Church-Based Colleges and Homophobic Discrimination

Jason,

I appreciate your response to my “Walking the Walk” posting yesterday. Since the questions you raise are important and complex, I thought I’d reply with another posting, rather than a brief comment.

First, thanks for visiting the blog. We share a love for Emily Dickinson, who is for me a secular saint. I still keep in one of my old journals a tiny wizened apple I plucked from an old tree in her yard in Amherst on a previous visit, and I’ve gone to her grave as though it were a saint’s shrine.

I see your point about Dorothy Parker. She was acerbic, but at least she told the God’s honest truth, when so many of us use language to conceal and deny—and, in my view, that’s a saintlike virture, plain honesty. I don’t know if you realized it when you left your reply, but you did so on Dorothy Parker’s birthday. Waldo Lydecker’s Journal had a tribute to her yesterday, with some entertaining (and moving) clips of her reading her poetry (see http://waldolydeckersjournal.blogspot.com/2008/08/oh-life-is-glorious-cycle-of-song.html).

And now to address the issues you raise: if I understand your primary point correctly, you’re concerned about my insistence that faith-based colleges/universities fulfill their part of the social contract by teaching and upholding values necessary for the proper functioning of civil society. You’re nervous about attempts to impose on these faith-based institutions the values of other groups, including civil society at large. You want to defend the right of any religious group to hold its own unique religious beliefs.

And I don’t disagree at all with that right. I’m all for defending the right of any religious group to maintain its own unique religious beliefs, no matter how loony or noxious those seem to me.

What I don’t support, though, is the right of religious groups to impose those beliefs on other groups, including civil society. And I don’t support the right of religious groups to insist that civil society allow them to extend their peculiar religious or moral views to society at large, when those views contradict fundamental values of civil society.

And that’s where (in my view) the role of church-based colleges and universities comes into the picture, and deserves to be examined very carefully. Despite the wall separating church and state, church-based institutions of higher learning i benefit—and largely so—from our tax dollars. And so, all of us as citizens have a vested interest in seeing that these institutions serve the common good and respect (and teach and foster) the values essential for the proper functioning of civil society.

As an example, I’ve just read on the website of a faith-based university a big announcement of a major federal grant to that university. The announcement is a bit peculiar, in that this is a grant the university receives routinely, though the website is showcasing it as some kind of fundraising coup. I have a personal interest in the story, because a close friend of mine wrote this grant, and I seriously doubt she will receive any credit for its being funded.

I bring her story up because it illustrates the point I want to drive at. When the president of this church-based university began to engage in vicious homophobic behavior towards several administrators at the university, my friend resigned in protest. She could not stomach the behavior. She could no longer work for a leader who exhibited such profound, toxic homophobia towards employees, even in (or particularly in?) a church-sponsored university.

And that’s really the heart of the story, in my view. As with public universities, faith-based universities have long made a social contract with our civil society to produce citizens who help to build a more humane society, in accord with the democratic values we profess to cherish. We give lavishly of our tax funds to church-based universities for that reason: they produce leaders, teachers, good citizens, professional folks who embody (we hope) the core values we need in order to keep participatory democracy alive, and extend it to those who are pushed away from its table.

For this reason, would argue strongly that church-based institutions should be permitted to cherish any and all religious beliefs unique to their sponsoring church, no matter how strange those may seem to me. But they should not be permitted to instill those beliefs and values in graduates who are going to serve the common good, if those beliefs and values undermine or conflict with core values of our civil society.

In my view, how church-based colleges and universities treat gay human beings is a litmus test—perhaps the litmus test—of this distinction today. I keep recurring to the case of the National Council for Teacher Education (NCATE) for this reason. As with many public institutions, many faith-based colleges and universities produce a huge number of teachers for our public schools.

Teaching in a public school demands respect for diversity. It does so because we live in a society that is increasingly diverse, and teachers cannot educate diverse groups of students without understanding and respecting diversity.

One of the diversities with which schools are now having to deal—for all kinds of obvious reasons—is diversity in sexual orientation. Youth are coming to terms with their gay/lesbian orientation at ever earlier ages. There is no way to avoid this public discussion in the classroom.

In my view, while teachers may justifiably hold peculiar religious or moral views that condemn gay people and gay behavior, they ought not to be permitted to impose those views on their classrooms, in a public school. A fundamental, a core, value of civic society is respect for difference and otherness, the desire to understand those who are tagged as different in a demeaning way and to protect them from prejudice. Our participatory democracy depends on that core value.

And it depends on educating teachers who understand this. This is why NCATE has added to its criteria for all teacher education programs, whether in faith-based or public colleges, the expectation that teachers are taught to respect diversity in the area of sexual orientation, and the expectation that the college itself has regulations in place requiring such respect institution-wide.

All accrediting bodies for American colleges and universities have been moving in this direction, as a matter of fact. It is not possible, increasingly, for colleges and universities to engage in open homophobia in hiring and firing procedures, in evaluation procedures, or in curricular decisions, and to use religion as an excuse for doing so.

I don’t want to maintain that the accrediting bodies do a very good job of enforcing these regulations. I have had a close association with several faith-based colleges/universities whose teacher education programs were run by deans and faculty who are deeply and overtly homophobic, and who are willing to use homophobic slurs to destroy the careers of valued colleagues who happen to be gay and to win political points with homophobic top administrators. In one sickening case, one of these educators is the daughter of a minister in a church whose teaching about sexual morality is very strict, and which definitely forbids homosexual behavior. But it also looks askance at multiple marriages, and this faculty member has been married three times--and reports to a homophobic dean who carried on an open relationship with a married colleague while she herself was married, while she used homophobic slurs to destroy the careers of several gay colleagues.*

I haven’t seen any action on the part of any accrediting bodies to remove accreditation from those colleges/universities. Several of them don’t even have institutional non-discrimination policies in place to prohibit outright discrimination in hiring, firing, evaluation, etc.—and this despite the fact that all are sponsored by churches that profess to deplore homophobic discrimination, while condemning homosexual behavior.

I’m glad you brought up the issue of slavery, because, in my view, it’s an historical illustration of the very point I’m making. There was a time when many American churches and the colleges they sponsored would, indeed, have claimed religious exemption to defend and promote (and teach) slavery. Prior to the Civil War, most churches in the South made explicit statements about this. They noted that slavery had always been upheld by biblical norms; they argued that the South was simply holding to the tried and true traditional Christian morality in defending slavery.

And they were dead wrong. Today, it would be unthinkable for us to permit any church-based college or university to teach students that slavery is morally or scripturally warranted. It would be unthinkable for us to produce teachers, even in church-based institutions, who are permitted to go into the classroom and promote slavery, and punish students who challenge them for doing so.

Yet we still allow church-based colleges and universities to practice homophobic discrimination, and to produce graduates who will engage in that form of discrimination in their civic and professional lives.

In my view, homophobic behavior is just as destructive to the bonds of civil society and to participatory democracy as defending slavery on biblical grounds used to be. In my view, churches which teach that people of color are an inferior form of humanity (there are such churches) have a right to teach and believe what they want.

But they do not have a right to try to impose that teaching on civil society or to sponsor colleges and universities that produce teachers, citizens, and professional leaders who espouse this teaching for the body politic and who try to impose this teaching on the body politic.

Maybe Emily Dickinson was wise when she simply absented herself from church life altogether. I sometimes think this when I see the damage that church communities do to our civil society when they use their religious beliefs to attack marginalized groups including LGBT persons.

Something that made me fall in love with Emily Dickinson long ago was when I discovered in her biography that she had been taken as a girl, along with her entire class at an Amherst school, to a revival. Where all those attending were leaned on to confess their sins and receive Jesus.

Emily refused. She was one of the very few in her class who stood apart when the altar call came along. As you know, she later simply stopped going to church, and wrote poems about how she encountered God walking in the woods more than she did in church.

Religion does some wonderful things. It’s capable of tremendous good. But it’s also capable of tremendous evil, and throughout history, all religious bodies have done horribly destructive things to some folks, in the name of God.

As they are often doing today to gay human beings . . . .

Again, thanks for writing. If I have misread your comment, and/or you’d like to continue discussing these issues, I invite further comments.

*It's not my business to pass moral judgment on these folks. I couldn't care a fig about how they live their personal lives, as long as they don't harm others. My point in referencing their own stories in the context of this story about the special status accorded to gay folks in many church-related institutions is this: there's a huge double standard. While their own behavior violated the ethical norms of the church sponsoring this college, they were never called on the carpet for that behavior. And I wouldn't advocate that any college begin to monitor and punish sexual transgressions of faculty and staff.

Even so, however, these faculty members willingly participated in a vicious campaign to destroy the careers of several colleagues solely because those colleagues were gay. And they were permitted and even encouraged to do this by the president of the university in question. The church that sponsors the university teaches that engaging in homosexual acts is incompatible with Christian life. At the same time, it also teaches that adultery is morally wrong. In its university, however, it would be unthinkable for a married faculty member engaging in an affair to be punished for that behavior. It would not be unthinkable for a faculty member in a committed gay relationship to be punished.

This is a huge double standard. And it is present in the life of the church itself. A significant number of churches within this denomination are resisting even allowing gay people to join the church. The same churches would not dream of asking heterosexual members if their sexual behavior makes them fit to be church members.