The Silencing (16 page)

In 2006, a series of speeches by anti-immigration reform leaders brought out the worst in liberal activists. Fire alarms were pulled to interrupt a speech by Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo at Michigan State’s law school. The same tactic was used at Georgetown to disrupt a speech by Chris Simcox, a Minuteman Civil Defense Corps leader.
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At Columbia, students rushed the stage, toppling tables and chairs and attacked Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project, which works
to keep illegal immigrants out of the United States. Marvin Stewart, an African American and a member of the Minuteman Project, who spoke with Gilchrist was booed by students who called him a racist, a sellout, and even a black supporter of white supremacy.
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The illiberal left often likes to invoke the importance of silencing people they claim have used “hate speech”—such as criticizing Islam or questioning rape statistics—when they demand bans on certain speakers. But as we can see, they have no problem using intimidation and hateful speech so long as it is directed at someone deviating from their worldview.

“THE WRONG KIND OF CHRISTIAN”

It’s bad enough to have a speech canceled because illiberal malcontents have found something you’ve done offensive. What’s worse is to have an entire organization forced off campus merely for adhering to their core values and religious beliefs.

In the fall of 2014, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA was stripped of official recognition on the nineteen of twenty-three California State University (CSU) campuses where they had ministries. The Cal State system is the largest four-year college system in the United States, so this action was not insignificant. The cause of this de-recognition was an executive order by CSU Chancellor Charles Reed that included the requirement that “No campus shall recognize any fraternity, sorority, living group, honor society, or other student organization unless its membership and leadership are open to all currently enrolled students at that campus. . . .”
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Referred to as an “all-comers policy” the executive order put InterVarsity, a multi-denominational student ministry that has maintained a presence on college campuses for more than seventy years, in an untenable position. They were being asked to choose between their faith and university policy. While InterVarsity welcomes all people—more than 25 percent of its participating students are non-Christians—they require their leaders to sign a statement of faith that they adhere to orthodox Christian doctrine.
CSU’s lead attorney charged that InterVarsity would be engaging in discrimination rather than education if the group didn’t allow atheists and others hostile to InterVarsity’s beliefs to run for leadership positions in the organization.
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“It’s an irony for us that, in the name of inclusion, they’re eliminating religious groups because of their religious beliefs,” InterVarsity’s national field director Gregory Jao told the
Los Angeles Times
. “My understanding of an inclusive, welcoming university is to accept people based on their own beliefs. I’m inviting Cal State to live up to its best goals.”
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In a statement expressing disappointment with CSU’s decision, InterVarsity stated, “This new CSU policy does not allow us to require that our leaders be Christian. It is essentially asking InterVarsity chapters to change the core of our identity, and to change the way we operate in order to be an officially recognized student group. While we applaud inclusivity, we believe that faith-based communities like ours can only be led by people who clearly affirm historic Christian doctrine. And we do not believe it is appropriate for a government agency to dictate how religious organizations are led.”

Cal State had told InterVarsity that they were compelled to institute this policy by a 1972 statute, according to InterVarsity head Alec Hill. Hill told me in a 2014 interview, “We haven’t changed our national or local practice in 73 years. Cal State is now interpreting the statute in a new way. This whole experience has felt like it’s Alice in Wonderland.” When I asked Greg Lukianoff, the liberal atheist president of FIRE, whether there was any merit to the illiberal left’s argument that the “all comers policies” were generic non-discrimination policies, he scoffed. “I’ve been doing this for 13 years and college after college that was specifically angry at evangelical groups for their position on gay rights . . . kept trying to figure out ways to keep them from being on-campus groups,” he said.

In his 2012 book,
Unlearning Liberty
, Lukianoff wrote, “The fans of religious liberty for Muslims are often vehemently on the other side when the group in question is Christian. Between 2002 and 2009, dozens of colleges
across the country threatened or derecognized Christian groups because of their refusal to say they would not ‘discriminate’ on the basis of belief. These colleges included, to name a few, Arizona State University, Brown University, California State University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, Texas A&M University, Tufts University, the University of Arizona, the University of Florida, the University of Georgia, the University of Mary Washington, the University of New Mexico, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Washington University.”

Lukianoff told me, “University administrators have consistently targeted evangelical Christians, except in a few rare cases such as Louisiana State University where they went after a Muslim student group in 2003 for its position on homosexuality. In that case, when FIRE contacted LSU they quickly understood that they should not be telling a religious group what it should believe, but they seem to miss this lesson when it comes to evangelicals. When you look at these ‘all comers’ polices like the one in the Cal State System you need to understand that these are post hoc rationalizations for de-recognizing evangelical groups.”
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Why is recognition important? A senior InterVarsity official told me, “Official recognition provides equal access to rooms on campus with other student clubs, participation in freshmen outreach with other clubs, and being on the university website clearly demonstrates that we are part of the academic community. Being unrecognized can create a stigma and may raise doubts about us in the eyes of students, parents, and the university community.”

InterVarsity’s concerns are often dismissed as paranoid delusion because, their critics argue, an atheist would never try to gain a position of leadership in their organization. Addressing this issue, First Amendment activist Harvey Silverglate, a liberal, wrote, “Given the heat that surrounds discussion of gay marriage and abortion, out-of-the-ordinary disruptive tactics—by either side against the other’s organizations—are
a realistic concern. This is one reason why in an earlier era beleaguered minority groups like the NAACP and gay-rights groups were most in need of, and usually received, official protection from those who would undermine them. In more recent years on college campuses the tables have turned, and religious groups that were once conventional now find themselves in need of protection.”
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Moreover, it’s not remotely farfetched to believe that a student in leadership who went away for the summer as a devout orthodox Christian could return as an atheist or even an adherent of another religion. InterVarsity reasonably sought to retain control over the decision of whether a leader who was contemptuous or even indifferent to their evangelical mission could be told to step down.

After Cal State decided to adopt the “all comers policy” InterVarsity tried to reach an accommodation with administrators. But in the end, they were granted only a one-year exemption. Cal State did give an exemption to fraternities and sororities, which were allowed to discriminate by sex, at least for now. That was a battle the university did not want to fight, as it might prove too unpopular with students and alumni. On college campuses, keg parties are not surprisingly more popular than Christian groups.

The list of campus Christian fellowship groups that have been stripped of official university status continues to grow, including, in recent years, groups at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY), Tufts, Bowdoin, Rollins, and Vanderbilt, though SUNY at Buffalo later reversed itself.
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As the
New York Times
’ Michael Paulson reported in June 2014, “For 40 years, evangelicals at Bowdoin College have gathered periodically to study the Bible together, to pray and to worship. They are a tiny minority on the liberal arts college campus, but they have been a part of the school’s community, gathering in the chapel, the dining center, the dorms.” But four decades of history with the school is of no concern to campus administrators who demanded that the group open up its leadership elections to any student, including atheists.

Fourteen campus religious communities at Vanderbilt—comprising about 1,400 Catholic, evangelical, and Mormon students—lost their organizational status in 2012.
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The
New York Times
reported that a university official asked a Christian student group to cut the words “personal commitment to Jesus Christ” from its list of qualifications for leadership.
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The only commitment the illiberal left seems to tolerate is a commitment to progressive groupthink.

But even those who consider themselves progressive have learned that deviations from the illiberal left script is verboten. Tish Harrison Warren, the pastor running one of Vanderbilt’s campus Christian organizations, bucked most orthodox Christian stereotypes. Warren wrote in
Christianity Today
, “I’m not a fundamentalist. My friends and I enjoy art, alcohol, and cultural engagement. We avoid spiritual clichés and buzzwords. We value authenticity, study, racial reconciliation, and social and environmental justice.”
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Warren discovered that no matter how progressive she was culturally—she’s a woman pastor for crying out loud—if she held strong to religious values at odds with the dominant culture at Vanderbilt that made her “the wrong kind of Christian” as her piece was headlined. Her shared commitment to many important progressive political and policy issues was of no consequence to university administrators who had put campus Christian organizations in their crosshairs.

Warren had led the Graduate Christian Fellowship—a chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship—for two years. The group, which consisted of Vanderbilt graduate students, had operated on campus for twelve years as an official student organization while requiring that leaders adhere to orthodox Christian doctrine. What changed? Warren attributes it to an incident where a student claimed he was kicked out of a Christian fraternity for being gay,
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an allegation the fraternity denied.
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Nonetheless, said Warren, the campus newspaper published the student’s claim which naturally resulted in uproar. According to Warren, it was after this that Vanderbilt forbade campus groups from having any standards for those wanting
to join or lead the group (except fraternities and sororities who were given an exemption to discriminate based on sex).

Warren tried to explain to Vanderbilt’s administrators that the Christian group needed its student leaders to hold certain Christian doctrinal beliefs, but was told the group couldn’t discriminate on the basis of anything [for leaders], including religious belief. At one point when she asked the administrators if they were really telling her that she couldn’t require her Bible study leader to believe in the Trinity, they said that was exactly what they were telling her. On the one hand, it was dismissed as a silly issue because they said nobody would want to run a Bible study if they didn’t believe in the Trinity.
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(Warren pointed out that, actually, Unitarians reject the Trinity.) At the same time, she was told that having someone who didn’t believe in the Trinity would be good because “It’s important that many different views are represented and if a Jewish student wants to lead a Bible study, that’s really good they’re able to bring that perspective.” She said that administrators would never address whether the gay rights groups should have to let a religious fundamentalist who opposed gay rights be a leader. It seems obvious, though, what the answer would be.

It also seems obvious that a Christian group should be allowed to have Christian leaders. “The function of campus ministry groups is devotional and proclamatory in that we have a specific message that we are proclaiming,” Warren told me. “[Vanderbilt administrators] tried to make us about academic study or service or like a social group.” Warren said the bottom line issue was they believed “that Christian groups were using doctrinal statements, even if they didn’t mention sexuality (ours did not). They were worried that doctrinal statements (or creeds) were more or less a Trojan horse for discrimination against gay people. It’s a real misunderstanding about religious faith and what drives religious people.” Warren was being generous. It was beyond misunderstanding: it was astounding ignorance about one of the world’s largest religions. One doesn’t have to support InterVarsity’s policy regarding leadership positions as it applies to gays and lesbians in committed relationships—I don’t—to believe that the group
should have a right to determine their own criteria for leadership. The same should be true of Muslim groups that share InterVarsity’s orthodox view on sexuality.

As Vanderbilt was working to de-recognize the campus Christian groups, Warren said she heard from people in senior positions in the administration that if it were up to them the “all comers policy” would not go forward and they told her “I’m just doing my job and it’s not worth losing my job over.” There was a group of professors who penned an open letter against this policy, Warren recounted. But, said Warren, the professor leading the effort was warned by their department head “this could be career damaging for you.” They pulled the letter at the eleventh hour.