I will write about in that event, hopefully the court will follow the law by protecting the students’ rights to religious freedom to gather as they wish, just like other clubs in Hopewell Valley’s schools.