If you think Christians can sit on the sidelines regarding the questions of sexual identity that permeate the culture, think again.
Christians, simply trying to be winsome, respectable, polite and to avoid those icky social issues, can’t. Oh yes, you can be a Christian anywhere in America. But if you are “The Wrong Kind of Christian” which means you live your beliefs, you will face persecution.
There’s a disturbing policy on many college campuses with regard to student groups. Writer Tish Harrison Warren, ran smack into it and addressed it at Christianity Today — in the September issue. It concerns a period when Tish and her husband were Ph.D. candidates at Vanderbilt University.
She writes: “I thought I was an acceptable kind of evangelical.
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.”
In other words they were avoiding the hot-button social issues. Tish and her friends were trying to be Christians without offending anyone.
This worked for a time. Tish Harrison Warren’ s CT article continues: “Then, two years ago, the student organization I worked for at Vanderbilt University got kicked off campus for being the wrong kind of Christians.”
The school made the decision to prohibit campus groups from setting their own standards for student leadership. Think of it this way. Under these rules a Muslim can claim the right to head up the Christian group; a global warming skeptic can run for president of the Earth First Group; and a liberal Democrat can seek office in the College Republicans. Belief or doctrine doesn’t matter. Only democracy.
Tish Harrison Warren was a leader of the Graduate Christian fellowship — a chapter of Intervarsity. She went to the school’s director of religious life and learned that the change came after a Christian fraternity had expelled several students for violating its behavior policy. One of the violations was, unsurprisingly, homosexual behavior.
Harrison Warren writes, “the university saw belief systems themselves as suspect. Any belief — particularly those about the authority of scripture or the church — could potentially constrain sexual activity or identity.”
She continues, “Religious organizations were welcome as long as they were malleable: as long as their leaders didn’t need to profess anything in particular.” In her dealings with other administrators, Tish Harrison Warren saw the word discrimination “lobbed like a grenade to end all argument.” Especially with regard to creedal statements which, she writes, “were allowed, but as an accessory, a historic document, or a suggested guideline. They could not have binding authority to shape or govern the teaching and practices of a campus religious community.”
Christians in America did not, until recently have to suffer for adhering to creed, to belief. Now, we cannot, without persecution, take even the most tepid of stands, against certain sins. Acceptable, comfortable Christianity does not exist.