The fracturing continues. Recently The Master’s College in California announced its departure from the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities. The reason? The organization, according to TMC, had veered too far away from real evangelical Christianity. To this reporter, it looks like the handwriting is on the wall for the CCCU.

Quitsville, meet Splitsville

It wasn’t hard to see it coming. As we noted in these pages, the US Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges made it clear for all with eyes to see and ears to hear that changes were coming soon. It’s not an easy position. Conservative evangelical colleges have been put in an impossible situation, a “do you still beat your dog” dilemma.

On the one hand, colleges such as Goshen College and Eastern Mennonite University have decided that real Christianity requires a changing of rules about homosexuality. They decided to welcome homosexual faculty members. In order to save the CCCU from rancorous disputes about the issue, both schools eventually withdrew.

On the other hand, school leaders worry that they will be giving in to social pressure–betraying their religious principles–if they change their policies about homosexuality. In the eyes of some school leaders, the CCCU didn’t act quickly enough to expel Goshen and EMU. As the drama unfolded last summer, Union University and Oklahoma Wesleyan University both quit, dismayed that the CCCU would even consider including Goshen and EMU.

Now The Master’s College has decided that it will no longer be part of the CCCU, even though Goshen and EMU have left the organization. In its recent announcement, TMC explained that the recent controversy proved that the CCCU had gone soft on core issues of creation and sexuality. As TMC put it,

We have increasing concerns about the direction of the CCCU, given that the vast majority of member schools do not accept the Genesis account of creation or the inerrancy of Scripture.

Two former CCCU schools have demonstrated that opinions are also shifting away from the Bible’s teaching on marriage and sexuality. There are likely other member institutions that are not faithful to the biblical position. The CCCU’s willingness to offer affiliate status to these two schools and the affirmation of 75 percent of member college presidents, raises serious questions as to whether the organization still holds to biblical Christianity.

What is the future of the CCCU? We historians are famously bad predictors, but I will say it anyway: The CCCU is already dead, even if it doesn’t know it yet.

As I’m finding in the research for my new book about the history of evangelical higher education, evangelical colleges can survive most storms. But the current crisis is one that is familiar throughout that history, and one that has wrecked earlier efforts at unity.

As has happened in the past, the current dilemma gives evangelical college leaders questions they will not be able to agree on: Is your school for bigots? Or is it for apostates?