The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled in a 3-o decision that the U.S. Department of Education had illegally denied Grand Canyon University’s nonprofit status. The university is one of the largest Christian institutions in higher education and retaining its nonprofit status is critical for operations.
“The Department invoked the wrong legal standards by relying on IRS regulations that impose requirements that go well beyond the HEA’s requirement and instead implement a portion of [law] that has no counterpart in the definition of the term ‘nonprofit’ set forth in HEA,” according to the ruling from the court.
The ruling continued, “The correct HEA standards required the Department to determine (1) whether GCU was owned and operated by a nonprofit corporation, and (2) whether GCU satisfied the no-inurement requirement. Because the Department failed to apply the correct legal standards, the panel reversed the judgment of the district court, and remanded with instructions to set aside the Department’s denials and to remand to the Department for further proceedings.”
Releasing a statement after the court’s ruling, Grand Canyon University described the decision as “a long-awaited correction” maintaining that the school is “hopeful for a quick affirmation of the university as a nonprofit institution.” The university stated, “In light of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, the IRS 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status and independent valuations, we are hopeful that the Department will act in good faith and render a quick decision recognizing the university’s nonprofit status.”
As Western society continues to stray from Christianity and becomes increasingly hostile to the faith, Catholic priest Calvin Robinson warned Christians in the United States that it must not make the same mistakes as the U.K. did. “Please don’t do what we did,” he said. “Please don’t just sit back and let the liberals deteriorate the rest of everything that you know and love,” he added.
Robinson stressed that Western society was founded on Christianity, contrary to the arguments from secular intellectuals going back to the Enlightenment where they sought to remove Jesus Christ from culture. “What we now call the ‘West,’ we used to call Christendom because it was built on Christian foundations,” he said. “Essentially, they tried to remove Christ from Christendom,” Robinson continued, explaining the impact this would have on society. “And, of course, when you take out the foundation, the house will eventually crumble. And this is what we’re seeing.”
“We’re starting to see the bad fruits of that. And so, without our Christian moral compass, without our Christian values, without our Christian ethics, without any of that, we are grasping at straws. And this is why we’re seeing some woke ideologies temporarily take the place of what used to be Christian,” he said.
Speaking about how Christianity has declined in the U.K., he said, “The Church of England has become very liberal in terms of divorce, sex outside marriage, same-sex relationships, transgenderism. And every time the Church tries to be more inclusive, it actually becomes more exclusive to Christianity and to Christian values, and more inclusive to worldly values and just further plummets that downward trajectory.”
Featured image credit: GrandCanyonU, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grand_Canyon_University_Arena_-_Dusk.jpg