Oral Arguments in Texas Supreme Court on Church Autonomy Doctrine

Recently, the Texas Supreme Court heard oral argument in Southern Methodist University v. South Central Jurisdictional Conference of the United Methodist Church. The case began when the Conference sued Southern Methodist University (SMU) because SMU amended its Articles of Incorporation in 2019 without obtaining the Conference’s approval. The suit includes claims of breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duties. According to the Conference, SMU was held in trust for it, and SMU’s board of directors lacked the authority to unilaterally amend its Articles of Incorporation. The complaint also alleges that SMU wrongly amended the articles to exclude language suggesting that the Conference had a role in SMU’s governance.

This case is reminiscent of Hyun Jin Moon, et al. v. The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification International. Moon involved the Unification Church, a spiritual movement founded by the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon in the 1950s, which gained international attention for various reasons throughout subsequent decades. Rev. Moon’s widow and younger son, the alleged “spiritual successors” of Rev. Moon, along with leaders of the Family Federation, sued the eldest son of the late Rev. Moon and the Unification Church International (UCI) for amending UCI’s Articles of Incorporation. They alleged that the elder son and the UCI had removed references to the Family Federation and breached their fiduciary duty to the founding church. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected and dismissed these claims because the court lacked the power to address whether the amendments to the articles were appropriate, or whether the actions taken by UCI were breaches of a fiduciary duty. The court lacked this power because the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine (also known as the church autonomy doctrine) precludes courts from getting involved in disputes about religious doctrine.

The ecclesiastical abstention, or church autonomy doctrine, comes from the religion clauses of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court first recognized the doctrine in Watson v. Jones, where the Court held that “a matter which concerns theological controversy, church discipline, ecclesiastical government, or the conformity of the members of the church to the standard of morals required of them” is “a matter over which the civil courts exercise no jurisdiction.”

Here, neither SMU nor the Conference raised the church autonomy doctrine as a concern during the litigation, including in their briefs before the Texas Supreme Court. However, the Becket Fund for Religious liberty filed an amicus brief urging the court to address the church autonomy doctrine as a threshold issue. Although courts generally lack jurisdiction to decide these matters, Becket argues that the court should rule in favor of the Conference, the plaintiff who brought suit in the case.

First Liberty Institute also filed an amicus brief arguing the same, except First Liberty concluded that the doctrine precluded suit altogether. Thus, the Conference’s case must be dismissed, just like the claims in the Moon case. The competing amici demonstrate that this is a complex issue with implications reaching far beyond any single case. With denominational schisms on the rise across the nation and a deepening rift among some religious institutions over marriage, gender, and other issues, the church autonomy doctrine is going to play a larger role in determining which side of a denominational schism keeps the buildings and assets and which side walks away.

The SMU case raises many questions. What is the effect of the doctrine’s jurisdictional claim? If the church autonomy doctrine commands dismissal for lack of jurisdiction, does that mean the plaintiffs presumptively lose? Would that subject religious institutions to an approach wherein whoever takes control of the assets and leadership prevails against all challengers such that “might makes right”?

As a solution to this problem, some scholars advocate for the adoption of the neutral principles approach to church property and asset disputes. The neutral principles approach asks courts to exercise jurisdiction so long as they avoid religious or doctrinal issues. Who owns the church in the schism against two competing groups claiming control? The neutral principles approach asks courts to determine this by looking at the governing documents and legal instruments such as title and trust documents. This approach has substantial advocates. It also has a limited blessing from the Supreme Court in Jones v. Wolf. This approach was essentially presumed in Conference v. SMU because neither side advanced an argument that the church autonomy doctrine precluded the judiciary from deciding the outcome of the case in whole or in part. The case proceeded in the trial court and through briefing at the Texas Supreme Court as a fight over the meaning of state law and the impact of those state law provisions on the actions taken by SMU’s board of trustees. Neither side seemed particularly concerned that the underlying dispute arose due to a theological disagreement.

After Becket’s amicus brief flagged the issue at the Texas Supreme Court just prior to oral argument, the parties faced questions from the justices regarding the application of the church autonomy doctrine. This questioning occurred against the backdrop of the fact that Texas, for good or for ill, has already adopted the neutral principles approach to resolving church property disputes when doctrinal schisms emerge.

The danger of a neutral principles approach, however, is that it may seep out of the limited property dispute paradigm authorized by the Supreme Court and encroach on other areas, including governance issues related to religious institutions. So neutral principles should be treated as a tool of last resort.

Allowing courts to decide issues regarding church governance is fraught with peril. It is easy to cheer for ideologically aligned entities in their fight against shared culture war opponents. When a local conservative congregation breaks away from the liberal mother church, it is easy for social conservatives to fall into the trap of immediately siding with the breakaway church. Yet one should not let doctrinal allegiance affect constitutional analysis. The better approach is sticking to the longstanding legal principle embedded in the church autonomy doctrine: a built-in hesitancy of civil courts to get involved in religious disputes. The SMU case will ultimately turn on whether the Court believes it should apply neutral principles in a manner seemingly advocated by both sides of the case, or whether the Court will recognize that the church autonomy doctrine provides a jurisdictional bar to its consideration of the issue. If the doctrine does so preclude adjudication in this case, the Court should simply dismiss the case for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.

Some might argue that this leads to a “might makes right” endgame for certain property or governance disputes. Even so, as the D.C. Circuit held in Moon, it is not the role of courts to solve all such problems. They are ill-equipped to answer existential questions and likewise unable to resolve doctrinal feuds among competing religious claims.