The California Supreme Court has ruled that municipal agencies can provide tax-exempt bonds to religious colleges and schools if their curricula include secular courses, the Associated Press reported.

The court’s 4-to-3 decision overturned a lower-court ruling and benefits Azusa Pacific University, California Baptist University, and a Christian secondary school in Southern California. All three wanted to build new facilities in 2002 using tax-exempt bonds, but ran into opposition from people who said the issuance of such bonds would violate the church-state separation laid out in California’s Constitution.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ming Chin wrote that “the proposed bond financings would have the direct, immediate, and substantial effect of advancing religion.”

The ruling follows federal-court rulings in a similar case involving Lipscomb University, a religious institution in Tennessee. In 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a ruling that said a Tennessee government agency could legally issue tax-exempt municipal bonds to help build facilities at Lipscomb, even though the university is “pervasively sectarian.”