America, we are warned, is on the verge of adopting a new state religion, and that state religion with the focal point being the state of California is a new form of liberal secularism. This “incipient state religion,” warns Joel Kotkin, is particularly and threateningly represented by a specific piece of legislation, now pending in the California General Assembly. Known as Senate Bill 1146, this particular bill, if adopted, would virtually eliminate the possibility of Christian higher education in that state. Kotkin writes,

“Under the rubric of official “tolerance,” the bill would only allow religiously focused schools to deviate from the secular orthodoxy required at nonreligious schools, including support for transgender bathrooms or limitations on expressions of faith by students and even Christian university presidents, in a much narrower range of educational activity than ever before. Many schools believe the bill would needlessly risk their mission and funding to “solve” gender and social equity problems on their campuses that currently don’t exist.”

Now what we’re looking at here is the biggest threat to Christian higher education in the history of the United States of America. We’re looking at the fact that the state of California is here poised to make it virtually impossible for a Christian college or university to be a genuinely Christian college or university in the nation’s most populous state. Make no mistake, this is not an exaggeration. Senate Bill 1146 would effectively strip religious colleges and universities of any right to discriminate on the basis of LGBT issues or even on the basis of religious conviction except in very tightly defined programs that train clergy—that is, in particular pastors of churches.

This would mean that the very idea of a Christian liberal arts university or college would come to an end in the state of California. It means that if this legislation is adopted and stands, it would be impossible to have a Christian college or university that would offer a Christian worldview education and that would have Christian convictions when it comes to the sexual and other moral issues expected of students and of faculty. Taken to its actual logical conclusion, given the language of Senate Bill 1146, it would be discriminatory for a Christian college or university to require that faculty, or even the president of the institution itself, be a confessing and convictional Christian.

What we’re looking at here is an effort, now undertaken by many in the California General Assembly, to finally put the absolute foot on the oxygen tube of Christian higher education, effectively saying legally that it would be discriminatory to have a Christian institution of higher education. Addressing this issue at The Federalist, Holly Scheer writes,

“People used to expect that attending something sponsored by a religious organization required abiding by mores and behavior that religious body professes. There was a simple option for avoiding the ideas or practices of a belief system you don’t agree with: don’t frequent their space. This courteous expectation naturally applied to all religions and expressions of faith.”

She continued,

“California is now attempting to end this system of free association that allows people to define their local and religious cultures. California Senate Bill 1146 (SB 1146), which is slated for a vote Tuesday, seeks to limit the religious exemptions from federal Title IX regulations that colleges and universities use for hiring instructors, teaching classes, and conducting student services in line with their faith. Under the bill,” she writes “a college would be eligible for an exemption only for training pastors or theology teachers.” Rightly, she concludes, “this threatens religious institutions ability to require that students attend daily or weekly chapel services, keep bathrooms and dormitories distinct according to sex, require students to complete theology classes, teach religious ideas in regular coursework, hold corporate prayer at events such as graduation, and so on. In other words,” she concludes, “it threatens every practice that makes religious institutions distinct from secular institutions.”

Dr. Kurt Krueger, who is president of Concordia University Irvine, a Lutheran school, said quote,

“The most troubling provision of this bill limits the religious liberty to integrate faith and learning throughout the educational experience. The bill effectively eliminates the religious exemption under current law that allows Christian colleges and universities to operate in accordance with their beliefs, including the freedom to hire only Christian faculty and staff. If passed without amendments,” he said, “the new law would also very likely disqualify students attending California Christian colleges and universities from eligibility for Cal Grants, a key state-level student aid program.”

Now throughout the nation’s history, there has been an understanding that the society at large benefits by having a diversity and pluralism of educational institutions. The underlying idea is that society is strengthened by citizens having a choice in terms of the education that they would prefer, according to their own vision of education and their own religious convictions or lack of those religious convictions. The diversity of American higher education includes avowedly liberal and at least a few conservative institutions, public and private colleges and universities, and also the ability of private universities to be distinctively religious according to the religious beliefs and convictions of their sponsoring bodies or founders.

What we’ve seen in the United States is an erosion of religious liberty in so many respects; but until now, no state has attempted to basically put colleges and universities of Christian conviction out of business. But that is exactly what is now on the line in California. Make no mistake, what we’re looking at here is an effort undertaken by legislators in the California General Assembly to make it impossible for a Christian college to require students, or for that matter even faculty, to be Christian—as I said, even the president of the university when it comes to hiring and issues of claim discrimination.

We’re also looking at the fact that this is driven by the sexual revolutionaries who obviously have taken a take-no-prisoners approach when it comes to looking at the cultural and legal equation. They now intend to make it impossible to defy the new sexual regime by making it impossible to teach to the contrary. In an open letter to alumni of the institution, Barry H. Corey, who is the president of Biola University, wrote that,

“The bill seeks to eliminate the current religious exemption in California that fully protects the freedom of Biola University along with dozens of other California faith-based universities to operate in a manner consistent with our religious mission and faith tenets. The provisions of the proposed bill,” he writes, “represent a dramatic narrowing of religious freedom in California. It would mean schools like Biola would no longer be able to determine for themselves the scope of the religious convictions as applied in student conduct policies, housing and restroom locker facilities, and in other matters of religious expression, and practical campus life. Though the free exercise of religion,” he writes, “is guaranteed by both the US and California constitutions, Senate Bill 1146 would make religious institutions like Biola vulnerable to antidiscrimination lawsuits and unprecedented government policing. The bill,” he concluded, “if it became law, would diminish religious liberty in California higher education. It would unfairly harm faith-based institutions and it would weaken the rich educational diversity of our state.”

Similarly, John Jackson, president of William Jessup University in California, says that the law would effectively eliminate the religious liberty, in his words, of all universities in a great spiritual life with their entire educational experience. He writes,

“Prayer, chapel services, spiritual groups, and public service are all integral parts of the experience on faith-based campuses. In the name of transparency, the bill opens up the pathway for harassment lawsuits.”

What these college presidents are pointing to is the reality that if this law is passed, any student on campus can claim that it is a form of discrimination to require that faculty members be Christians. Furthermore, what is embedded in this lawsuit is the impossibility of a college having a Christian approach, say, to history or English or biology. Instead, everything would become a matter of absolute, enforced, state-sponsored secularism.

At present in California, the law in accordance with the U.S. and California constitutions recognizes the right of a Christian institution to be Christian, to require students or, even more commonly, faculty, to be Christians, confessing Christians, to set moral and other expectations upon faculty, and to have convictional or creedal and confessional requirements of those who would teach. At present, the California law recognizes an exemption from antidiscrimination lawsuits for Christian colleges and universities who adhere by Christian conviction to the understanding that men and women are different and have different roles and should live in different dorms and should use different locker rooms. All of that would simply become a matter of history if this law is to pass in California.

We should note that the law doesn’t specifically say that Christian colleges cannot operate by Christian conviction. What it does is make them immediately vulnerable to any student who claims that that’s a form of religious discrimination, which of course it is, which is precisely why the state of California and, for that matter, the United States government has recognized the right of Christian institutions to an exemption from laws that would otherwise outlaw discrimination on public university campuses or on private university campuses that claim no Christian conviction.

To understand what’s behind this, I point to an important new book written by Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy center in Washington. The book is The Fractured Republic and in it he writes this:

“Religious conservatives today can seem obsessed with sex for the same reason that someone just poked in the eye can’t seem to change the subject. They are being attacked on a particular front and are struggling to defend themselves.” He continued, “They are not the ones who made sexuality the center of the culture wars. Social liberals have, for the most part, picked these fights because orthodox views about sexual morality, which insist on fundamental limits to the scope of personal choice, strike them as uniquely oppressive and backward and they cannot abide their persistence. Indeed,” he writes, “many liberal combatants in our contemporary culture wars probably aren’t otherwise troubled by religion much at all. This is why,” he says, “they are baffled to find themselves labeled enemies of Christianity. They believe sexual freedom is essential to the project of modern liberation but need not be essential to the project of Christian godliness.”

In that one paragraph, Yuval Levin puts his finger on exactly what we’re facing here, and that is the fact that the sexual revolutionaries, in his words, cannot abide the persistence or even the presence of alternative worldviews as would be represented on a Christian college committed to Christian biblical conviction. They simply can’t abide the idea that there should be allowed such institutions to stand against the sexual revolution. Furthermore, they do believe that sexual liberty, by their definition, is essential to the modern project of individual liberation. They really don’t believe it could be central to any kind of worldview that would be guaranteed protection by the U.S. Constitution.

Here once again we have the direct confrontation between what I’ve described as erotic liberty on the one hand and religious liberty on the other. The secular elites continue to worship at the altar of sexual liberty to the extent that they are willing to dispense with, to redefine, or to minimize religious liberty. But what we’re looking at in the case of Senate Bill 1146 is a threat to religious liberty the likes of which have not been seen in America in any living generation. Indeed, the argument can be made that this is the most direct assault upon religious liberty when it comes to Christian schools in the history of this nation, and the legislation is even now pending in the California General Assembly. It has already once in a previous form passed the California Senate, and it is expected to pass once again.

We also have the very interesting phenomenon of these legislators saying that they want to restrict the religious liberty of Christian institutions to the training of those who will be either pastors or teachers of theology. That effectively says that the Christian worldview doesn’t apply to anyone else and can’t be used as an educational worldview criterion for higher education in the state of California. Let that sink in for a moment.

Finally on this issue, also recognize that even though this legislation is now pending in the California General Assembly, this is not an issue that will end in the state of California. California is and has been for so long the cultural and legal bellwether of the United States. It’s not only the most populous state in the union, but it has been one of the leading forces in terms of moral change. If you want to see the future, you have so often been able to look simply to the state of California. And now we’re looking at the fact that that future would be very dangerous indeed for religious liberty. So in terms of the frontline of the battle for religious liberty, for now all eyes are on the state of California.