A former tenured professor at the Lexington Theological Seminary is appealing a lower court’s ruling that dismissed his lawsuit against the seminary last year for breach of contract and racial discrimination. The case of Dr. Jimmy Kirby is unusual in that the court’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s religious-freedom provisions disregards civil rights and equal employment statutes and regulations.
“Tenure used to mean academic freedom and job security,” says Kirby, 67, who earned his doctorate of theology in social ethics and Christian education from Boston University and joined LTS in 1994 as assistant professor of church and society. “This dismissal has impacted me financially. It’s been a burden on me and my family. At the very least, we should have had a trial where I would have presented all of the evidence of years of racial discrimination and hostility at LTS.”
The seminary cited “financial exigencies,” not performance, as the basis for firing Kirby. It is not the only seminary facing a difficult financial situation. New Orleans Baptist Seminary, Southeastern Baptist Seminary and Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School — where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. studied — have all downsized staff and cut expenses. Unlike LTS, however, none of those institutions has taken the unusual step of jettisoning tenured faculty.
After more than a year of filings, hearings and motions, Kentucky’s lower courts refused to allow Kirby’s lawsuit to proceed. Instead, it accepted the seminary’s argument that because LTS — an ecumenical seminary of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) — is a religious organization, it has the autonomy to hire and fire employees at will, and that those decisions are exempt from judicial review. In making its ruling, the trial court deemed Kirby to be a ministerial employee because he helped the denomination to fulfill its religious mission.
But Amos Jones, a Washington, D.C.-based constitutional law scholar and employment litigator, contends that the Constitution’s bar on governmental interference with religious entities does not give those entities license to ignore civil rights and equal employment laws. Jones is representing Kirby before the Kentucky Court of Appeals, which has certified the appeal and is expected to hear oral arguments later this year.
“The trial court erred in its application of the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine,” says Jones. “It recognized an exception that lacks foundation in Kentucky and that is untenable in the few other jurisdictions that have created it.”
Kirby, a Jewish professor and a Catholic professor were fired by seminary officials in May 2009, in what seminary officials called a cost-saving plan to rescue the seminary from mounting debt.
