Major LGBT Group Urges Biden to Strip Accreditation of Christian Schools, Colleges

Michael Foust | ChristianHeadlines.com Contributor | Updated: Nov 25, 2020
Major LGBT Group Urges Biden to Strip Accreditation of Christian Schools, Colleges

Major LGBT Group Urges Biden to Strip Accreditation of Christian Schools, Colleges

The nation’s largest LGBT advocacy group is urging the future Biden administration to help pull the accreditation of Christian colleges and schools if they don't have a policy prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Human Rights Campaign posted its goals for the Biden administration in a Nov. 11 document, Blueprint for Positive Change. The 22-page brief includes dozens of objectives for the Biden White House, but its targeting of Christian institutions would have a major impact on religious schools.

Under a current law known as the Higher Education Opportunity Act, accrediting agencies are told to ensure their standards “respect the stated mission of the institution of higher education,” including a school’s “religious” mission.

HRC, in its blueprint, says the language “could be interpreted to require accrediting bodies to accredit religious institutions that discriminate or that do not meet science-based curricula standards.”

The Department of Education, HRC says in its blueprint, “should issue a regulation clarifying that this provision … does not require the accreditation of religious institutions that do not meet neutral accreditation standards including nondiscrimination policies and scientific curriculum requirements.”

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., calls such a recommendation “sinister.”

“I’ve not seen any document like this before – the Human Rights Campaign is effectively calling for religious colleges and schools to be coerced into the sexual revolution or stripped of accreditation,” Mohler said this week in a column and on his Briefing podcast. “... In terms of accreditation, that is an atomic bomb.

“In clear text, for all the world to see, the Human Rights Campaign summons the Biden administration to deny accreditation – or, at the very least, to facilitate the denial of accreditation – to Christian institutions, Christian colleges and universities, and, for that matter, any other religious institution or school that does not meet the demands of the LGBTQ orthodoxy. This would mean abandoning biblical standards for teaching, hiring, admissions, housing, and student life. It would mean that Christian schools are no longer Christian.”

Mohler called it an “open threat to the ability of Christian colleges and schools to operate by Christian conviction.”

“This is an outright attempt to eliminate religious freedom for Christian schools – or for any religious school that refuses to bow to the moral revolutionaries at the Human Rights Campaign,” he said. “... This is an undisguised attempt to shut down any semblance of a Christian college or university that would possess the audacity to operate from a Christian worldview.”

Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Mark Makela/Stringer


Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chroniclethe Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.



Major LGBT Group Urges Biden to Strip Accreditation of Christian Schools, Colleges