Bowdoin College, Cal State Now Say: "Discrimination for Christian Groups to Require Christian Leaders"

Posted: 2014-07-20

<<<<

7-7-14 The Report Card

(Editor: www.thereportcard.org When does political correctness morph into political repression and Orwellian doublespeak? Why, at colleges that say the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship discriminates by requiring Christian leaders. Insane? Yes, of course, unless you are a member of the world of academe where such nonsense is routine. That is sort of like saying it’s discrimination to require captain of a football team to play football. In this case, the target seems to be Christian groups. But if fully enforced, no group would be able to set the standards of leadership without being accused of discrimination. Naturally, what happens at our universities will trickle down to K-12 eventually)

Students have found themselves on the forefront of the religious freedom fight.  Bowdoin College in Maine will no longer be recognizingthe Bowdoin Christian Fellowship as a student group on campus any longer, even though they have been a fixture on campus for over 40 years. Why? Because the Christian group won’t allow anyone who isn’t a professed Christian to run for student leadership of the group or lead a Bible study. The university says that even though anyone can join the group, it is discriminatory that they aren’t allowing non-Christians to lead the group.

This is only the beginning of a disturbing trend. The New York Times has more:

At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders. And at Vanderbilt, more than a dozen groups, most of them evangelical but one of them Catholic, have already lost their official standing over the same issue; one Christian group balked after a university official asked the students to cut the words “personal commitment to Jesus Christ” from their list of qualifications for leadership.

“It would compromise our ability to be who we are as Christians if we can’t hold our leaders to some sort of doctrinal standard,” said Zackary Suhr, 23, who has just graduated from Bowdoin, where he was a leader of the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship.

The consequences for evangelical groups that refuse to agree to the nondiscrimination policies, and therefore lose their official standing, vary by campus. The students can still meet informally on campus, but in most cases their groups lose access to student activity fee money as well as first claim to low-cost or free university spaces for meetings and worship; they also lose access to standard on-campus recruiting tools, such as activities fairs and bulletin boards, and may lose the right to use the universities’ names.

“It’s absurd,” said Alec Hill, the president of InterVarsity, a national association of evangelical student groups, including the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship. “The genius of American culture is that we allow voluntary, self-identified organizations to form, and that’s what our student groups are.”

http://education-curriculum-reform-government-schools.org/w/2014/07/bowdoin-college-cal-state-now-say-discrimination-for-christian-groups-to-require-christian-leaders/

Share this article on:

Facebook

Google+

Twitter

Enter comments below:

Your Email:

Validation Code from Graphic:

(Comments subject to review before being published.)