A Generational Schism Over Gay Rights Appears at Evangelical Colleges

Evangelical Christians, who proved a powerful voting bloc for Donald Trump, are often viewed as a monolithic group. But a generational rift is appearing on Christian college campuses and among student groups, as students are diverging from professors and administrators on one prominent issue: gay rights.

Divides within the evangelical community have been developing on campuses for a while now. Dozens of religious colleges have received federal exemptions that allow them to refuse to hire people in same-sex relationships. One of the largest evangelical student groups in the country, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, has asked staff members who disagree with its orthodox positions on sexuality to quit. And the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which represents about 120 evangelical institutions in the United States, effectively removed voting rights for members that allow for same-sex relationships.

Yet, according to Pew Research Center data, 54 percent of young millennial evangelicals think homosexuality should be accepted, and 47 percent are in favor of gay marriage. By contrast, only about 35 percent of evangelicals who are part of Generation X or are Baby Boomers believe homosexuality should be accepted. Only about one quarter support gay marriage.

That raises the question of whether the policies of evangelical colleges and campus groups are increasingly out of sync with student views. Campus activism around LGBT issues is on the rise, fueling conversations at colleges about how to fight discrimination while remaining true to one’s faith. Some campus activists are forming breakaway groups.

“What I see is a new schism, especially among the younger generation, where institutions that won’t bend are spawning new movements that are going to be inclusive,” says David P. Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University who has spent 20 years speaking at Christian campuses. On almost all of them he has met students, faculty, and alumni, he says, “who are pressing at least for conversation on LGBT issues.”

A recent essay by Mr. Gushee, who has advocated for a reconsideration of Christian views on homosexuality, described the polarization within the evangelical community over LGBT issues. The majority of conservative religious institutions, including colleges, “are responding to today’s sweeping social changes by digging in their heels — even against profound and pained internal opposition from their own dissenters,” he writes. “These institutions and their leaders are interpreting pressure to reconsider as pressure to succumb to error, or even heresy.”

Deeply Conservative

What this means for the future of Christian colleges and other organizations that focus on students is unclear. Evangelicals over all remain deeply conservative, showing far less support for gay marriage than other groups. And they are more uniform in their opposition to other things like abortion and evolution. More than 80 percent of evangelical voters picked Mr. Trump, who is, in turn, adding conservative Christians to his administration. They include Betsy DeVos, a graduate of Calvin College who has supported efforts to ban same-sex marriage, the president-elect’s choice to head the U.S. Department of Education.

Evangelical leaders who break with orthodox views on marriage or gender orientation have been shunned by peers. And students say it continues to be a challenge to be openly gay on Christian campuses, even as more colleges offer support for LGBT students in an effort to reduce harassment and homophobia. Meanwhile, members of a loosely knit movement that includes LGBT-affirming Christian organizations, national advocacy groups, and a handful of high-profile Christian thinkers, are pushing back against policies that they say needlessly polarize the evangelical community on gay and transgender issues.

These groups include advocacy organizations like Safety Net — founded three years ago to support LGBT students, alumni, and faculty at Christian colleges — and groups that promote a re-examination of Christian teachings on homosexuality, such as the Reformation Project and the Gay Christian Network. A few splinter groups also formed in the aftermath of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s changes, including a new national student ministry that promotes itself as LGBT-inclusive.

Changing Landscape

This polarization has both fueled, and been fueled by, a changing legal landscape. As the U.S. Supreme Court inched toward its 2015 decision cementing the constitutional right to marriage for gay people, Christian colleges developed legal strategies to protect their hiring policies and lifestyle covenants. Most evangelical Christian colleges explicitly define marriage as between a man and a woman and forbid both students and employees to have sex outside of marriage. They will hire gay academics who are celibate but not those who are in same-sex relationships.

Similarly, many evangelical colleges are making explicit that they believe gender is defined at birth. Those stances put them at odds with the U.S. Department of Education’s Title IX guidance on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

As a result, more than 90 religious colleges and Bible schools have sought, and been granted, exemptions from these Title IX requirements because of their doctrinal beliefs. Last year, the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ-rights organization, documented this strategy in a report, “Hidden Discrimination: Title IX religious exemptions putting LGBT students at risk.”

Shapri S. LoMaglio, vice president for government and external relations at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, says member institutions have always been clear about their policies on sexual orientation. Moreover, she says, evangelical Christians, gay and straight, largely agree on these matters.

She questions whether there really is much of a generational divide on doctrinal beliefs about gay marriage. Answers to the Pew questions, she says, most likely reflect how young evangelicals think people should be treated in “civic space.”

“There is absolutely not theological unanimity on this issue,” she says, “but there’s a pretty high degree of it.”

She also does not believe colleges are forcing students to abide by policies with which they might disagree. “The students who come into these communities do so willingly,” she says. “They could take that aid anywhere.”

Asking Questions

The problem with this argument, say gay-rights activists, is that young people are still working through their views on sex and theology when they enter college. That leads some students, gay and straight, to challenge the rules of a community in which they want to stay.

“This generation is not buying the former positions. They’re not sitting down and just accepting it. They’re asking questions,” says Jeffrey Hoffman, executive director of BJUnity, a group for gay alumni of Bob Jones University that began in 2012.

A number of groups like BJUnity have sprouted up in recent years, offering support for students, employees, and alumni of conservative Christian colleges. Some push for changes in college policies. OneGordon unsuccessfully petitioned the administration of Gordon College, located in a small town north of Boston, to remove the phrase “homosexual practice” from its life and conduct statement. It remains among a list of forbidden actions, alongside theft, drunkenness, and dishonesty.

Some evangelical colleges are in continuing discussions about their treatment of LGBT people and of gay marriage, fueled in part by a growing number of openly gay or transgender students.

Kit Apostolacus is one of them. A 2016 graduate of Eastern University, near Philadelphia, she came out as a lesbian and transgender while an undergraduate. She got to know Robert G. Duffett, Eastern’s president, after speaking out against a letter he had signed asking President Obama to add a religious exemption to an executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT people in hiring. Ms. Apostolacus says she’s not surprised the administration has been willing to engage with these issues: “There’s room for disagreement and it’s kind of built into the fabric of Eastern,” she says.

During her time there, she says, Eastern officially recognized Refuge, an LGBT student support group that has been active for more than a decade. Following controversy over the Obama letter, Mr. Duffett formed a task force on human sexuality, which organized two years of campus conversations, workshops, panel discussions, and academic presentations.

While he doesn’t think many people changed their positions, Mr. Duffett says they were able to chip away at harmful stereotypes, such as the conservative who hates gay people or the liberal who is not really a devout Christian. “We could all benefit from the kind of conversation we had,” he says of the evangelical community. “It’s a little bit edgy to open it up.”

The task force’s recommendations, which are now before Eastern’s Board of Trustees, include the removal of “homosexual conduct” from a list of examples of “moral turpitude” in the faculty handbook and consideration of changing the definition of marriage in the student handbook so that it is not limited to a relationship between a man and a woman.

Internal Divisions

Two evangelical colleges have gone further. Eastern Mennonite University and Goshen College changed their nondiscrimination policies in 2015 to allow the hiring of married gay and lesbian faculty. That led to a rift within the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which subsequently changed its membership rules. The two colleges ended up leaving the council to avoid exacerbating tensions within the group.

A similar division has appeared in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a nondenominational evangelical student organization with chapters on more than 600 campuses. While many, if not most, of its 1,300 staff and 39,000 student members agree that the Bible defines marriage as between a man and a woman, some students and employees were disturbed by InterVarsity’s letter to staff members in July that they should quit if they cannot “believe and behave” in accordance with a new position paper on human sexuality. Among other things, it states that sexual activity outside of marriage between a man and a woman is immoral. Treatment of LGBT students and views on same-sex relationships have varied among InterVarsity chapters, and some members have described the move as a theological purge.

Gregory L. Jao, vice president and director of campus engagement for InterVarsity, said that only about a dozen staff members have left so far. He rejects the idea that InterVarsity is pushing people out. “We’re not hunting them down and looking for them,” he says. Rather it’s up to staff members to come forward if they disagree. He acknowledges that the stance on same-sex relationships is “pastorally difficult” and “socially problematic.” But, he says, “we cannot find a way with intellectual integrity from our viewpoint to read Scripture a different way.”

Jaira Koh is a student leader at the Pomona-Pitzer Christian Fellowship, the only chapter so far to disassociate from InterVarsity. “In the coming years,” he says, “for our generation and coming generations, this kind of a singular unyielding insistence on one idea of sexuality is just going to be a nonstarter for most people.”

He and other critics say InterVarsity’s move is jarring given its longstanding commitment to social justice. The organization has thrown its support behind the Black Lives Matter movement and denounced violence against Muslim students. “The people they are kicking out are the people who ought to be leading the organization,” says Mr. Koh. “Those are the people who have the most fresh and needed perspectives on justice.”

A former InterVarsity staff member, Max Kueker, said he’s communicated with about 200 InterVarsity staff members, many of whom are just a few years out of college themselves, who are “depressed, angry, struggling to do their work.” Some can’t afford to quit their jobs, others don’t want to abandon their LGBT students.

He created Incarnation Ministries, which describes itself as multi-ethnic and LGBT-inclusive, as a potential home for such people. He hopes to have the group on 24 campuses by next fall. “If you’re a Christian who believes that the Bible is the authoritative word, there aren’t many places you can bring your LGBT friends.” But, he adds, “more organizations like ours are going to start to develop.”

Election Dynamics

The election of Donald Trump has given conservative Christians hope and gay-rights advocates pause. Paul Southwick, a lawyer who represents LGBT students in antidiscrimination lawsuits against religiously affiliated colleges, says the incoming administration could roll back LGBT protections in several ways, such as ignoring Education Department guidance documents that have expanded LGBT protections under Title IX or reducing the role of the Office for Civil Rights.

Meanwhile, some states may try to carve out greater protections for LGBT people. This summer California enacted a law that requires religious colleges that do not fully comply with its nondiscrimination laws to notify students.

Whatever the legal landscape, incoming students will continue to challenge Christian colleges over their stances on LGBT issues. Some colleges hope to find what they call a “third way” between a full embrace of same-sex marriage and a rejection of people in same-sex relationships. Activists remain optimistic that, over the long term, evangelical positions on sexuality and gender will change.

Ms. Apostolacus, the Eastern graduate, says it’s important for people on both sides of the debate to keep talking. “Just doubling down and going to the legal side is a way of shutting down that conversation.”

“The longer it goes on the more nuanced our discussions will be,” she says, “and therefore the better they will be.”

Clarification (12/21/16, 9:02 p.m.): This article originally said that Kit Apostolacus came out as gay as an undergraduate. She identifies as a lesbian. The article has been updated to reflect that.

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.