Hall sued in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, arguing the exclusion violated her First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. The district court dismissed her case with prejudice, and on May 13, 2026, a panel of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that dismissal, holding that the Supreme Court's 2004 ruling in Locke v. Davey controlled the outcome and foreclosed her claim.
On August 11, a coalition of legal groups representing Hall — the National Legal Foundation, Claybrook LLC, Troutman Pepper Locke, First Liberty Institute, and Alliance Defending Freedom — filed a petition for a writ of certiorari asking the Supreme Court to take up the case, now styled Hall v. Fleming, and to overturn Locke v. Davey outright. That 2004 decision upheld a Washington state scholarship program that excluded students pursuing devotional theology degrees, and it has been cited ever since to justify treating religious majors differently from every other course of study a student might choose.
The petition argues that two academic years' worth of denied aid amounts to the government picking and choosing which vocations a citizen may prepare for with public benefits otherwise available to her neighbors — engineering, nursing, business, art — every field except the ministry. Hall's lawyers contend the Fourth Circuit's ruling deepens a split among federal courts over how far states may go in excluding religion from otherwise neutral aid programs, a live and unsettled question the justices have not fully resolved since a string of more recent rulings, including Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer and Carson v. Makin, chipped away at Locke's reasoning without discarding it.
A grant that follows the student, not the sermon
Set the legal footnotes aside and look at what actually happened to this young woman. She did not ask Virginia to fund a church. She did not ask for a subsidy for a denomination. She asked to keep a scholarship already promised to her as a resident and a student, and the state took it back the moment she said she wanted to serve God with her education instead of teaching a classroom of instruments. That is not neutrality. That is a fine for confessing a calling out loud.
This is the same old suspicion dressed up in modern language — the idea that faith is a private hobby the government may tolerate but must never treat as equal to anything else a person might do with a degree. Scripture never allows that division. The call to preach, to shepherd, to lead worship, is not a lesser vocation tucked away from the world's business. It is the highest business there is.
"And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ." (Ephesians 4:11-12)
A government may fund roads it will never drive on and hospitals it will never lie down in. It cannot claim, in the same breath, that funding a student's classroom seat somehow crosses into forbidden territory the instant that student decides to spend her life pointing others toward Christ. My friend, if you have ever felt the world tell you that your faith is fine as a private comfort but out of bounds in public life, take heart — that lie has been told for a long time, and it has never once made the gospel smaller.
The courts will decide what the Constitution requires. But no ruling, whichever way it falls, changes what is true: the ministry Bethany Hall is training for answers to a higher court than the Fourth Circuit and a longer docket than this one. Young people who feel drawn toward the pulpit, the choir loft, the mission field, or the Sunday school room are not choosing a lesser path. They are answering the same call the apostles answered, and no state grant committee gets the final word on whether that calling counts.
Whatever becomes of this petition, the church does not wait on the Supreme Court to bless the work of the ministry. It was called blessed a long time before Virginia wrote its grant rules, and it will still be blessed after every appeal is exhausted.