Democrats didn't "weaponize" the government to "target" Christian schools

A misleading report from the right-wing American Principles Project suggests the punishments against taxpayer-funded Christian schools are unfair

This newsletter is free, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can use the button below to subscribe to Substack or use my usual Patreon page!

---

Last March, the Department of Education fined Liberty University a record $14 million for violating the Clery Act, basically saying Liberty created a culture where students were afraid to report sexual violence and didn’t do nearly enough to let students know about threats on campus.

The reason the government could even go after a private Christian school like this was because Liberty receives hundreds of millions of dollars each year in student loan payments. In the 2022-2023 school year alone, they got $880 million from the Department of Education that helped approximately 67% of their students. But accepting that money meant agreeing to comply with basic federal rules concerning student safety (rules that have nothing to do with Christianity itself).

Liberty agreed to pay the fine and promised to spend an additional $2 million over the next two years to fix these problems on campus.

That fine came after a damning report from the Department of Education detailed the problems that existed on campus between 2016-2022—problems that could have resulted in an astonishing $37.5 million fine. A consultant who spoke to the Washington Post said it was “the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.” For the sake of comparison, the largest-ever Clery fine issued before that was $4.5 million to Michigan State for failing to address Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse.

It wasn’t exactly news that a Christian school faced a Clery Act fine since many of them have a reputation for not taking student safety seriously. There have been reports of religious schools looking the other way regarding sexual assault allegations on campus. Women on campus know that coming forward with those stories might mean admitting they broke school rules regarding sex before marriage or drinking or staying out too late. As one damning article noted, “How do you report sexual assault at a place where authorities seem skeptical that such a thing even exists?”

That’s not the only kind of punishment the government handed out to Christian schools, though.

In 2023, the Department of Education levied a $37.7 million fine against Grand Canyon University (another private Christian school) because there was ample evidence that the school lowballed its tuition fees to reel students in… before hitting them with larger fees once they were already taking classes (and it was therefore harder to leave).

The government laid out with plenty of detail how the school lied about tuition on its website, its enrollment agreement, the “Net Price Calculator” that students could use online to figure out how much they would owe, and other marketing materials. This wasn’t, in other words, some accident on one page of GCU’s website; it was clearly a purposeful move to attract students before gouging them later.

All of that’s to say: The government had good reasons for punishing those schools. Their fines had nothing to do with faith and everything to do with how those Christian colleges were screwing over their own students. (GCU has since appealed its fine.)

But that’s not the story you hear when you read a new report from the right-wing American Principles Project that claims the “Biden-Harris Department of Education… unfairly targeted Christian colleges and universities.”

The 22-page report targets the Education Department’s “Office of Enforcement” which they say is “leading a crusade against Christian colleges.” They add that “new data proves the bias.”

(Spoiler: I looked at the data and it “proves” nothing of the sort.)

The first page of the APP’s report

As their press release notes:

Drawing on newly obtained data, the report found that nearly 70 percent of the Department’s enforcement actions have involved faith-based and career schools, despite those schools representing less than 10 percent of students nationwide.

They’re so close to getting it…

The obvious problem with that those numbers is the faulty assumption that Christian schools should be punished exactly in proportion to the percentage of students they take in even if they’re committing far more violations than other schools.

Just look at how APP describes the situations at Liberty and Grand Canyon:

Created with the implicit purpose of advancing the Biden-Harris administration’s woke agenda, the Department’s Office of Enforcement also targeted two of the nation’s most prominent Christian universities — Grand Canyon University and Liberty University — which resulted in record-level fines worth more than all penalties imposed over the past seven years combined.

At least 12 Christian colleges have been the target of excessive penalties or banned from receiving federal student aid; by comparison, no Ivy League school has been the recipient of punitive action by the Office of Enforcement. The average fine against a Christian school for a Clery Act violation was $815,000, compared to $228,571 against public and private institutions.

At no point in the actual report does the APP explain to readers why those penalties against Liberty and GCU were levied, or why they think other schools should have been fined more (or at all).

Those Christian schools were punished as they were because their crimes were bigger and affected more students than the narrower (though obviously appalling and perhaps more headline-grabbing) crimes that took place at other secular schools.

APP basically argues that the government punishing a Christian school, regardless of reason, amounts to religious discrimination. APP Policy Director Jon Schweppe’s statement about it is utterly shameless:

As our report details, the Biden-Harris Department of Education has been engaged in a long-running scheme to punish Christian colleges that are ideologically opposed to the left’s agenda. The unfair targeting of these institutions has been egregious, and it needs to stop immediately.

Punishing schools for not taking sexual assault seriously and for jacking up tuition costs after students have enrolled is not ideological. Biden wasn’t “weaponizing the Department of Education’s Office of Enforcement,” as the report claims. The government can and should go after every school that does what these Christian schools did. It’s the oversight required of any school that wants taxpayer money.

That means if Christian schools don’t want to play by the rules they agreed to, then they should be punished.

If the fines against Christian schools are larger than those at other institutions, it never crosses these propagandists’ minds that maybe that’s because those schools are just unwilling to protect students to the same degree as other colleges.

Consider this excerpt from the APP’s report involving a different Christian school:

Corinthian Colleges—once the largest career education institution in the country, serving some 110,000 students and operating 105 campuses nationwide—was fined $30 million in 2015 by the Department of Education for allegedly failing to provide “clear and accurate information” to prospective students. The Department also barred Corinthian Colleges from receiving federal student aid. Later that year, Corinthian filed bankruptcy, affecting nearly 16,000 students.

The mean Obama Administration went after a Christian school, and it eventually had to shut down, and it hurt all those students!

They never consider this story as an example of a Christian school screwing over its own students.

Here’s what you won’t find in the APP’s report: Corinthian Colleges flat-out lied to students about job placement rates; in fact, they literally “paid temporary employment agencies to hire graduates in short-term jobs so they could be counted” in job placement numbers. The LA Times noted in 2015 that the school counted an accounting graduate as “employed in the field” because she worked at Taco Bell since 2006. In the same way, they counted business administration grads who worked in retail jobs at Safeway and Macy’s.

“Instead of providing clear and accurate information to help students choose which college to attend, Corinthian violated students’ and taxpayers’ trust,” U.S. Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell said in a statement. “Their substantial misrepresentations evidence a blatant disregard not just for professional standards, but for students’ futures.”

The APP doesn’t explain any of that in its report. They just treat it as a case of religious persecution because the Obama Administration demanded a lot of documents from the school if they wanted to fight back. The fact that the school was forced to shut down is treated as a problem for its “nearly 16,000 students” but not the Corinthian administration’s blatant lies that may have led those students to enroll there in the first place.

Corinthians Colleges went bankrupt because the people running the school were liars. It was their own damn fault. The APP only says, however, that the shutdown “upended countless students’ college plans.” It’s Obama’s fault, not the Christian leaders who lied to make their school look better than it was.

Christian college student (image via Adobe Spark)

You often hear this false equivocation whenever religious zealots want to defend their faith against allegations of bad apples. Like the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, who routinely whines about how the media highlights predatory Catholic priests when there are plenty of public school teachers who break the law. There are more of the latter if you look at raw numbers, he argues.

But there’s no rule that says arrests have to be proportionate to the religious demographics of the nation. One side insists it has the moral high ground due to its Christian faith and so their arrests make news. Public school teachers, on the other hand, are (or at least should be) held accountable for what they do, as are the people who oversee them. (It usually doesn’t take decades for there to be any justice, either.)

The APP report never bothers defending the Christian schools’ actions. They never admit those schools were wrong to lie to students or to put them in harm’s way.

The most it says about Liberty University’s numerous problems (which I laid out in detail here) is this:

School officials acknowledged reporting errors, including “incorrect statistical reports” and “timely warnings and emergency notifications that were not sent.” While not insignificant, the mistakes do not justify the record fine.

The “mistakes” were shocking and downplayed the very real threat of predators on campus in a way that made it more likely for more students to be victims of sexual violence. The fine was beyond justified.

If other schools commit similar violations, they should also be held accountable.

Just because some taxpayer-funded schools are religious doesn’t mean they should be granted immunity from their own violations.

Instead of saying that, though, the report just treats all punishments against Christian schools as inherently unfair, as if all actions against them are part of some larger anti-Christian plot. Just look at this pie chart to see how they spin it:

That’s supposed to make me think the government is out to get religious schools. In fact, it should confirm your hunch that religious schools routinely believe themselves to be above the law, which is why they don’t bother taking necessary steps to follow the rules.

Or consider these bulletpoints in the APP’s report, highlighting the supposed weaponization of the Education Department, that never explain what the schools did wrong:

Samford University was fined $76,000 for violations of the Clery Act. Samford University is rated as one of the top schools for career preparation.

The Baptist Bible College was fined 35,000 in 2022 for violations of the Clery Act. The fine was significantly larger than universities ten-times larger received.

Bethesda University, a school with only 264 undergraduates, was fined $37,000 for Clery Act violations.

You can read why those schools got punished here.

APP keeps doing this, arguing that it’s unfair for smaller Christian schools to be fined whatever they were fined, without ever explaining in depth what those schools were accused of doing or how those fines were justified by the government.

It’s just catnip for their gullible readers. An effort to get on right-wing media outlets by packaging a lie in a neat way: The government is scrutinizing and harassing Christian schools!

And it worked. Fox took the bait, regurgitating the group’s press release and offering none of the details, logical fallacies, or hypocrisy I’ve noted above.

---