“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.”38
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.”39
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.”40 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.41
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 2012.42 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.43 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.”44 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,45 an allegation the fraternity denied.46 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 tr
ied 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.47 (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.
The experience was painfully eye opening for Warren. “I was so surprised. [I]’ve never voted Republican. I’m not your stereotypical right-wing Christian,” she said. While Warren described herself as “orthodox and evangelical” she was decidedly not fundamentalist, and yet that is how the university seemed to view her. “I had a lot of sorrow about the culture wars and the way Christians engaged in those,” Warren said. “But I think I had an assumption that all the cultural warriors and all the fundamentalists were on the right. I realized through this process that they are on both sides.” The difference of course is that Vanderbilt, like most secular universities, present themselves to the world as Enlightenment-bound, open-minded thinkers.
“Vanderbilt thinks they are operating out of a non-belief system but they are operating out of a belief system, and it’s essentially [a kind of] progressive liberal theism . . . They repeatedly said how much they value religious groups on campus, but I think it’s a certain kind of religious group. [They] want religious groups that are not orthodox in views of homosexuality,” Warren told me. “Just come out and say it, put it in the flyer and let students know what they’re getting into before they choose Vanderbilt . . . If [Vanderbilt] wants to be the Bob Jones or Liberty University of the Left, that’s fine. The difference is that Bob Jones and Liberty are very honest about their preset positions and are very honest about who they are. [Vanderbilt should] say ‘we don’t like orthodox evangelical religious belief across the board.’ Don’t say, ‘we love religious groups’ and then gut our ability to self govern and practice in a meaningful way.”
Warren’s lament echoed that of the late Reverend Peter Gomes, the celebrated Harvard Divinity School theologian and Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, who blasted the editors of the Harvard Crimson when they argued in 200348 that the Harvard Radcliffe Christian Fellowship (HRCF) should have been denied university recognition because of its “requirement that leadership believe in the holy spirit and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The editors alleged it violated Harvard’s anti-discrimination policy. Gomes characterized this view as “foolish” and wrote that it “boggles the mind.” Interestingly, Vanderbilt selected Gomes’s book, The Good Life as required reading for Vanderbilt’s freshman class of 2015 as part of an effort to teach them about ethics.49 Perhaps they should make his scathing letter to the editor required reading as well.
In that letter, Gomes—himself a gay celibate man and also a vocal advocate for gays and lesbians50 in the church—argued that opposing religious groups’ right to discriminate based on doctrinal beliefs betrayed a “fundamental ignorance of the nature of religious belief, or a determination in the name of ‘non-discrimination’ to discriminate against a Christian student group which takes its Christian identity and principles seriously.”51 He explained what should have been obvious: “It does make an enormous difference to the integrity of a Christian club in the evangelical tradition if its leaders are unwilling to subscribe to the orthodox Christian beliefs to which the club is committed.” He asked: “How can a profession of faith be irrelevant in the leadership of a faith-based group?” Gomes’s frustration with the Crimson’s intolerant editorial was palpable throughout the letter, even though he himself did not embrace the orthodox view that homosexuality is a sin.52
He called the Crimson’s argument “not tolerant, neither is it pluralistic, nor inclusive. Let us call it what it is: hostile, rampantly secular, and overtly anti-Christian.” He noted, “If there is any discrimination going on in this debate, it is the unseemly discrimination of The Crimson against an explicitly Christian student group, and the particulars of the faith which provides the basis of its identity.”
Replace the Crimson with the names of a host of universities and colleges and all of the arguments are just as true today. The people who purport to believe in tolerance, diversity, and free speech in fact act like intolerant fundamentalists projecting their own narrow-mindedness onto Christian groups who merely want to be left alone to practice their faith and serve their campus communities.
TOLERANCE FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE
While the illiberal left expects to be shielded from views they don’t want to encounter, conservatives have to sit through classes with liberal professors in order to obtain a diploma. It’s “hate speech” to hold an anti-abortion protest, but you can say pretty much whatever you want to a conservative without worrying about the long arm of campus justice coming down on you. Omar Mahmood, the Muslim student at the University of Michigan who wrote the satirical essay ridiculing political correctness that got him booted from the student newspaper, had his apartment vandalized after the column ran.53 Mahmood told the College Fix that he considers himself a political conservative and holds views at odds with most other Muslims on campus. This can’t be tolerated. According to the College Fix, “the vandalism posted on [his] apartment door stated ‘you scum embarrass us,’ ‘you self-righteous d-ck,’ ‘you have no soul,’ ‘everyone hates you you violent pr-ck.” There was also an image of the devil, and hot dogs and eggs had been thrown at his door.
If you are a conservative—or even a liberal who says something deemed conservative—your speech will get canceled or your award revoked for taking a view at odds with liberal dogma. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s honorary degree at Brandeis was y
anked for slamming Islam, but nobody blinked when at a 2007 Smith Commencement address, Gloria Steinem compared people who oppose abortion and same-sex marriage to “Germany under fascism.”54 Moreover, there’s no “trigger warning” for conservative students who are regularly confronted with ideological and philosophical views they find offensive or may even violate their religious beliefs. Nor have conservative students demanded them. It seems that what most non-left students desire is the simple right to determine their own views and express them freely without fear of retribution. This reasonable desire is a bridge too far for the illiberal left.
SIX
THE WAR ON FOX NEWS
[Presidents] inherit traditions that make us greater than the challenges we face. And one of those traditions is . . . a free press that isn’t afraid to ask questions, to examine and to criticize.1
—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, APRIL 2012
Speaking at his first White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2009, the new president of the United States opened with a joke to the assembled media: “I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox table. (Laughter.)”2
The president’s light-hearted barb at Fox News was harmless on its face and if it had been left at just a little tension between a White House and a news organization, that would have been typical. Instead, it was a precursor to something much more ominous: a war on dissent by the White House, starting with that outlier of the media, Fox News.
The Silencing Page 12