In the Fight Over ‘Wokeness,’ Christian Colleges Feel Pressed to Pick a Side

This spring, two professors at Christian colleges lost their jobs after people complained about how they had brought up race in the classroom.

The professors — one at Palm Beach Atlantic University, in Florida, and one at Taylor University, in Indiana — faced similar circumstances. They were not tenured. They taught writing courses. They assigned readings about race by authors of color, as they had done for many years. But this time, their universities didn’t renew their contracts.

Both included a name on their syllabi that has become a lightning rod in Christian higher ed: Jemar Tisby, a religious historian and professor at Simmons College of Kentucky, a Christian HBCU. Tisby is best known for his 2019 best-selling book, The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. The book argues that people of faith throughout American history have worked against racial justice and calls on today’s Christians to reverse the pattern.

Last year, the Board of Trustees at Grove City College issued an apology for inviting Tisby to speak on its Pennsylvania campus in 2020. The statement came after parents circulated a petition calling for Grove City to save the college “from CRT” — critical race theory, an academic concept that conservatives often use as shorthand for diversity and inclusion efforts, or teaching about race, that they find objectionable.

Amid the fallout, Grove City trustees sent a clear message: The college was not “going ‘woke’” and remained “one of the most conservative colleges in the country.” Hosting Tisby, the board members wrote, had been “a mistake.”

The recent tussles over Tisby’s work demonstrate the pressures that Christian colleges are facing to articulate exactly where they stand in a debate that, to many of their stakeholders, defines the current political moment: Is promoting diversity an urgent priority or an ideological agenda? How institutions appear to answer that question can have major implications — for faculty members and students, for curriculum and enrollment, for finances and campus culture.

The Enrollment Narrative

There’s a theory often discussed among the faculty in Christian higher ed that institutional leaders think coming out strongly against “wokeness” will draw more applicants. That’s because many conservative Christians believe that certain faith-based colleges are drifting too far from biblical principles in an attempt to be politically correct.

The enrollment link is tough to prove. College enrollment goes up and down for all sorts of reasons, such as location, demographics, and academic offerings. But a snapshot is illustrative: Several Christian colleges that have recently leaned more explicitly into a conservative identity and publicly denounced concepts connected to racial justice are seeing their enrollments grow.

Take Colorado Christian University. In April 2022, it released a statement on critical race theory: “A Christian world view significantly differs from the popular, secular CRT narrative. Because of these distinct differences, CCU rejects and does not promote CRT or critical theory.” Last fall, The Chronicle found Colorado Christian to be one of the fastest-growing colleges in its category. A university spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But in a Washington Times essay last year, Colorado Christian’s chancellor described his campus, along with Grove City and Hillsdale College, in Michigan, as increasingly sought-after by parents and students because they are “pushing back against the dumbing down and political correctness of mass culture.” Hillsdale, which has made the uncommon decision to reject federal funding, has become the model of higher education for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. It saw high enrollment throughout the pandemic, while other small colleges fought to stay afloat.

The narrative is that conservative colleges’ “enrollment is going up if they press into their white Christian identity, because it stands in opposition to this false narrative that Christianity is going liberal,” said Raymond Chang, a former associate chaplain at Wheaton College, in Illinois. Chang now directs an evangelism program for Fuller Youth Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary that aims to reach 10-million teenagers over the next 10 years.

In July, Jay W. Richards, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, included Colorado Christian, along with Hillsdale, in an article about institutions where students would not encounter the “mind virus” of critical race theory. (Richards didn’t explain how he drew those conclusions.) A similar list drew attention in 2021: Josh Mulvihill, a former adjunct professor of ministry at Crown College, in Minnesota, who writes about Christian family issues, published a list of “Christian Colleges Without Critical Race Theory.” Colorado Christian made the cut. (Mulvihill declined to comment.)

Despite success stories like Colorado Christian’s, Tisby doesn’t believe a race to the right necessarily results in enrollment gains. As he sees it, clarifying your political or social stance as a Christian college — in whatever way you choose — distinguishes you to like-minded observers. Belmont University, a Christian institution in Nashville, is an example of one that has gone the other direction. Its increasing and public emphasis on conversations about race in the classroom and on campus have correlated with increasing enrollment.

“I think the schools that are going to struggle the most with attracting students are the schools that aren’t clear about what they stand for, that aren’t clear about their identity,” Tisby said.

Regardless of what the enrollment numbers say or don’t say, one thing is clear: In a world where many Christians think you have to pick a side, Tisby himself has emerged as a dividing line.

In January, Taylor University’s provost called Julie L. Moore, an associate professor of English, into a meeting. According to Moore, the provost said that her curriculum “had made the composition class into some sort of ‘sociology of race’ class.” (Moore shared her version of events in Tisby’s newsletter; she declined a request for an interview.)

The provost’s main objection, Moore said, was that Tisby was on her syllabus. Moore said she merely included a quote from him. The provost also said she hadn’t followed an earlier directive to add “materials written by the Heritage Foundation to my course to ‘balance’ it out.” Moore said it had been a suggestion, not a requirement. Ultimately, Taylor did not renew Moore’s contract.

A spokesperson for Taylor didn’t respond to a request for comment. Taylor welcomed its largest freshman class ever this fall.

The Lightning Rod

In the second half of the 2010s, the young, dynamic Tisby was a frequent speaker on Christian college campuses.

Tensions over social and political identities were simmering under the surface. But a lot of Christian higher ed was trying to talk about race. Some colleges created diversity offices and hired cabinet-level officers to craft new messaging.

“As the discourse around Black Lives Matter was increasing, evangelicals knew that they needed to find a way to address the racial tensions,” said Chang, the former associate chaplain at Wheaton. “They didn’t know where to turn. And so they identified a few key people that they thought were safe.”

Tisby, a Black man who had grown up in white evangelicalism, was one of them.

He attended a “very white, very evangelical” youth group with a friend in high school, where he became a Christian, Tisby says on his website. As an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, he attended a predominantly white local church.

At Grove City’s chapel and elsewhere, Tisby made public calls for Christian students to participate in racial-justice efforts. The Color of Compromise, his New York Times (and elsewhere) best seller, is a historical argument that the white American church helped set up and maintain racist societal structures. But some white evangelicals took his critiques personally, he said.

And then came 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement and critical race theory gained a more significant platform in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a white policeman in Minneapolis. Some conservative Christians began to feel uneasy when statements of support edged into prescriptions for systemic change. A backlash ensued in churches, which also took hold at some religious colleges.

Tisby is skeptical that critics who associate his book with critical race theory have ever cracked its spine. As he sees it, the book charts white American Christianity’s history of racism and backs it up with evidence: “There’s nothing controversial in what I’m saying.” He believes he’s become an “avatar” of what people don’t like about the direction some Christian colleges are going.

“They’ve heard from people who’ve heard from people that I’m a bad influence,” he said. “And they’re latching on to that hearsay as a way to demonstrate how ‘anti-woke’ they are.”

Earlier this year, Palm Beach Atlantic, another college under pressure to respond to a complaint about a professor, had to make a decision about whether particular views of racial justice had a place in its classrooms.

Samuel Joeckel, who had taught there for six years, told The Chronicle in March that a parent had complained to the administration about a unit on racial justice in one of his composition courses. One of Joeckel’s assignments included an excerpt from The Color of Compromise. After a review, the university decided not to renew Joeckel’s contract and terminated his employment immediately.

Debra A. Schwinn, Palm Beach Atlantic’s president, said in a recent interview that the campus is committed to open dialogue about the experiences of minority students, and that its history curriculum has no particular lens. Its diversity statement refers to a “divine tapestry” of people from all nations and races, stating that “no form of racism, racial supremacy, ableism, or ethnic bigotry” will be tolerated.

“We’re not afraid to talk about the truths of history, the good, bad, the ugly,” Schwinn said. “So that’s just part of being a Christian university, to understand the biblical context of the imago Dei, where everybody is made in the image of God and therefore worthy of respect.”

Terriel R. Byrd, who recently retired as a professor of urban Christian ministry at Palm Beach Atlantic, said he felt that the college had been moving in the right direction on racial justice. The university started a Council for Intercultural Engagement in 2020; Byrd, who has written books on Martin Luther King Jr. and racial separation in Christian worship, was its first leader.

But more recently, public colleges across Florida have faced growing opposition from politicians and conservative activists to teaching about race. Professors have canceled racial-justice courses, fearing they might be accused of violating a state law that bans teaching that one race or gender is morally superior to the other and that one race should feel guilty for past discrimination. Palm Beach Atlantic seemed to find itself at a fork in the road, as a parent clamored for Joeckel’s removal while the college attempted to demonstrate commitment to diversity.

Asked about Joeckel, Schwinn declined to comment on personnel matters. She said no professor has been fired for teaching about racial justice in the three years she’s been at the university.

The Holdouts

Some Christian colleges see it as part of their mission to contend with racism in America, even when a lot of people dismiss them as “woke.” That can bring heat from both the right and — when the colleges’ efforts are deemed insufficient — the left.

When Belmont University released a statement in response to Floyd’s murder, alumni and others criticized it for failing to identify the presence of racism or lay out a plan for action. Belmont eventually rewrote the statement.

In fact, Belmont could be seen even by many secular colleges as making extra efforts to ensure that students are exposed to anti-racist ideas. Mark McEntire, a professor of biblical studies, says faculty members in his program are now informally “expected” to include authors “doing the work of anti-racism” in their syllabi, although a spokesperson for the university said there is no requirement for this on a university level. McEntire said these expectations for faculty members distinguish Belmont from institutions where administrators have punished anti-racism efforts.

“So it’s the other way around,” he said. “Rather than that being something that’s a threat or that will get us in trouble if we do it, we are expected to do it as part of our work.”

In May, Belmont hired D’Angelo Taylor as its first vice president for hope, unity, and belonging. Taylor said the ecumenical nature of Belmont, which is not affiliated with a denomination, appealed to him. His mission is both to help shape policy that encourages a sense of belonging on campus and to build up the physical space of the HUB, as his new office is called, to be a cultural refuge for students from minority backgrounds.

The university is also making efforts to acknowledge its complicated racial history, including the dedication in 2021 of a memorial to enslaved people who built parts of the campus.

“What we don’t want is for folks to look at Belmont as the last to the table,” Taylor said. “No, we honor the work that’s already been done. Now it’s more formalized.”

Belmont’s full-time enrollment has continued to increase, with 1,910 freshmen enrolled in 2022, compared with 1,827 in 2021 and about 1,560 in the pre-pandemic years.

Though evidence that either rejecting or embracing “woke” positions on race will build enrollment is not conclusive, it’s worth noting that some Christian colleges with no strong position have suffered enrollment losses. Biola University, in La Mirada, Calif., whose president wrote a statement about critical race theory in October 2020 that neither condemned nor accepted it wholesale, has seen its enrollment decline since before the pandemic. According to the student newspaper, the university saw its lowest freshman class in 15 years in the fall of 2022, and in February, Biola announced that it would cut 41 staff and 14 faculty members. President Barry H. Corey said in a statement to The Chronicle that the university’s diversity goal is to “ground our thinking in the truths of Scripture.”

“I believe that humbly hearing one another’s concerns is a good starting point in the pursuit of unity and peace,” he said.

At Wheaton, some faculty members and students complain that it’s difficult to assess what the college stands for. (Full disclosure: This reporter is a senior at Wheaton College.) It unapologetically invited Tisby to speak on campus in 2019, and a college statement cites Bible verses to explain its commitments to diversity, equity, and justice. But students and faculty of color say they still don’t feel entirely at home. The college continues to hold onto “white evangelical” traditions and worship practices that feel foreign to many Black students, Chang said. And a debate continues over whether to rename the library, whose eponym is a former president found to have resisted enrolling Black students.

Wheaton’s enrollment took a hit during the pandemic and hasn’t recovered as quickly as expected. Last year, the college made cuts in the faculty and eliminated academic programs.

A Wheaton spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A Bellwether

It’s possible that Christian colleges choosing to make racial justice a core part of their identity will eventually attract more students of color as the nation diversifies — winning in the long game of culture change.

Joeckel and Moore, the two professors targeted for teaching about race, wrote a statement to the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities that called on the organization to hold their former employers accountable “for the injustices they are promoting.”

Any college that wants to be part of the group, the professors wrote, “must allow academic freedom and open discourse about all issues related to racial justice and in so doing, firmly resist all forms of white supremacy, no matter what ‘American’ cloaks they appear to wear.”

Regardless of where Christian higher ed goes from here, it isn’t just a story about where students go to college, Tisby said. Such conflicts are a bellwether for the social and political climate of the country at large, he said.

“Faith communities are one of the last and largest truly voluntary associations,” he said. “People don’t have to go there. And so where people are choosing to align themselves voluntarily says a lot about what they deeply believe and what they’re prioritizing.”