Auburn University is facing a religious freedom battle after top coaches at the school promoted and participated in a prayer and baptism event on campus earlier this month.
The event, called Unite Auburn, brought together pastors, school leaders and students for a worship service in Auburn’s Neville Arena. Afterwards, around 100 students were baptized in a nearby lake, according to the campus newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman.
“A revival is happening tonight in Auburn. People are getting baptized at Red Barn with hundreds of people cheering them on,” tweeted Kristen Carr, the Plainsman’s editor in chief, during the Sept. 12 event.
Auburn coaches help with baptism event
Several of Auburn’s most prominent coaches helped advertise the United Auburn event, including football coach Hugh Freeze, men’s basketball coach Bruce Pearl and baseball coach Butch Thompson. A few were spotted in videos shared on social media of the prayers and baptisms.
One video showed Freeze assisting in the baptism of freshman safety Sylvester Smith.
Jeremy Napier, who serves as chaplain for the men’s basketball team, told the Plainsman that he personally baptized more than 20 students.
“We serve an awesome God who can do amazing things. My prayer obviously is that all these decisions were genuine decisions and heart change. It’s awesome to do it in this environment, but now is where things get tough,” he said.
Religious freedom concerns
The prayers and baptisms at Auburn prompted one faith-related organization to send a letter to the school raising legal concerns.
“Auburn University is a public university, not a religious one. It is inappropriate and unconstitutional for University employees to use their University position to organize, promote, or participate in a religious worship event,” the Freedom From Religion Foundation wrote on Sept. 19.
The letter urged Auburn’s leaders to do more to protect students, including student-athletes, from unlawful pressure to participate in religious activities and to educate coaches on what they can and can’t do with their players.
“Auburn University must take action to protect its student athletes and to ensure that its coaches understand that they have been hired as coaches and not religious leaders. We request that all three coaches be educated as to their constitutional duties as University employees,” the Freedom From Religion Foundation wrote.
A spokesperson for the university told AL.com last week that Auburn is “evaluating” the foundation’s letter.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey responded to the letter with a letter of her own. She told the Freedom from Religion Foundation that their description of the Unite Auburn event was “misleading”
“In my view, we should be more welcoming, not less, to expressions of faith, and society would be worse off were we to purge religion from our public institutions,” Ivey wrote.
Prayer in public schools
The conflict at Auburn calls to mind a similar drama that played out earlier this year at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Freedom from Religion Foundation contacted school officials there to raise concerns about football coach Deion Sanders’ habit of leading prayers during team meetings.
“The University of Colorado must take action to protect its student athletes and to ensure that Sanders understands that he has been hired as a football coach and not a pastor,” wrote the foundation’s staff attorney, Christopher Line, in a letter to the school, as the Deseret News previously reported.
Colorado responded to the letter about a week after it was sent, noting that Sanders had met with the school’s Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance to learn about when and where it’s appropriate for him to discuss his faith.
In general, public institutions have to tread carefully when it comes to policing expressions of faith. Authority figures, including coaches, can sue school leaders if they feel they’ve been unfairly silenced. (One high school coach did just that recently and won in front of the Supreme Court.)
Ivey highlighted this tension in her letter to the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
“Requiring college officials to entirely remove faith from their lives could very well violate those officials’ own religious freedom. After all, the First Amendment protects the ‘free exercise’ of religion just as much as it prohibits government establishment of religion,” she wrote.