"Colleges and Evangelicals Collide on Bias Policy" (NY Times, 6/10/14)

Keep in mind that these excerpts are NOT from a socially conservative publication but from our country's socially liberal paper of record....

"BRUNSWICK, Me. — For 40 years, evangelicals at Bowdoin College have gathered periodically to study the Bible together, to pray and to worship....

"After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college....

"In a collision between religious freedom and antidiscrimination policies, the student group, and its advisers, have refused to agree to the college’s demand that any student, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, should be able to run for election as a leader of any group, including the Christian association.

"Similar conflicts are playing out on a handful of campuses around the country, driven by the universities’ desire to rid their campuses of bias, ...but also, in the eyes of evangelicals, fueled by a discomfort in academia with conservative forms of Christianity. The universities have been emboldened to regulate religious groups by a Supreme Court ruling in 2010....

"At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders. And at Vanderbilt, more than a dozen groups, most of them evangelical but one of them Catholic, have already lost their official standing over the same issue; one Christian group balked after a university official asked the students to cut the words 'personal commitment to Jesus Christ' from their list of qualifications for leadership.

"At most universities that have begun requiring religious groups to sign nondiscrimination policies, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic and mainline Protestant groups have agreed, saying they do not discriminate and do not anticipate that the new policies will cause problems....

"The evangelical groups say they, too, welcome anyone to participate in their activities.... But they insist that, in choosing leaders, who often oversee Bible study and prayer services, it is only reasonable that they be allowed to require some basic Christian faith.... and often an implicit expectation that unmarried student leaders... will abstain from sex....

"Some institutions..have opted to exempt religious groups from nondiscrimination policies.... But evangelical groups have lost official status at...others, and their advocates are worried that Cal State could be a tipping point....

"Bowdoin officials say they, too, are disappointed.

“'I want them on campus, because it’s a sanctuary for many of our conservative evangelical students — Bowdoin has accepted these students, and they need a place, and they need to have their faith challenged,' said the Rev. Robert Ives, a United Church of Christ minister who is the director of religious and spiritual life at Bowdoin. 'But every organization has to be open to every student, and every position of leadership has to be open to any individual, without discrimination'"
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