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Conservative colleges visited by gay Christians
Response differs strongly as group buses across nation
A bus full of gay Christians and their supporters has traveled across the country the past month, visiting Christian colleges normally hostile to people like them and getting arrested for trespassing.
But in Southern California this week, the gay and lesbian Christians are drawing a much different response: An official welcome.
“We’re at a place where we really want to learn from these students,” said John W. Back, dean of students at Biola University in La Mirada (Orange County), which prepared for Tuesday’s visit for several months. The school might have had a different response three years ago, he said, but now “we’re praying for other institutions that they be at a place where they’re able to do this.”
Administrators at Azusa Pacific University, where the bus stops today, have planned a wide range of meetings between those on the bus and student leaders and top university officials.
“We thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to allow for interaction and conversation for folks who share different viewpoints,” said Maureen Taylor, spokeswoman for Azusa Pacific.
Officials at both schools said this openness does not signal that they are changing their beliefs on homosexuality, but that conservative churches are shifting how they respond to gay and lesbian people.
“We’ve realized we have some things to learn,” Back said.
The tour, sponsored by a gay religious activist organization called Soulforce, began last month at Liberty University, the school the Rev. Jerry Falwell founded in Lynchburg, Va. There, 20 members of the “Equality Ride” were arrested for trespassing after stepping onto the private campus. A few days later, six others were arrested at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va.
And at Lee University in Cleveland, Tenn., someone graffitied the bus with “Fags-Mobile.” Students from the university scrubbed off the graffiti the next day. Since then, the 32 travelers, about half of them Christians, have crossed Oklahoma — the site of more arrests — and Texas, and they plan eight more stops before ending the tour in New York later this month.
Organizer Jacob Reitan, a 23-year-old from Minnesota, said he wanted to start conversations on the issue at places where there are few, if any, gay and lesbian voices.
“We really see these schools as abusing the sanctity of religion by using faith to discriminate,” Reitan said. He selected the 20 colleges and universities on the tour because they have antigay policies ranging from prohibitions on sexual relations between people of the same sex (as well as by unmarried heterosexuals) to bars on any show of support for gay or lesbian rights.
At the schools, tour participants hand out literature, talk to students, hold forums and sing. Although reaction has been mixed, Reitan said, most of the students on the campuses are surprised by the “discrimination gay and lesbian people in this country face in housing and employment.”
The tour and the schools’ responses are signs of an emerging trend in conservative Christianity to engage rather than shun, said Josh Matlock, who is the minister for college students at the 2,000-member Calvary Church of Santa Ana (Orange County).
Matlock held a series of events last year, called “Confessions of a Sinful Church,” where the church publicly apologized for Christianity’s past dealings with gays, its early views of slavery and its recent views of science.
“There’s a willingness to say we’ve burnt some bridges and not shown the love of Christ,” Matlock said. “It’s a new thing happening more and more in the church.”
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