ABSTRACT
Religious colleges and universities have been an integral part of the American higher education scene for over three hundred years. The earliest colleges, such as Harvard and Yale, were private-controlled but considered by many “public,” and were started to train persons for the ministry. The legal history of these religious colleges and universities in their relationships with government is very much identified with the latter half of the twentieth century. The legal standard to be applied to religious universities in terms of either eligibility for government aid or exemption from government regulation varies with the amount of control over the universities by churches. The difficulty religious universities are having walking the tightrope between church control and eligibility for government benefits was recently addressed by the Virginia Supreme Court. Although formulated in the context of evaluating financial assistance to religious educational institutions, the Lemon test has been expanded to test government regulation of religious institutions.
