Bethany Hall’s petition to the Supreme Court asks justices, potentially including Clarence Thomas, a long-time critic, to scrap a 22-year-old ruling that has allowed states to deny scholarship aid to students training for ministry, reviving a constitutional fight over religious freedom and public funding.
Virginia college student Bethany Hall has set the stage for a direct challenge to Locke v. Davey, the 2004 Supreme Court decision that has stood for more than two decades as the legal shield for states excluding theology students from public scholarship programs. Hall, a Liberty University student, filed her petition this month after Virginia revoked her Tuition Assistance Grant (VTAG) when she switched majors from music education to programs the state classified as religious training.
Hall’s case asks the Supreme Court to overturn Locke and end what she and her legal team call unconstitutional religious discrimination. She argues that denying a public benefit, one generally available to other students, simply because her chosen field involves ministry or theology violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. Both a federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled against Hall, citing binding precedent from Locke. The Fourth Circuit said her situation was “directly analogous” to the earlier case and described the facts as “on all fours” with Locke.
Virginia’s VTAG program is one of many state grant programs offering thousands of dollars per year to qualifying students at private colleges, but it bars students whose majors are designated as religious training or theological education. Virginia officials revoked Hall’s grant before she received any funds, after she switched first to Youth Ministries, then to Christian Leadership and Church Ministries, and finally to Music & Worship. Hall responded by filing suit and, after her losses in the lower courts, petitioning the Supreme Court to reconsider the constitutional question at the heart of her exclusion.
Her challenge is part of a broader national debate about government funding and religious liberty, a debate also playing out in other high-profile Supreme Court cases, such as recent litigation over the Second Amendment and the Trump administration’s legal battles on military and education policy. Recent challenges to gun bans and requests to overturn lower-court rulings show the Court’s willingness to revisit long-standing precedents.
When the Supreme Court decided Locke v. Davey by a 7-2 vote in 2004, it ruled that Washington state could deny scholarship funds to students pursuing devotional theology degrees without violating the Free Exercise Clause. The majority, led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, described the state’s policy as a response to a “historic and substantial state interest” in avoiding taxpayer funding to train clergy, viewing this as a “distinct category of instruction.”
But from the day the decision was handed down, conservative justices sharply disagreed. Justice Clarence Thomas joined Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent, which argued that the state’s broadly available scholarship program singled out theology as the only excluded major. Thomas contended that studying theology “does not necessarily implicate religious devotion or faith,” and he has continued to criticize Locke in later opinions.
In recent years, the Supreme Court has chipped away at Locke’s rationale. In Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), and Carson v. Makin, the Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has issued rulings that undermine the logic of Locke but have stopped short of formally overruling it. As Seth Chandler, a law professor at the University of Houston, told Newsweek, “Roberts is the wild card hiding in plain sight, he's written the majority in all three cases that gutted Locke’s reasoning...yet each time he stopped short of finishing it off. That could mean he's circling for the kill, or that he's happy leaving a hollowed-out precedent on the books.”
Hall’s legal team, led by attorney Steven Fitschen, argues that recent Supreme Court decisions have “rejected or ignored every premise of Locke” except its historical analysis. Judge Julius Richardson, writing separately at the Fourth Circuit, went further, calling Locke “wrongly decided,” based on “bad history and bad reasoning,” and a “stain on our Free Exercise jurisprudence.”
Support for Hall’s challenge comes from several national religious liberty organizations, including Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty Institute, as well as Joshua Davey, the original plaintiff in the 2004 case. Davey stated, “Twenty-two years ago, the Supreme Court’s decision allowed states to single out students like me because our course of study related to our religious calling,” according to Just The News. Hall’s lawyers acknowledge the odds are long, the Supreme Court grants only about 1% of petitions, but they remain “as confident as we can be with a 1% chance that the Court will both take the case and overrule Locke.”
For Hall, the stakes are personal, her $5,000 annual grant was canceled after she changed her major to Music & Worship, a path she and her supporters say is central to her faith and calling. But the outcome could reach far beyond her own case. At least ten states have similar laws or policies restricting scholarship funding for theology or ministry programs. If the Supreme Court overturns Locke, states would face a choice: fund all majors equally or end these aid programs for everyone, as Chandler described.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s longstanding opposition to Locke is now at the center of the fight. He has repeatedly argued that denying benefits to students based on the religious character of their studies is a violation of the First Amendment. In both Trinity Lutheran and Espinoza, Thomas wrote or joined opinions criticizing the “endorsement” of religious discrimination embedded in Locke.
Legal experts believe Thomas would vote to grant Hall’s petition and overturn the precedent. Chandler, the Houston law professor, said that if the Court takes the case, “they are most likely to do it to reverse the Fourth Circuit and kill off Locke.” He predicted that Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh would join Thomas in such a move, with Amy Coney Barrett as a likely fifth vote. But the outcome may hinge on Chief Justice Roberts, who has written the majority opinions that have weakened Locke but never buried it.
This petition joins a series of major constitutional disputes now before the Court, as seen in cases over mail-in voting orders and religious expression in public schools. Readers following these trends may recall the Court’s recent actions to reverse lower-court blocks, such as its decision on Trump’s mail-in voting order, and high-profile challenges to displays of religion in the classroom, like the ongoing ACLU case against Texas’s Ten Commandments law (full story).
Whether the Court takes Hall’s case or lets Locke stand will send a message about the future of religious liberty and government neutrality. If the justices agree to hear the case and overrule the 2004 decision, it would mark a major expansion in constitutional protection for Americans pursuing faith-based vocations, forcing states to treat all students, regardless of religious calling, equally in the distribution of public benefits.
The debate over religious discrimination in public policy is not limited to education. The Supreme Court’s current docket is packed with cases testing the boundaries of constitutional rights and state authority, from challenges to gun bans to disputes over military policy and religious expression. For those tracking the Court’s evolving approach, the Hall petition may prove a turning point, just as past reversals have reshaped the landscape on issues from gun rights to military service (see background).
For decades, progressive officials have used laws like Locke to single out faith-based students for second-class treatment, Hall’s case just might force the Supreme Court to finally end that double standard.
