California Christian University President Reflects on COVID Impacts on Religious Freedom

This month the Supreme Court issued an order that overturned California’s limits on religious gatherings in people’s homes, such as prayer meetings and scripture readings.

The COVID restriction limited worship in homes to no more than three households. Five of the Court’s conservative justices, not including Chief Justice Roberts, ordered California to lift restrictions, stating that “California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise, permitting  hair  salons,  retail  stores,  personal  care  services,  movie  theaters,  private  suites  at  sporting  events  and  concerts, and indoor restaurants to bring together more than three households at a time.”

The order marked the fifth time that the Supreme Court overturned the Ninth Circuit Court’s analysis  of  California’s  COVID  restrictions  on  religious  exercise.

Dr. John Jackson. Photo by William Jessup University.

Religion Unplugged interviewed Dr. John Jackson, President of William Jessup University, a California-based private Christian university in the Sacramento area. In our conversation, Dr. Jackson explored the spiritual and practical impacts of COVID-19 on the Jessup community, reflected on recent jurisprudence challenging religious freedom during the pandemic and offered a vision of religious freedom lived responsibly and stewarded for the benefit of others during the pandemic. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

CLB: Could you speak to the ways in which the coronavirus pandemic, over the last year or so, has impacted your William Jessup University’s campus on a macro level? What challenges, and perhaps even opportunities, has it presented?

Dr. John Jackson (JJ): These are historic issues. About 14 months into the pandemic, at William Jessup, we are a community of about 1,800 students or so, about 1,000 of those are traditional undergraduates (18-25-year-olds), about half living on campus.  The rest of our students are graduate students online. We are a relatively small school though we have grown a lot in the last decade.

The first master’s students of accountancy graduated in Spring 2021. Photo via William Jessup University’s Instagram.

We never closed. One hundred fifty of our students, even at the height of the fear of March and April of 2020, just said that our housing was their only secure housing. Our housing was the only place where they could get consistent educational access. So, we stayed open the whole time. We actually saw an enrollment increase in the fall of 2020. That was shocking given what was happening in the higher education sector. To be fair, that was predominantly happening in our online enrollment.

CLB: That is powerful. How has COVID-19 impacted you and your community spiritually?

JJ: It has been grueling. It has been hard. People have struggled. I have struggled. Sometimes you are at the top of the mountain saying, “Yes, God is here. Jesus is present. We are victorious.” And then there are other times where you feel like you are in the pit of the valley and you wonder where the presence of God is, and you wonder if you have taken a wrong turn.

But, I think as a collective entity, we have stayed full of faith. And, as a collective entity, we have tried to manifest and stay full of love. We have participated in a lot of community outreaches. Our students have been very involved, as well as our staff and faculty, in just trying to serve other people.

We think God is at work. We are not only hope-filled for the future. We have actually tried to use these last 13 or 14 months to be very innovative, creative and cease this as an opportunity. It is a crisis. There is a lot of pain, a lot of grieving, but we want to cease this crisis and say, “Okay God, we want to root our mission, root our vision deeply in our souls. And thankfully we have been able to do that.”

CLB: You are familiar with the recent Supreme Court order overturning California’s limits on home-based religious activities. The decision looks at innovative, perhaps nontraditional religious communities. How are current cultural and legal challenges to even the most basic and narrow elements of religious freedom, even the right to worship in one’s own home with more than one or two other households, impacting you and the Jessup community?

JJ: I am not a constitutional attorney, but from my perspective, what has been chilling about these last 12 months from the perspective of government overreach is… the inconsistency. You can go to the liquor store, you can go to the cannabis shop, but you cannot gather to practice your faith.

On religious freedom, I think we have to ask ourselves what [our country’s founders] meant in the First Amendment of the Constitution. Did we mean freedom of worship? Did we mean only freedom to build churches and congregate on Sunday mornings? This is a very narrow view of religious freedom. I cannot fathom that anyone could read the Constitution and believe that freedom of religion was only construed as freedom of worship in very constricted spaces. A more expansive view of religious freedom means that each individual person is free to pursue the dictates of their religious convictions according to their conscience. So for example, if someone is a pacifist by their religious conviction, we do not force them into military service, we provide them other ways to exercise their citizenship without being militarily engaged. We respect genuinely held religious convictions.

Let’s get personal. Let’s talk about how this is affecting Jessup and our community. I think we are seeing a host of, not necessarily redefinitions of church, but manifestations of different church realities. So, for instance, the word used throughout the New Testament in Greek is the word ekklesia. Ekklesia is an assembly. That is the meaning of the word. It could be three or four people in a house. Or 20. It could be three or four people in the marketplace, in the public square. It could be dads or moms at a Starbucks. That could be your assembly.

In the early church, Christians met house to house or in the temple courts. And by the way, when persecution sprung up, what happened? The church scattered, but it never died out and Christians met house to house. In communist China, since the 1970s, we have seen an explosion of the house church. By some estimates, China is on track to become the country most populated with Christians on the planet. Because of their total population, but also because of the thriving reality of what we would call the house church.

At Jessup, we have about 500 churches and 50 denominations represented on our campus between students, faculty and staff. We are undeniably a Christ-centered campus. Some students attend large churches. Some Jessup community members attend small churches. And, especially since the pandemic, we see lots of people gathering in small groups. Two or three households together. Two or three groups of students: six, eight, 12, 20 people.  And I actually think it is a glorious and good thing. So I have an expansive view of what religious freedom means.

I was thankful for the Supreme Court decision but disturbed that it was a 5-4 vote. In my view, this is the kind of case that should ideally be 9-0. This case represents a basic fundamental human right and guaranteed American freedom. What sets America apart? We have all kinds of horrible, sinful destructive things in our country’s past. We all have that personally. But one of the amazing, redemptive glorious stewardships we have here in the U.S. is people came here, in some large measure, for the freedom of religion.

CLB: You had mentioned how in many ways over the last year, the Jessup Campus had played that role of a home for students that did not necessarily have a home to go back to. Could you elaborate on this theme?

JJ: We think about freedom and responsibility as an equilibrium. We have had health protocols in place to protect our students. We asked people to responsibly follow those on campus. These involved wearing masks when six feet of physical distance could not be maintained and limiting large gatherings, especially early on. Our students naturally live on our campus in pods, in small grouping. We encouraged students who needed to stay on campus to continue to be in community in these pods: to pray together and fellowship.

Jessup AMSA (Amerian Medical Student Association) students volunteering at the Placer Food Bank in the Sacramento area. Photo via William Jessup University’s Instagram.

On our campus were international students who needed to stay on campus. Another very neglected group of young people is students from foster care systems. In other words, they have aged out of foster care. I believe about 65 or 67% of foster youth say that they want to go to college and only about 3% ever finish. So, Jessup has a heart for these students, to serve them, including during the pandemic when they don’t have a stable family to return to. Also, 43% of students on our campus receive federal financial aid. Our students are from all over the social and financial spectrum. You would be shocked by how many of our students express that they do not have a home to go to with stable internet that is essential for them to continue to do their schoolwork. Our students on the lower end of the socioeconomic status can have tuition and board covered, but when they go home, they face challenging material realities.

Our Jessup community has also reached out to the broader community. We have partnered with local churches to say, “How can we serve the medical community? How can we provide mental and emotional support? How can we provide families directly with food?” I know that if our freedom of religion means we just take care of us, that is not what a Christ-centered education institution is all about. All of our students sign a community covenant where they agree to practice Christ-centered moral values. But they also all agree to be involved in a certain number of service hours in the community as an expression of their faith. Thirty thousand hours a year is given by Jessup students in the local community. Our local community, in the Sacramento region, values Jessup students for several reasons. We are actively engaged in the local school systems, in the governmental agencies and in the social services fabric of our region. We steward our religious freedom to serve our community.

Chelsea Langston Bombino is a believer in sacred communities, a wife, and a mother. She serves as a program officer with the Fetzer Institute and a fellow with the Center for Public Justice.