New York college sued over requiring Christian club to accept non-Christian leaders

A Christian student club is suing a New York community college for refusing to recognize it as an official campus organization because the group requires its leaders to be practicing Christians, the latest in a string of similar campus disputes that have repeatedly ended with courts siding against colleges.

Campus Bible Fellowship (CBF), a student ministry at State University of New York Broome Community College that dates back to the 1996-97 school year, filed suit Sept. 3 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York. According to the complaint, the college’s director of student activities rejected CBF’s club constitution in August 2025, telling the group’s faculty adviser it violated the school’s “Open Access Rule” because it required voting members and officers to affirm a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The college placed CBF on “inactive” status, cutting off its access to meeting space, event funding and the campus club fair. A revised constitution submitted in June 2026 under new club president Jacob Seachrist was rejected on the same grounds.

The lawsuit, filed by Alliance Defending Freedom, argues the college’s policy violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by forcing CBF to choose between opening its leadership to non-Christians or losing its standing as a recognized club. 

“The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations are free to select faithful leaders,” ADF senior counsel Tyson Langhofer said. 

The complaint also alleges selective enforcement, pointing to other recognized SUNY Broome clubs, including one for women in male-dominated fields and one built around a “sisterhood” identity, that it says restrict membership or focus without facing the same scrutiny CBF did.

The dispute follows a familiar pattern on American campuses, one that came to a head at the University of Iowa in 2018, when the school deregistered nearly 40 student groups, including several religious minority organizations, for requiring leaders to share the group’s core beliefs. Two of those student clubs, the Business Leaders in Christ and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, sued separately, and both won.

In the business leader group case, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Rose ruled in February 2019 that the university had enforced its nondiscrimination policy unevenly, finding no meaningful difference between the “potential harms” caused by the club’s faith requirement and those posed by other student groups the university left alone. Iowa officials were later found personally liable for damages, a ruling the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld in 2021.

InterVarsity’s case, covering both its undergraduate and graduate chapters, produced an even sharper rebuke. A federal judge ruled in September 2019 that the university and several administrators had violated the group’s speech, association, and free exercise rights, again holding individual officials personally liable for damages. The 8th Circuit affirmed in July 2021, writing it was “hard-pressed to find a clearer example of viewpoint discrimination” than Iowa’s treatment of its religious student groups. InterVarsity noted at the time that Muslim, Sikh, and Latter-day Saint student groups had been swept up in the same purge.

Not every campus dispute over leadership requirements ends in litigation. In 2012, Vanderbilt Catholic left campus voluntarily rather than comply with a similar Vanderbilt University policy, becoming an independent, off-campus ministry instead of suing. 

“The discriminatory non-discrimination policy at Vanderbilt University has forced our hand,” the group's chaplain, Father John Sims Baker, said at the time, arguing that the university’s rule would have made it impossible to guarantee that a Catholic organization stayed under Catholic leadership.

No hearing date had been set in the SUNY Broome case as of this week.