The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is threatening to sue Auburn University after some 200 students participated in a spontaneous and unscripted mass baptism at a “Unite Auburn” worship event Tuesday night.
The “Unite Auburn” event featured performances by Christian worshipband Passion and included speakers such as Jennie Allen, a Christian author, and Rev. Jonathan Pokluda, lead pastor of Harris Creek Baptist Church in Waco, Texas.
Following the event, one individual reportedly wanted to be baptized, but a tub was not available for use. Seeking a solution, students began gathering at the lake.
Photographs and video footage from the event showed hundreds of college students lining the banks of the lake as students waded into the water to be baptized one by one over a two-hour period.
About 200 students chose to be baptized from a crowd of over 5,000.
According to the godless twits at FFRF, the First Amendment requires public universities to suppress all religious activity.
University-sponsored religious activities violate the U.S. Constitution, FFRF emphasizes.
“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,” FFRF Staff Attorney Chris Line writes to Auburn University President Christopher B. Roberts. “These ongoing and repeated constitutional violations at the university create a coercive environment that excludes those students who don’t subscribe to the Christian views being pushed onto players by their coaches.”
The FFRF contends, against the corpus of Supreme Court decisions going back a couple of decades, that “The Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment requires government neutrality between religions, and between religion and nonreligion. When a public university’s staff members sponsor and participate in religious events, it violates this constitutional requirement by clearly favoring religion over nonreligion.
For reasons that remain unclear, Governor Kay Ivey responded to FFRF as though it was a real organization and not the vacuous, Constitutionally illiterate, and morally stunted bunch of grifters that it is. She pointed out that faculty and staff have the right to free expression of religion.
The revival at Auburn is the latest in a series of campus revivals that began with Asbury University in Kentucky and grew to include Texas A&M and Baylor.