Republicans built a higher-education culture war around one promise: punish “woke” degrees.
Now the blade may be swinging back toward Bible colleges, seminaries, theology programs, ministry degrees, and religious universities.
Under the Trump-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and the Department of Education’s proposed accountability rule, college programs could lose access to federal student loans if graduates do not earn enough compared with people who did not earn that credential. The Department says the rule would apply to programs “regardless of tax status or sector,” meaning public, private, nonprofit, and religious schools are all in the same net.
That matters because ministry and religious studies are not exactly high-salary pipelines. Pastors, missionaries, youth ministers, nonprofit workers, religious educators, and seminary graduates often choose callings that are intentionally low-paying. But under this Republican-designed earnings test, a low-paying calling can look like a “failed” degree.
Christian college leaders are now warning that the rule could become an “existential threat” to religious higher education. Christianity Today reported that programs could be labeled failing if their graduates do not out-earn peers without the degree, making students in those programs ineligible for federal aid.
The numbers are brutal. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that, according to Education Department data shared by the Christian-college association, more than half of undergraduates in religion or religious studies would fail the earnings test. For master’s programs in religious studies, the figure was reportedly around 90 percent.
This is the problem with writing laws to punish ideology instead of solve problems.
Republicans wanted to frame humanities, gender studies, race studies, and liberal arts programs as “worthless.” They sold the public a story that college should be judged almost entirely by salary return. But once that logic becomes federal policy, theology degrees do not magically get a church exemption. A degree in ministry may be spiritually meaningful, culturally important, and central to a religious community — while still producing graduates who earn less than business majors, engineers, or people in technical fields.
That is not a bug in the Republican framework. That is the framework.
The same political movement that spent years sneering at “woke” degrees now has to explain why a queer studies degree is supposedly worthless if it does not produce high earnings, but a ministry degree should be protected even when it also leads to low-paying work.
They cannot have it both ways.
Either education has value beyond raw income, or it does not.
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Either students should be allowed to pursue callings, service, scholarship, and community work, or every degree becomes a spreadsheet judged by salary alone.
And if Republicans insist on the spreadsheet, religious colleges may be forced to live under the same cold math they wanted applied to everyone else.
The irony is almost too sharp to miss: in trying to discipline universities for being “woke,” Republicans may have created a rule that punishes pastors, seminary students, Bible colleges, and Christian universities first.
The culture war finally found its boomerang.
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