A Direct Threat to Christian Education—The Human Rights Campaign Demands that the Biden Administration Deny Accreditation to Christian Colleges and Schools

Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Dr. Mohler is a theologian and ordained minister, and serves as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Nov 18, 2020

The accreditation of Christian colleges and schools has just been directly targeted by the nation’s most influential LGBTQ organization. The Human Rights Campaign has recently issued a document directed at the incoming administration entitled Blueprint for Positive Change 2020. The Blueprint demands that President-elect Biden adopt a legislative agenda and enact specific executive orders that are in line with the LGBTQ movement—a movement that Biden pledged to champion.

Contained within its pages are perhaps some of the most alarming demands that threaten religious liberty, and the mainstream media has given little to no attention to this dimension of the report.

The Blueprint is not ambiguous—it makes detailed policy positions and recommendations, department by department, for the Biden Administration to deploy once the president-elect assumes office. From the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Human Rights Campaign demands the enactment of policies to prohibit what is identified as discrimination.

In the Department of State, for example, the Blueprint urges the department to, “include a non-binary gender marker and modernize existing requirements for updating gender markers on United States’ passports.” Such policy proposals would upend a system specifically designed to quickly and accurately identify individuals for the purposes of safety and security. Hence this is why, when reporting a crime or a missing person, a police officer will ask you if the suspect or missing person is male or female. Passports are designed for specificity in order to promote safe travel throughout the United States and around the world—a policy likely to be undermined by a passport that includes “non-binary” gender markers and is “modernized” for our cultural moment. All this contributes to the elimination of gender or sex as a meaningful category – which is not accidental. If the intention is to remake humanity, the passport will have to be redefined.

Also included within the recommendations for the Department of State is the following: “Create a panel of human rights experts to review the conclusion of the Commission on Unalienable Rights and provide inclusive recommendations.” The Blueprint justifies that policy proposal by arguing, “The Commission on Unalienable Rights was designed to challenge the international consensus with a narrow view to human rights that, among other things, would leave LGBTQ people even more vulnerable to violence and discrimination.”

To be clear, the Department of State established the Commission on Unalienable Rights in order to identify those rights that all human beings possess—rights that ought to be recognized for every human being around the world. Those unalienable rights stand contrary to invented and artificial rights that have been declared by various courts around the world.

By calling for the end of this commission, the Human Rights Campaign has levied a veiled critique of the Trump administration’s State Department under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The Biden administration, according to LGBTQ activists, must correct the missteps of the Commission on Unalienable Rights by reasserting the newly invented sexual liberties of the LGBTQ movement.

Indeed, the Blueprint argues that the Commission was created to “challenge the international consensus” on rights and liberties, especially sexual liberties. The problem with this, however, is that if you are looking for an international consensus on the issue of unalienable rights, you will not find it at the Human Rights Campaign. You will not find an international consensus in the Blueprint. It is intellectually dishonest for this group to claim an international consensus for the LGBTQ revolution—a consensus that, quite frankly, does not exist.

Yet, the most shocking demand in the report is found under the section for the Department of Education. The Human Rights Campaign demands the Biden administration to ensure that “non-discrimination policies and science-based curriculum are not undermined by religious exemption to accreditation standards.”

That is 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.

The Blueprint states, “Language regarding accreditation of religious institutions of higher education in the Higher Education Opportunity Act could be interpreted to require accrediting bodies to accredit religious institutions that discriminate or do not meet science-based curricula standards. The Department of Education should issue a regulation clarifying that this provision, which requires accreditation agencies to ‘respect the stated mission’ of religious institutions, does not require the accreditation of religious institutions that do not meet neutral accreditation standards including nondiscrimination policies and scientific curriculum requirements.”

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.

This is insidious from top to bottom. Schools that will not get in line with the moral revolution, if the Biden Administration acts as demanded, will be denied their accreditation. We must not miss the language: Accreditation should be revoked for those who do not meet the LGBT “non-discrimination” standards or “science-based curricula standards.”

Wait just a minute. The Human Rights Campaign is not known for any particular agenda on the creation-evolution front, nor is the group preoccupied with particle physics. The Human Rights Campaign is targeting issues of sexual orientation and gender identity, cloaking them in the language of “science.” This is an undisguised effort to require Christian schools and colleges to abandon biblical authority or lose accreditation.

This is 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.

If the Human Rights Campaign achieves its policy goals, religious institutions will either be coerced into capitulation over fundamental religious and theological doctrines, or they will be marginalized. This kind of policy goes even further than, for example, attempts to strip federal funding and student aid from institutions that will not surrender to the LGBTQ movement. Indeed, accreditation is a more basic and pervasive threat—those colleges or universities would not be permitted to participate in the GI Bill; students would not be allowed to transfer their credits nor would they be allowed to apply for graduate study at other institutions. The threat to accreditation is more basic than the threat to federal funding. It would threaten even institutions that do not receive a single penny of government funding.

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.

This comes with chilling specificity and clarity. We dare not miss what is at stake.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.