Christian and Democrat – an oxymoron

You cannot be a Christian and a Democrat. Everyone assumed that the Christian Coalition of America took that position at its founding. The organization’s executives don’t say this officially. But when a Democrat addressed a gathering of Coalition members to say “God is an Independent!”, the attendees all but laughed him out of the building. That took place decades ago. Today, Ralph Reed, the Coalition’s founder, would have reason to tell his detractors, “I told you so!” A new report by the American Priorities Project attests to the direct weaponization of the Biden-Harris administration – a Democratic administration – against Christian students and the higher-educational institutions many of them attend. As should go without saying, there is no excuse for that. The APP calls for Congressional action to reform the Department of Education, the seat of this particular weaponization. They might do better to abolish that Department altogether.

Systematic attacks on Christian students and colleges

The American Principles Project first released their report on the Office of Enforcement, U.S. Department of Education, eleven days ago. Recent reportage from Fox, The Gateway Pundit, and The Daily Wire has brought it to national attention. One can read the twenty-two-page report at this link.

Jon Schweppe, APP Policy Director, begins his Executive Summary by crediting “people of faith” with voting for President-elect Donald Trump. Why? Because they knew that Democrats and other leftists were against them, and “mocked, ridiculed, targeted, and persecuted” them.

Most of this mockery and ridicule took place on social media, especially before Elon Musk bought, reformed, and renamed Twitter. But Schweppe’s latest report details direct targeting by the government itself – and in particular an obscure Department of Education agency.

The Office of Enforcement, formerly the Student Aid Enforcement Unit, exists to make sure students receiving financial aid, and the government, are getting their money’s worth. But under Biden-Harris, this agency sought to destroy any college that did not follow the conventional model. First to fall were the for-profit career colleges, like the Corinthian Colleges. (They are now bankrupt, and 16,000 enrollees suddenly had no institution.) The explicitly Christian colleges became the next targets.

How they did it

From the report:

Days before his inauguration then President-elect Joe Biden wrote in a statement that “ensuring freedom of religion remains as important as ever” and that government must safeguard “bedrock protections.” No one should be “afraid to attend a religious service, school, or community center,” the statement asserts.

That statement is not representative of what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris actually believe. Since assuming office, the administration has waged an unprecedented assault against Christian colleges, universities, and students, while systematically protecting “elite” public and private institutions, foisting woke ideology on reluctant students, and enabling antisemitic, violent protests on campuses across the nation.

It’s done so by weaponizing the Department of Education’s Office of Enforcement—an obscure subsidiary of the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) that was created with the implicit intent of shutting down schools and programs that do not conform to the administration’s radical agenda. This campaign, which has been advanced under the auspices of protecting students from “predatory” colleges and universities, threatens to erode traditional family values from higher education and financially squeeze and shut down schools that align with Christians’ values and beliefs.

The campaign looks reasonable enough – send secret shoppers to find out whether colleges are telling the truth about the costs and benefits of attending and graduating. The problem, as ever, is with selective enforcement of the rules. For example, the Enforcement Office fined Liberty University (Lynchburg, Virginia) $14 million for failure to report campus crime as required by law. Lynchburg, Virginia isn’t exactly as crime-ridden as are other college cities (like New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale). Nor has Liberty been lacking in attention to such campus crime as actually occurs.

In contrast to these fines, Michigan State paid $4.5 million for failing to report sexual abuses by a team doctor. Penn State paid $2.4 million for its mishandling of the scandalous Jerry Sandusky affair. Compared to such acts, the crime and reporting problems at Liberty were tame.

Grand Canyon University, the country’s largest Christian university, faces a $37.7 million fine for failing to disclose fully the costs of a doctoral program. Fewer than five percent of students at GCU pursue doctorates. Those that do, do not seem to have complained. But who knows what instructions a government “secret shopper” might have, to misrepresent or exaggerate what he finds?

Even The Wall Street Journal, hardly a faith-friendly publication, was aghast, and called the DOE investigation “a hit job.” In another editorial, their board wrote:

Progressives oppose private competition in education, and they’re willing to use the government to punish schools that won’t bow to their wishes.

In fact, the APP report says:

Nearly 70 percent of penalties imposed by the Office of Enforcement have been against Christian institutions and career colleges, even though these schools represent less than 10 percent of college students.

What’s been happening at conventional schools?

In fact, enrollment at conventional colleges and universities has been declining in recent years. According to USA Today, undergraduate enrollment peaked in 2010 and has declined ever since, with a slight rise last year. That rise looks like a “dead-cat bounce,” like a temporary rise in stock value when short sellers “buy to cover.” Most of the decline has taken place at public universities, but even private universities have lost students.

The APP report is not shy in its conclusions, which common sense supports. People are asking whether a degree is worth the cost. And it might not be, unless you’re majoring in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics. Or planning a career in the intelligence community, or to sign on as an assistant curator in a museum. In addition, the Vo-Tech centers are seeing increased enrollment. People want training to get a job and do that job.

That’s not what the Biden-Harris administration wants, nor is it what the Harris-Walz administration would have wanted. They want to graduate dedicated servants of a stone-cold atheistic government, who perhaps would serve in Ayn Rand’s “Bureau of Economic Planning and Natural Resources” (Gosplan in Russian).

So through this Office of Enforcement, they pick on the Christian and career-oriented colleges. Meanwhile, conventional colleges, charging six-figure tuition and comparably exorbitant “student fees,” continue to abuse the financial-aid system.

What next for the Christian schools – and the incoming administration?

APP regards as reasonable the hope that the Trump-Vance administration will stop the abuses of authority against Christian schools. But they also want Congress to act, to protect against the next Democratic administration. The action they want to see

should include oversight hearings of the enforcement office, and subpoenas for those Biden Administration officials who engaged in these unlawful actions. Additionally, Congress should invite outside experts and college administrators that have been unfairly targeted by these enforcement proceedings.

That’s good, but doesn’t go far enough. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new Department of Government Efficiency should consider abolishing the Department of Education completely. That decisions about primary and secondary education ought to be “reserved to the States” (see Amendment X), goes without saying. But the Department’s actions regarding higher education include selective enforcement of the law, and favoring of institutions that teach atheism. Parents have been asking who needs college. Taxpayers need to ask who needs departments like the Department of Education.

What, after all, has the Department of Education done for Christian parents and students? They haven’t done things for them, but rather to them. Christian voters, whether they go (or send their children) to college or not, need to ask themselves. Do they want to support a government that promotes atheism and punishes faith? The answer should be clearly: no.