Free Exercise and the Ministerial Exception

In speaking with a friend yesterday, he mentioned that in Free Exercise and Establishment cases, religious colleges and universities have more freedom under the Establishment Clause and less freedom under the Free Exercise Clause, at least relative to educational institutions that serve younger kids.

The logic is that while impressionable young children should be protected from government monies’ backing of religious instruction (even indoctrination), college students at religious institutions are more intellectually independent and thus not as subject to the unfair influence of government-backed religious education. Therefore, you need an Establishment Clause that protects young children from government-supported religious indoctrination but gives more leeway to government-religious college partnerships.

The logic (I suppose) on the Free Exercise side is that because of this impressionability sliding scale (younger to older), religious elementary schools (let’s say) have more freedom to (for example) discriminate in religious hiring under the “ministerial exception” than do religious colleges.

If I’m understanding that logic correctly, then I don’t really follow it. The freedom implied in the “ministerial exception” should really have nothing to do with the recipients of the education but everything to do with the identity of the religious institutions and the employees within them. If a Jewish college has a robust understanding of its distinctive Jewish identity (as clearly laid out in its by-laws), I see no reason why that college is any “less Jewish” than a synagogue school down the street that serves 7 year olds. In fact, it’s this kind of slicing, dicing, and differentiation by the state into religious institutions’ identities that the Free Exercise Clause is meant to protect against. It’s not the state’s job in the first instance to determine the religiousness of a school; it’s the school’s job to do that.

Again, I may be misunderstanding the sliding scale logic of the two Religion Clauses, but if I’m not, I don’t follow how the sliding scales work in opposite directions for the two clauses.