Michelle joined InterVarsity — one of the nation’s largest evangelical student ministries with chapters on more than 500 campuses — because she shared its mission of “showing the love of Jesus Christ,” she said.

But that mission was squelched last fall when the club was defunded and banned from campus facilities.

Its crime? Requiring leaders to “adhere to biblical standards and belief in all areas of life of their lives.”

To be eligible for “mandatory fees collected from each Rutgers student,” the university required that “groups be open to all students” and “any active member be eligible for election to office,” Rutgers’ Vice President of Student Affairs, Dr. Emmet A. Dennis, said in a statement.

In other words, Christian clubs had to accept Muslim or homosexual leaders who didn’t share their beliefs — or forfeit the funds that came out of their own pockets.

But it wasn’t money that worried Michelle. What was really at stake was the right to claim Jesus is the only salvation.

Campus administrators wouldn’t listen to those concerns. And so, for the first time in its 65-year history, InterVarsity sued a university. The lawsuit accused Rutgers of trampling on First Amendment freedoms by denying religious groups access to the same facilities and funding available to secular groups; and by controlling the leadership-selection procedures of a private association.

“It would be like saying, ‘You can have a Catholic Church, but you cannot reserve the priesthood for Catholics,’ ” explained InterVarsity’s attorney, David French, who works with the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal group promoting religious liberty. “Free speech is meaningless without freedom of association.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly backed that principle, most recently in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. The 2000 ruling called the right of association “crucial in preventing the majority from imposing its views on groups that would rather express other, perhaps unpopular, ideas.”

Outweighed by that precedent, Rutgers surrendered this spring, promising to allow religious clubs to choose like-minded leaders.

But for others, the battle continues.

At least a dozen InterVarsity affiliates recently have been threatened with suspension or loss of money at schools including Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“True diversity is enhanced by the presence of a Christian voice on campus,” French said. “So the universities seeking to shut out that voice are actually the agents of intolerance.”

That trend will eventually affect other national ministries like Campus Crusade for Christ, warned religious-freedom lawyers, unless students take the offensive.

To help them do that, ADF has developed a counterattack strategy wielding First Amendment protections for free speech, religious activity and assembly

“We have an army of attorneys committed to fighting for students, and the First Amendment is our weapon of ‘shock and awe,’ ” said ADF Chief Counsel Benjamin Bull.

The first wave of that offensive was launched this summer through ads published in college newspapers nationwide. Boldfaced headlines ask students if they’re “experiencing anti-Christian bigotry on campus.” Listing the common ways that bigotry is expressed, the ads provide a toll-free help line (1-800-TELL-ADF).

One of the calls that came in was from 23-year-old Jason Roberts, a third-year law student at Texas Tech in Lubbock. To counter gay-rights groups’ claims that God didn’t consider same-sex relationships sinful, Roberts had planned to distribute leaflets listing Bible verses about homosexuality at the campus bookstore.

Then he learned about a university speech “code” banning any expression that might “humiliate” or intimidate” someone. Roberts canceled his plans, fearing just one complaint could result in his expulsion.

“The problem is, no one knows for certain what’s going to ‘humiliate’ someone,” Roberts said. “I don’t want to intentionally cause someone to feel horrible . . . but I do think that if I have the truth I shouldn’t be censored by a school authority.”

In addition, students who don’t meet the university’s litmus test are quarantined to a 20-foot-wide gazebo (the campus’ only designated “free speech area”) and must wait six days to speak after filing a request, limiting their ability to address current issues.

In a still-pending lawsuit filed this summer, ADF accused Texas Tech of violating both free-speech and free-exercise rights by using excessive regulations to reduce religious students’ access to public forums — which, according to the Supreme Court, is an unconstitutional “prior restraint” on expression.

That lawsuit and several others mark the second phase of ADF’s offensive, which is to challenge university censorship in every federal court. The purpose: to ultimately win a high court ruling that sets the record straight once and for all on students’ free-speech rights.

Pro-life students at the University of Houston (UH) took a leap toward that goal with a precedent-setting victory this spring.

At issue was a traveling exhibit featuring 8- to 20-foot posters of aborted babies at various stages of development. The display was designed by a national pro-life group (Justice for All) to spur lively debate among students

To academic liberals’ chagrin, the UH Pro-Life Cougars hosted the exhibit in spring 2001. (For previous coverage of this event, click here.)

“I had professors e-mailing me, telling me my college career was going to be over,” said Sheree Tullos, the club’s president at the time.

The threats notwithstanding, Sheree erected the display in one of the university’s most heavily traveled areas — Butler Plaza, right next to a major library. So university administrators resorted to another tactic: a zoning policy restricting “potentially disruptive” expression to less-visited areas of the campus.

That seemed unfair to Sheree. Especially in light of the rally promoting homosexual adoption held in another heavily traveled area. Or the feminist play “The Vagina Monologues,” staged by the National Organization for Women in front of classrooms (during which exhibitors shouted questions like, “If you were a vagina, what would you wear?”).

“Speech zone” policies are unacceptable, agreed Bull, because — in addition to fostering “viewpoint discrimination’ by restricting only unpopular opinions — they base censorship on the fact some people might be offended.

That’s called a Heckler’s Veto, he explained, which is unconstitutional because “free speech can’t be reduced to what is acceptable to the most hostile viewers; that gives them veto power.”

The Supreme Court has said that government can restrict speech if it’s proven to cause “material disruption” — and risk of protest or offense doesn’t meet that test.

The Pro-Life Cougars made those points in a lawsuit filed by ADF on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. But most of Sherri’s fellow club members decided they didn’t want their name on the lawsuit.

“I think they were intimidated,” she said. “I found out I was alone, and it was a scary thing. But as much as everybody told me I shouldn’t . . . when you feel like it’s something God wants you to do, nobody can tell you not to.”

Then she got a phone call from Jonathan Saenz, a UH law student who said he’d been reading about her case and wanted to help.

He did so by becoming the club’s next president and requesting permission last summer to wear a sandwich board with the words “life is beautiful” written on one side and “choose life” on the other.

Not surprisingly, he was denied permission.

“They’re annoyed that Christians are willing to defend their rights and assert them and not just meet in a room and do a Bible study,” Jonathan said. “When we step out into the public square . . . it bothers people.”

U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein also found that refusal “astonishing” and, in June 2002, declared UH’s speech policy unconstitutional because it gave campus officials “unfettered discretion” in deciding which expression was allowed.

After a failed attempt to get that ruling rescinded, UH finally agreed this summer not to censor the Justice for All exhibit and to allow students to wear sandwich boards espousing political viewpoints.

That precedent is being used to defend pro-life exhibits at the University of Texas and University of California, Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the Pro-Life Cougars learned the life-saving power of principled resistance when their exhibit returned to Butler Plaza last September — thanks to a court order. Sheree recalled what happened that day when a woman walked up and interrupted a debate between two male students:

Her face was getting red, and then tears started running out of her eyes. And she looked up, and she said, “You guys don’t know anything; you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I looked at her, and for the first time, I didn’t know what to say. And I thought, “God, just speak through me.” . . . The next thing I remember, she was telling me that she was 10 weeks pregnant and she was living with her boyfriend, and he was trying to get her to have an abortion. . . . And now she saw the pictures.

She said, “I didn’t know it looked like that at 10 weeks. . . . I have an appointment Thursday [two days later] at Planned Parenthood to have an abortion.”

And I said, “Do you really want to do that?”

The woman left that day determined to protect the child inside her. And that baby’s life — and the souls of those yet to be saved by the Gospel — are the real reason Christian students don’t have any choice but to defend their freedoms, said Jonathan said.

“If it hadn’t been for the lawsuit, we would not have been there that day,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion. “The goal is not about let’s sue someone and win and cause trouble. The goal is to change the hearts and minds of people across the country.”