‘Are We Advocating for Something By Existing?'

WHEN JOHN BAGLEY JR. chose to attend evangelical Wheaton College in the mid-2000s, he said he was still trying to understand himself. As a Black queer man, Bagley said he spent a lot of his time after graduation just attempting to “put together the pieces of a lot of what was deconstructed or broken while ... in that environment.”

The year after Bagley graduated, he was contacted by a friend who was still a student at the school in Wheaton, Ill. The friend shared with him what would become known in Wheaton circles as “The Letter.” It was a message from students and alumni released following an April 2011 on-campus chapel series on “Sexuality and Wholeness.” The message from the college was clear: Heterosexual relationships were the only legitimate and faithful choice for Christians.

Wheaton alumnus Wesley Hill, author of Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality, was among the series speakers that week, delivering a sermon based on his book, which chronicles his decision to be a “celibate homosexual Christian.”

“Many of us felt trapped and unable to respond honestly to these messages while we were students,” the alumni authors of “The Letter” wrote. To current LGBTQ students, they added, “your sexual identity is not a tragic sign of the sinful nature of the world. You are not tragic. Your desire for companionship, intimacy, and love is not shameful. It is to be affirmed and celebrated just as you are to be affirmed and celebrated.”

More than 700 alumni and students, including Bagley, signed the open letter. Bagley also became an informal member of an LGBTQ alumni group known as OneWheaton, which launched amid the controversy.

More than a decade has passed since the release of the letter, and Bagley, now chair of the OneWheaton board, said he’s watched as the Wheaton LGBTQ student group has been passed along from different institutional offices willing to sponsor it. The group does not receive student government funding and has been denied the right to use LGBTQ language on school flyers. Bagley said this is part of an institutional effort to erase LGBTQ students and alumni. “It’s almost like a form of censure,” he said, adding that the institution tries to make it difficult even to publicly identify as queer. And, he alleges, that approach extends to individual policing of students.

Joseph Moore, director of marketing communications at Wheaton, told Sojourners that in 2013 the college created a group called Refuge, with student input, “to support students navigating same-sex sexuality and/or gender identity.” Moore said the school “does not use the specific term ‘LGBTQ’ on posters” because it “is not inclusive enough for some of our students. Not all students who are attracted to the same sex, for example, self-identify as lesbian or gay.” Moore added, “Additionally, the LGBTQ nomenclature often symbolizes supporting same-sex sexual relationships. Wheaton College adheres to Scripture’s prohibition of such relationships as well as Scripture’s teaching about loving one’s neighbor."

For groups like OneWheaton, such comments make clear why many LGBTQ students feel trapped in a hostile environment—and why the work of an alumni network is so crucial, providing everything from literature, monetary resources, and community to helping students in same-sex relationships find off-campus housing. For these students, such organizing campaigns can be integral to survival.

‘Running interference’

ALUMNI GROUPS LIKE OneWheaton have emerged across the country at Christian schools in response to ongoing campus-based activism for LGBTQ rights. In January 2022, the University of Notre Dame Alumni Association launched an official LGBTQ alumni group, the Alumni Rainbow Community of Notre Dame (ARC ND). Institutionally backed, ARC ND replaced an unofficial group formed in the mid-’90s by LGBTQ alumni of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College. The chair of that informal group, Paul Burke, a 1998 graduate of Notre Dame, is the inaugural ARC ND chair.

But while alumni can, and do, play an important role in running interference between marginalized students and universities, most don’t have the power to change school policies, which often take the shape of what they call a “biblical” approach to human sexuality, either condemning LGBTQ relationships or erasing LGBTQ people altogether.

As LGBTQ people have demanded and acquired new forms of acceptance, both in the broader culture and within Christian spaces, Christian colleges have a clear financial incentive to continue enrolling these students. Some colleges have made vague verbal nods toward inclusion, without meaningful changes to policies or statements on human sexuality. In response to even small concessions, conservative Christian groups have accused those universities of “surrender[ing] at least in part to this moral revolution,” as Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler put it on an episode of his podcast.

The past few years have seen a series of legal filings that seek to challenge universities’ lack of inclusion of all students, as well as federal Title IX investigations at some universities. These efforts grew out of decades of both underground and overt organizing from LGBTQ students, alumni, and faculty.

Holding schools accountable

WHILE CAMPUS-BASED organizing and alumni activism continue, a class-action lawsuit filed by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP) on behalf of 40 students and recent alumni of Christian colleges seeks to hold schools accountable by challenging the constitutionality of religious exemptions to Title IX, the federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. According to REAP, more than 200 faith-based schools receive federal funding while claiming a faith-based exemption from Title IX from the U.S. Department of Education.

While Title IX regulations are outwardly clear, the sections on religious exemptions are murky, creating confusion and preventing students and staff from challenging actions taken by educational institutions. Toward the end of 2019, Joanna Maxon, later joined by another student, Nathan Brittsan, filed a Title IX sex discrimination claim after they were dismissed from Fuller Theological Seminary in California for being in violation of the seminary’s sexual standards policy, which says that a “sexual union must be reserved for marriage, which is the covenant union between one man and one woman.”

According to a report by Christianity Today, Maxon had finished three years of online coursework at the time of her dismissal. The school had noticed her wife’s name on Maxon’s tax returns. The district court ultimately ruled that the seminary’s actions fell within its religious exemption from Title IX. Maxon and Brittsan appealed, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the earlier decision, citing that while Title IX does not clearly define what it means to be controlled by a religious organization, the religiously identified board of trustees at Fuller was enough to warrant the seminary’s exemption from regulation.

REAP has challenged whether the religious exemption clauses of Title IX are constitutional. The Department of Education has found merit in REAP’s legal pursuit and has since opened Title IX investigations at Clarks Summit University, Lincoln Christian University, and Brigham Young University; the latter case was dismissed in February 2022. In a January statement on the Lincoln Christian complaint, REAP director Paul Carols Southwick said, “We are glad to see the Office for Civil Rights take this important step in protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ students at taxpayer-funded religious colleges.”

Southwick, who graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 2009, was inspired to launch REAP by OneWheaton’s work. In the early 2000s, Southwick attended George Fox University in Oregon, a conservative Christian school with Quaker roots, where he was pushed into conversion therapy. “I remember coming back [from law school] feeling like, ‘Well, I’m a lawyer now, and I’m going to hold you accountable,’” Southwick told Sojourners. “But I didn’t know what the heck I was doing.” That was when he learned about OneWheaton.

Southwick said that broader societal progress casts the ongoing discrimination on campuses in sharp contrast. “Students come out, they’re happy, they say things are going well,” Southwick said. “Then they start dating someone or they want to start using a different pronoun. Then they get told no. And then they find out that what they thought was going to be an okay experience quickly turns into a very scary environment for them, where nobody helps them. They go to their Title IX office and the Title IX coordinators are the same people who are enforcing the honor code.”

When LGBTQ students have these experiences, it disrupts what Southwick calls “a false sense of security” that the rest of society has instilled in them before they reach campus. “For a lot of these young people, they think they can come out now in these spaces,” Southwick said. “Then when they do, they quickly learn that it’s still largely cis, straight, white men who run the boards of directors and are the major donors and really wield the true power at these institutions.”

‘Queer resistance’

I ATTENDED A Jesuit university that, at best, permitted LGBTQ people to exist on campus. The battles over using queer-friendly language—for instance, over even including the word “queer” on campus event fliers—had mostly run their course by the time I arrived on campus in 2013; our primary struggles were over gender-inclusive bathrooms and housing for transgender and nonbinary students.

We often joked about the unintentionally queer-affirming steps the university took in an effort to institutionalize heteronormativity. For instance, all housing was gender-segregated, and it was against the rules to sign in an opposite-sex guest to stay in the dorms unless they were a relative. As a result, queer students could sign in their same-sex partners with relative ease. But for me, the real intention behind the policy—to coercively control trans and queer identities on campus—came to light when an alum, a trans woman, was blocked from being signed into the dorms by a student because her ID and gender presentation didn’t match.

Similar anecdotes from multiple Christian colleges raised serious concerns for me, now years removed from campus restrictions. For instance, OneWheaton’s Bagley talked about hearing of students who were confronted by school administrators over their online browsing history. And students have shared openly with the media about harassment and bullying from other students going unpunished, social media surveillance by administrators, and being questioned about their dating history as a requirement of being allowed to graduate.

According to a survey commissioned by REAP and carried out by College Pulse, at least one in 10 students at Christian colleges identify as LGBTQ; including those who express any level of same-sex attraction, the number becomes 30 percent. Students who identified as a gender minority at Christian colleges were 17 times more likely to say they feel their sexual or gender identity “prevented them from feeling accepted” on their campus.

There are, however, Christian universities taking steps to live up to LGBTQ-inclusive values. In 2021, the Campus Pride Index, which evaluates how LGBTQ-friendly campuses are, recognized 10 religious schools for their inclusivity. Lutheran-affiliated Augsburg University, Quaker-identified Guilford College, and Virginia Wesleyan University, which has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church, all received top marks.

But at many campuses across the country, progress has been slow. For instance, the board of trustees at Free Methodist-affiliated Seattle Pacific University refused to change a university policy that bars LGBTQ faculty from full-time employment. Faculty members issued a vote of no confidence in response. Adjunct nursing professor Jéaux Rinedahl filed a discrimination suit against SPU in January 2021 after his application for a full-time position was denied, he said, because of his sexuality. Students and faculty are also advocating for the university to change its statement on human sexuality, which “affirm[s] that sexual experience is intended between a man and a woman.”

At Baylor University, efforts by LGBTQ students to form a recognized club have for years been rejected; the administration is now considering permitting the club in an effort to build a “caring community”—while making clear they still oppose same-sex marriage and expect students not to join “advocacy groups” around LGBTQ rights. “Are we advocating for something by existing?” senior Brit LaVergne, president of Baylor’s unofficial LGBTQ student group, said to the Texas Tribune last summer.

“So many students come in much more confident about their queer identities than students 10 years ago,” Bagley told Sojourners. He credits this change to the long-term work of LGBTQ people to foster inclusive spaces. But, he cautions, this queer resistance is taking place in a deeply unsafe context. “It’s tough to live as a queer student or as an ally or as a queer staff person on that campus when so much of the institution and the stakeholders are dedicated to making sure that your point of view, points of view that are healthy for people like you and that help folks flourish, are actively combated,” Bagley said.

REAP legal fellow Joe Baxter, who attended Brigham Young University-Idaho as an undergraduate, resists the idea that these students should just choose to go somewhere else for school. “This is your community. This is who you grew up with,” Baxter told Sojourners. “There is a lot of victim-blaming going on, saying, ‘Why are you here?’ And we want to reiterate that the students belong here. They deserve to be equal members of those communities.”