The University of California won a major victory last week when a federal court upheld the university’s decision to deny credit for several Christian high school courses because they were too narrow and not rigorous enough to meet entrance requirements.
The lawsuit was filed in 2005 by Calvary Chapel Christian School, five Calvary students and the Association of Christian Schools International, the largest organization of Christian schools in the country. The plaintiffs argued that the university was discriminating against religion, stifling free expression and exhibiting anti-Christian bias.
“This is America. We have the right to send our kids to private schools, and have them study from a Christian perspective,” one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Robert Tyler, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. “The university has no right to tell any person of any faith that they’re not going to accept courses because they’re taught from a Christian perspective.”
Once again, Religious Right groups have made this all about their “academic freedom” to teach Christianity. Charles Robinson, UC’s vice president for legal affairs, told the San Francisco Chronicle, that what the plaintiffs really want here is a “religious exemption from regular admissions standards.”
And Robinson’s got it just right. It is simple– if courses do not teach important, well-accepted scientific and/or historical material, they won’t meet state and nationwide standards. This is not a case about religious discrimination or “academic freedom,” it is about the university’s right to decide what courses meet basic scholarly standards.
In the past, the university has approved many courses containing religious material and viewpoints — some of these courses even include scientific discussion of creationism as well as evolution, the Chronicle reported.
But UC denies courses that fail to provide students with the knowledge and skills to succeed in their college-level studies, and this is constitutionally within its right, U.S. District Judge James Otero said in his Friday decision in Association of Christian Schools International v. Stearns.
The courses at issue came out of Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murrieta. UC rejected credit for a history course called “Christianity’s Influence on America”– whose primary text was published by ultra-fundamentalist Bob Jones University. The class, the judge said, “failed to adequately teach critical thinking and modern historical analytic methods.” Experts said the text instructs that the Bible is the unerring source for analysis of events and attributes historical events to divine providence rather than analyzing human action.
Another rejected course, this one from Calvary Baptist School, was “Biology for Christian Schools.” That class used a textbook that, experts said, characterized religious doctrine as scientific evidence, included scientific inaccuracies and failed to encourage critical thinking.
Those are legitimate reasons to deny course credit, Otero held.
“The university is not telling these schools what they can and can’t teach,” UC general counsel Christopher Patti told the Chronicle soon after the lawsuit was brought against the university. “The university has no quarrel with Christian schools.”
In fact, many students from Calvary Christian attend UC, including two of the five students named in the case.
Attorneys for the Christian school activists plan to appeal the federal district court’s decision. The case is “about the future of private religious education and the right to be able to have your kids learn from a religious perspective,” Tyler, whose four children are enrolled at Calvary Christian, told the L.A. Times.
Maybe Tyler and the rest of his lot should take a deep breath and realize no one is even trying to take that right away.
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