Church-State Issue Goes to High Court : Rights: Justices must decide whether public money may be spent on religious messages. Virginia case could have broad impact.

Should a state university use mandatory student-activity fees to subsidize an avowedly religious magazine distributed on campus?

When the Founding Fathers wrote the 1st Amendment, ensuring free speech and barring establishment of religion, they surely did not anticipate such an issue.

But 200 years later, amid a bitter culture war between religious conservatives and civil libertarians, the U.S. Supreme Court this week begins the task of deciding whether spending public money on a religious message is appropriate.

It is a rancorous issue that is dividing the nation’s religious community along ideological lines.

On Wednesday, the nine justices will hear oral arguments in a case involving the Christian magazine, Wide Awake, published briefly at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1990.

The magazine, the brainchild of student Ronald Rosenberger, was not only short-lived, but also something of an irony: Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, is the intellectual birthplace of the 1st Amendment. The University of Virginia was founded by Jefferson, a fierce defender of free speech and the separation of church and state.

“The fact that this case arises from Virginia, the cradle of religious liberty, infuses the proceeding with the dramatic irony that might be found in a novel,” the Washington-based Baptist Joint Committee said in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on behalf of the university.

Some religious groups hope the court will use the case--Rosenberger vs. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia--to change the longstanding test for deciding church-state issues, and open the door on other issues, such as the government funding of parochial schools.

A decision in the case is expected in the early summer.

“A broad ruling,” warned Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington-based advocacy group backing the university, “could affect other sensitive church-state issues.”

Rosenberger, who remains a student at the university, published only four issues of Wide Awake. The magazine included Christian symbols on each page and such headlines as “Homosexuals: Can They Change . . . and Should They?” and “The Pope on Marxism and the Free Market.” The magazine’s stated mission: “To challenge Christians to live, in word and deed, according to the faith they proclaim and to encourage students to consider what a personal relationship to Jesus Christ means.”

When he sought about $6,000 in student-activity money for Wide Awake, school officials denied the request, citing university guidelines barring funding of religious groups.

Rosenberger sued the university, contending that his free speech and press rights had been violated and that he was the victim of discrimination based on the magazine’s religious content.

Rosenberger lost in federal district court and the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court said providing money to Wide Awake would be “a direct and substantial government subsidy of religion.”

As the case goes before the nation’s highest court, religious groups are choosing sides, and pointing to it as an important test of how far the government will allow church and state to intermingle in years to come.

For the tow sides, the specifics of Rosenberger’s magazine are less important than is the possibility that the justices might use the case to reconsider church-state law.

On one side are those who favor strict separation, including the Baptist Joint Committee, the National Council of Churches, the American Jewish Congress, the Women’s Zionist Organization and the National Coalition for Public Education and Religious Liberty.

On the opposing side are more conservative groups, including Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, the Christian Legal Society, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Family Research Council, the National Assn. of Evangelicals and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Robertson’s Center for Law and Justice is urging the court to use the case to scrap a 14-year-old standard used to evaluate church-state relations.

Called the “Lemon Test” after a Supreme Court case by that name, it mandates that government actions touching on religion must have a secular purpose, must neither advance nor inhibit religion, and must not excessively entangle church and state.

Robertson’s group calls the test an “aberration” that has “sanctioned varying degrees of hostility to religion, placing religious adherents at a disadvantage with regard to other students.”

But Americans United for Separation of Church and State, joined by two Jewish groups, is urging the justices to retain the “Lemon Test.”

“There is no compelling reason for the court to venture down that road” of rewriting the church-state test, Americans United stated.