Maybe President Lindsay feels better knowing that only high pressure can create diamonds. Because the leader of evangelical Gordon College is feeling intense pressure from two sides right now. On one hand, the school’s accrediting agency has threatened to take away its accreditation if Gordon does not revise its policy on homosexuality. On the other, the school’s conservative supporters insist the policy must stay in place. If history is any guide, it appears one group might make the crucial difference in this case.
Are all welcome? MUST all be welcome?
This Gordon-ian knot is one that all conservative evangelical colleges have tried to pick apart. Schools such as these are in a pickle: they need to remain intellectually respectable and financially viable, yet a decision either way threatens both intellectual consistency and the bottom line.
As I’m finding as I research my new book, similar schools have had a difficult time walking this line. In the 1930s, for example, Wheaton College leaders moved fast to bring Wheaton up to accreditors’ standards. As historian Michael Hamilton argued, the president at the time, Oliver Buswell, viewed accreditation as more than just a piece of paper. To Buswell, accreditation was the “one of the best ways to earn intellectual respect for fundamentalist Christianity.”
But college leaders such as Buswell were also under intense pressure to maintain both the appearance and the reality of theological steadfastness. Leaders needed to maintain the confidence of the evangelical community that their schools were not slipping into secularism. In 1929, for instance, Buswell withdrew from publication a controversial book he had written. Why? As he explained to a colleague, above all Buswell felt the need to keep “the confidence of fundamentalist leaders . . . in the administration of Wheaton College.”
Losing either accreditation or the respect of the “fundamentalist” community could mean a wasting death for an evangelical college. And the two have often pushed in opposite directions.
WWBD?
Much has changed since then, but President Lindsay at Gordon College finds himself coming under similar pressure from both sides. [Full disclosure: I worked with Michael Lindsay in the Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellows program. I consider him a friend and colleague.]
For those who are just joining us, this story began back in July, when President Lindsay signed an open letter to President Obama about religious exemptions to an anti-discrimination law. Now, the question has become whether Gordon’s Statement on Life and Conduct violates the rules of its accrediting agency.
At issue is the Gordon ban on “homosexual practice.” The New England Association of Schools and Colleges has collaborated with Gordon in setting up a “discernment” group to examine the policy. (As an aside, we could ask why only this part of the policy has come under investigation. After all, the Gordon policy also bans “blasphemy” and “profanity,” not to mention heterosexual sex outside of marriage. Doesn’t this impinge upon the free speech rights of potential students?)
For a host of reasons, the accrediting agency doesn’t care about blasphemy. But it is threatening to withdraw accreditation over the ban on “homosexual practice.” For Gordon College, loss of accreditation would have serious consequences. Its graduates would not necessarily be considered qualified for graduate school. Nor could they receive student loans backed by the federal government. Perhaps most important, though, loss of accreditation would be a symbolic slap in the face. Gordon would face the challenge of proving its continued intellectual respectability.
But that is not the only pressure facing Gordon right now. Just as President Buswell at Wheaton worried about both mainstream intellectual respectability and credibility within the world of conservative evangelicalism, so President Lindsay faces a double-sided threat.
Beyond accreditation pressure, Lindsay must consider the opinions of the far-flung community of conservative evangelicals. As one conservative pundit wrote recently in the pages of the Christian Post,
To Michael Lindsay, the gifted president of Gordon, and to the board of trustees, I remind you: Many eyes are watching you, knowing that the decisions you make could either strengthen or dishearten many other schools that will soon be put under similar pressure.
As this conservative writer worried, Gordon might be willing to “sell its soul” to maintain accreditation. If it did, conservative students and parents might take their tuition dollars elsewhere. But if it doesn’t it might lose accreditation. Without that sort of mainstream credibility, students and parents might take their tuition dollars elsewhere.
So what is a conservative school leader to do? How can President Lindsay balance the pressure to reform with the pressure to hold fast to the faith once delivered to the saints?
In this case, there is a new wrinkle. Traditionally, alumni are one of the groups most likely to push school leaders to maintain conservative positions. Today, though, some Gordon alumni are hoping to convince Gordon to change its ways. A group of two dozen alums have published a letter encouraging Lindsay to remove any hint of anti-gay discrimination from Gordon’s policies.
In the past alumni have been one of the most vocal groups fighting any change at evangelical colleges. Conservative evangelical colleges have long been keenly aware of the pressures to modernize and secularize. Traditionally, alumni of these schools have been staunch foes of any perceived change, since any change could lead to an utter loss of the school’s steadfast character. Historian Michael Hamilton described this alumni attitude this way:
colleges, more than any other type of institution, are highly susceptible to change, and that change can only move in one direction—from orthodoxy toward apostasy. . . . The very process of change, no matter how slow and benign it may seem at first, will always move the college in a secular direction, inevitably gathering momentum and becoming unstoppable, ending only when secularization is complete.
In Gordon’s case, however, alumni—at least some of them—are pushing in the other direction. It is impossible to predict what will happen at Gordon. The board of trustees may decide this policy needs updating. Or they may not. And President Lindsay might decide that this language is a central part of the school’s evangelical character. Or he may not.
This case highlights the double pressure faced by conservative evangelical colleges. In a sense, they must serve two masters: the pressure to maintain a vague and shifting “respectability” with mainstream institutions; and the pressure to remain bastions of orthodoxy in a world hurtling headlong into secular mayhem.
I Love You but You're Going to Hell 
galacticexplorer
/ October 7, 2014It is an unfortunate pickle for evangelicals to find themselves in, but I cannot feel too much pity. It is a problem of their own making; the result of decades of discrimination and bigotry. They are now suffering because their bigotry is no longer socially acceptable. But what about the people who were wronged by the culture of exclusion and discrimination that evangelicals upheld for so many years? No tears are shed for them.
It’s a shame that conservatives are so unwilling to evolve their views, but these changes must happen.
Agellius
/ October 7, 2014I wonder why they don’t just remove the reference to homosexuality and simply say that all pre- or extra-marital sex is prohibited.
Adam Laats
/ October 7, 2014This is something I’ve wondered about, too. Why not just ban non-marital sex? I have a couple of hunches. First, that would only kick the can further down the road, since the conversation would then shift to the school’s (I’m assuming here) policy against homosexual marriage. Second, and this is more interesting to me, I’m guessing that ANY change in the wording of the student statement in these conditions will be seen by conservative watchdogs as truckling to “worldly” demands.
Douglas E
/ October 7, 2014This reminds me of an interesting episode a few years ago at Pepperdine University. The U had all of the ducks in a row to apply for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa – enough faculty members, etc. At the site visit, the team apparently focused on the school’s policy of not officially recognizing [ie monetarily supporting] any LGBT…groups on campus. The application was ultimately unsuccessful, but I am unclear as to where it currently stands. Will try to find out when we visit later this month.
Agellius
/ October 7, 2014That’s a good point. With gay marriage legal in Mass., a married gay couple could claim that sex within their marriage complies with the policy.
Anyway, the fact is that I don’t know all the facts so there’s no point in my speculating.
I will say that if Gordon College is refused accreditation on the ground that it forbids students to violate Christian moral teaching, then Christians are officially being persecuted. However I’m hopeful that that’s not really what’s happening.
Karl Giberson
/ October 9, 2014The problem is the ambiguity of “Christian Moral Teaching.” Christians are not of one mind on this and many evangelicals have no theological issues with gay marriage. If “belief in God” were forbidden then you can say “Christians are being persecuted.” But this is a case where the conservative end of the spectrum wants to claim orthodoxy. More liberal evangelicals want their conservative brothers and sisters to move forward on such questions. The reason Gordon is in chaos on this now is because the alumni, present student body, and many faculty are way ahead of the trustees and president on gay marriage. The outcry is that Lindsay’s actions have put an uncomfortably conservative face on an institution that thought of itself as more progressive.
Agellius
/ October 9, 2014Karl:
I like the way you assume that people who favor gay marriage are “ahead” of those who don’t. Inevitable March of Progress, what? : )
It’s true that more liberal Christians have no problem with gay marriage, and more conservative ones don’t. But this should tell you something: That favoring gay marriage is a new phenomenon, and not the traditional Christian teaching. By the nature of conservatism and liberalism, if it were the traditional Christian teaching, then conservatives would be in favor of it and liberals opposed.
Again, this idea that we can’t be sure what the Christian teaching is on this issue, because there are numbers of people on both sides, assumes that “official” Christian teaching is determined by counting heads. In any case, the Supreme Court has already held that it’s not the government’s business to decide what is orthodoxy and what isn’t. Gordon College, as a Christian institution, has the right to make its own determination as to what it considers authentic Christian teaching.
At the very least, it has to be admitted that traditional Christian teaching considers homosexual sex to be immoral. If Gordon comes down on that side of the issue, they can’t be accused of bending Christian teachings, or inventing new ones ad hoc, to gratify their preferences and prejudices, since these teachings existed long before they were born. The liberal Christians, on the other hand …
Karl Giberson
/ October 10, 2014No argument here. I note only that conservative evangelicals had to be convinced that it was OK for divorced people to remarry (unbiblical), and then forced by social and legal pressure to accept interracial marriage. If the Christian Tradition was an unambiguous repository of stellar moral insights I would value it more highly. The “traditional” view that gay marriage is wrong, like the “traditional” view that the earth was fixed, was based on wrong science. Homosexuality is not a choice and any moral position based on that belief needs to be re-examined.
Douglas E
/ October 10, 2014Agreed Karl. 50 years ago in the Mennonite Church, the heated debate was whether or not a divorced person could even be a member – now the church has pastors who are divorced and remarried. The heated discussion now is whether or not to ordain an openly gay pastor. This too shall pass.
Agellius
/ October 10, 2014Karl:
I won’t defend evangelicals on divorce since I’m a Catholic. Their allowance of divorce and contraception undermines the arguments against gay marriage, since those things gut the true nature of marriage as traditionally understood, instead making it into something temporary and not primarily involving procreation.
You write, “Homosexuality is not a choice and any moral position based on that belief needs to be re-examined.”
To clarify: The Christian position against sodomy is not based on homosexuality being a choice, but on sodomy being a choice.
Douglas E
/ October 10, 2014So Agellius, the true nature of marriage is primarily about procreation? Does this mean that all of those married couples who simply cannot procreate for whatever reasons have lost the primary reason for being married, and thus are in a secondary, and by inference, an inferior marriage?
Agellius
/ October 10, 2014Douglas:
Has this now become a gay marriage debate thread? : )
“Primary” modifies the word “purpose”, not the word “marriage”. “Procreation is marriage’s primary purpose” doesn’t translate to “marriages in which people can procreate are primary marriages and all others are secondary.”
Douglas E
/ October 10, 2014Got it.