Gay rights and traditional values collide
Christian colleges grapple with a generational rift over what it means to be Christian
SPRING ARBOR, MICH. — It is no secret that Christian colleges do things differently than their secular peers.
There are behaviour codes, required Bible study, Christian-infused curricula (think: environmental protection as “creation care”) and weekday chapel.
But where these campuses once existed in a bubble, new economic, social and cultural realities are letting outside air rush in — and with it, controversy.
For a generation of students that is connected, inclusive and risk-averse, Christian colleges present an interesting puzzle.
On one hand, they offer “safety” in contrast to drinking and hookup cultures (alcohol and sex are forbidden) and take seriously their call to produce “deeper souls” — as Shirley Hoogstra, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, put it.
But they are also grappling with a giant generational rift over what it means to be Christian — from students’ more accepting views of LGBTQ individuals and the conviction that faith demands social justice activism, to their comfort with using social media to organize a countermovement.
Unlike their elders, many students want to use their love for Jesus not to uphold traditional values, but to engage with and change the world, pushing Christian campuses to a careful openness.
Stephen Mortland, vice-president for enrolment management and marketing at Taylor University in Upland, Ind., said that unlike the past when campuses protected students’ faith from outside tampering, Christian colleges now help them explore, even challenge beliefs.
“This is not some Christian Disneyland,” Mortland said. The goal “is not to indoctrinate. I’m not afraid that God is not real.”
Colleges discuss evolution (an alternative theory), science, refugees and the role of women.
“If we want our alums being the hands and feet of Jesus, we can’t have them scared to talk about the things that everyone is talking about,” said Mary Hulst, pastor at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Mich.
In some ways, Christian colleges look on trend. Their sweet spot of missions abroad and deep community service speak to a generation seeking not just future paycheques but meaning and impact.
But while Christian colleges are outwardly projecting a more open, contemporary tone, on campus they are grappling with perhaps the most divisive issue they have faced in years — treatment of LGBTQ individuals.
Being gay barely warrants a shrug at secular colleges, but it is setting off bottle rockets at Christian ones.
(After interviewing Hulst about LGBTQ issues and making plans to hear her preach — she suggested a pizza gathering and discussion with students — a college official told a reporter not to visit).
At some Christian colleges, LGBTQ students meet in secret and form clubs, communicating on Facebook with code names.
Some feel isolated, caught in families who view as troubled their “struggles with SSA,” or same sex attraction as one parent put it on Facebook, or are kicked out of homes for coming out, as a student from Texas described to me.
The values guidance that students come for — to help them prepare for life and relationships as well as careers — can be alienating to LGBTQ students. It is partly the ban on LGBTQ faculty, but it is also the constant grooming of students for heterosexual marriage that leaves gay students like Gwyneth Findlay, who just graduated from Calvin, with “no framework for the future I am going to have.”
And when professors share stories of dating, spouses and children that “a lot of students learn from,” she said, it’s a reminder that she is not fully part of the community.
Divisions on Christian campuses spring from divergent views over homosexuality and what it means to be Christian.
Where an older generation focused on sharing the gospel, as one Calvin student put it, now “there is more than spreading the message. There is living out the message.”
Youth consider LGBTQ fairness a social justice issue where elders see “a morality issue, an obedience issue,” Hulst said. “Which is why we are talking past each other.”
Mark Yarhouse, director of the Institute for the Study of Sexual Identity at Regent University, said that in his recent longitudinal study of 160 gay students at 14 Christian colleges, 80 per cent found a way to reconcile their identities.
“Very few reject one in order to have the other,” said Yarhouse, adding his sample was students who are both “highly religious” and gay.
This is feeding an LGBTQ Christian movement pursuing visibility and inclusion.
They are comfortable with social media and thrusting the issue into the public arena, casting themselves as “not far-off from the wild-eyed radicals who started Christianity in wellheeled Rome,” said Joshua Kam, a Hope College graduate.
And they are using Scripture to make their case, challenging Bible translations, including “clobber passages” casting homosexuality as a sin.
Until recently, most Christian colleges did not admit to having LGBTQ students.
But the increasing visibility of same-sex marriage plus the mingling of Christian colleges with mainstream institutions is changing that.