Victory: Southern Illinois University Backs Down & Confirms Pastor’s Right To Share His Faith on Campus

Last month, we told you about our client, a pastor who has spent nearly three decades peacefully sharing his Christian faith with students on the campus of Southern Illinois University (SIU) – only to be exiled to remote “free speech zones” simply because of the religious content of his message. We immediately sent SIU a demand letter seeking written assurances that his First Amendment rights would be respected.

Last week, SIU backed down, assuring us that our client is free to continue exercising his constitutional rights on campus.

As we previously explained:

[Our client’s] approach is remarkably straightforward and nonintrusive – he sets up in various public spaces on campus and offers students a small monetary incentive to ask questions about the Bible, which he then answers directly from Scripture. He uses no amplification. He simply has personal conversations about the Bible with willing participants on campus.

Yet time and again, SIU officials have suppressed his speech. In 2021, university officials threatened him with arrest and forced him to relocate to SIU’s designated free speech area. A year later, police officers informed him he must move to the free speech area simply because he was talking about his faith. In 2024, following faculty complaints, he was once again forced to relocate based on the religious content of his speech. . . .

Most recently, on October 1, the pattern repeated itself. Our client was outside an area known as Faner Plaza when an SIU official approached and told him he could not be there. The official called the police. Officers arrived and informed our client that someone had complained about protesters who needed to move to a designated free speech area – this was a lie – to be clear, our client was not engaged in any protest or demonstration. He was simply speaking with students about his Christian faith. Our client was then forced to relocate to a “free speech area” or face arrest.

The law on this is clear. Public university campuses are not enclaves immune from the Constitution. SIU’s own policy permits our client’s speech anywhere on campus. It should be a true marketplace of ideas. The Supreme Court has long held that excluding religious viewpoints from an otherwise open forum violates the First Amendment. In other words, a university cannot open its campus to individuals to speak on a variety of topics and then treat religious speech differently – as SIU did here. Moreover, the Seventh Circuit has specifically warned public universities against yielding to a “heckler’s veto” that silences a speaker based on audience hostility to a specific viewpoint. 

In its response to our letter, SIU assured us that our client “may continue, as he has on numerous occasions, to exercise his free speech rights in accordance with SIU’s policies on these matters.” That is exactly what we demanded, and we are grateful for this significant victory.

We remain watchful. The First Amendment does not only apply to SIU but to all public education institutions. We have seen radical antisemitic protesters shut down campuses and harass students at UCLA, Columbia, and Harvard while administrators looked the other way – yet when a pastor quietly opens a Bible and invites conversation, university police are called. The double standard is glaring, and it is happening from coast to coast. The ACLJ will not stand for it.

If you or someone you know has faced a similar situation on a public university campus, we want to hear from you. Please contact us at ACLJ.org/HELP.