The Hidden Life of a Christian-College Professor – The New Yorker
In October of 2015, I received one of those vaguely mysterious e-mails which journalists sometimes get. It came from an account under the name of “K. Lee,” generic enough to be un-Googleable. “I wasn’t sure to whom to send this message,” the note began. “I am gay and teach at a member institution of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.”
That got my attention. The council, known as the C.C.C.U., is America’s most prominent association of evangelical Protestant schools. A few weeks earlier, two schools had left the organization after announcing that they would start hiring married gay and lesbian faculty, an unacceptable theological position for most member institutions. If this e-mail was really from a gay faculty member at a C.C.C.U. school, the sender’s identity would likely need to remain a secret. Otherwise, he or she would probably be fired.
There wasn’t much more to the e-mail—a few links, a story suggestion. I replied with something quick and polite. During the next couple of years, I continued to receive short messages from K., usually about the latest news in Christian higher education. Slowly, I started to learn more about my correspondent. Her name was Kathy Lee. She taught political science at Whitworth University, a school with around twenty-seven hundred students in Spokane, Washington. Now I could look up her picture: she was in her late fifties, with short, silvery hair, and she wore rectangular glasses and a chunky, colorful scarf—the kind that baby-boomer liberal-arts professors love.
After a while, it became clear that Lee was thinking about coming out. She began looking into what legal protections she had. “I had a very good meeting with the attorneys in Seattle,” she wrote in September of 2017. “Mulling over their advice.” She was worried about losing her job. But she was also worried about putting Whitworth’s leaders on the defensive and making them feel like they had to double down on not hiring L.G.B.T.Q. faculty. Unlike some other Christian colleges, Whitworth didn’t make its faculty sign a statement of faith with clauses affirming that marriage is between one man and one woman. The status quo was something closer to “Don’t ask, don’t tell”: university administrators assumed that there were lesbian and gay faculty among their ranks, but they made a point not to inquire into their employees’ sex lives. That delicate balance might be disrupted if a professor came out, Lee thought. She mulled over the situation some more.
Two months later, Lee sent a letter to Beck Taylor, who was Whitworth’s president at the time. “For many years, I have not talked about my sexual identity and let people sometimes assume that I am straight,” she wrote. “I am not a profile in courage.” But she was finally coming out, Lee continued, because the lack of clarity about who is and isn’t welcome at Whitworth “grinds down” on her. “It sends the wrong and harmful message to our students and colleagues, a message inconsistent with our articulated values.”
Lee met with Taylor. “While he was gracious and kind,” she wrote in an e-mail to me later, “it is going to take longer for Whitworth to be a completely welcoming place than I thought.” Taylor assured her that she wasn’t going to be fired, but afterward she sat in her car and wrote down everything she could remember—that way, she and her lawyer would have a record. She felt dispirited. “The idea of ‘boring from within’ i.e., changing things from inside, may not be worth the toll for me emotionally,” she wrote.
That was all five years ago—the beginning of Lee’s long and winding process of coming out at Whitworth. Since then, similar stories have played out repeatedly on other Christian-college campuses. A group of students at Baylor University, in Texas, lobbied to get an L.G.B.T.Q. support group recognized. A gay professor at Milligan University, in Tennessee, was reportedly forced to resign. Just this month, protesters gathered at Calvin University, a school affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church, in Michigan, denouncing the Church’s decision to reaffirm traditional marriage.
I spoke with Christian-college professors who described these new standoffs as head-spinning; it seems like, even a decade ago, hardly anyone was talking about L.G.B.T.Q. rights on their campuses. Several people told me that they think some C.C.C.U. schools are shifting further to the right end of the political spectrum, polarized by the culture wars just like every other institution in American life. But Shirley Hoogstra, the president of the C.C.C.U., told me, “I don’t think the campuses are actually changing much.” It’s just that “everything that used to be implicit has to be made explicit.”
The theological vibe of Lee’s Christian upbringing was not hellfire and brimstone. “It was very quiet,” she said. “You acknowledge Jesus as your Lord and Saviour. And then you treated people well. It wasn’t complicated.” She grew up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, which is something of a Jerusalem for Reformed Presbyterians. The denomination controls Geneva College, a C.C.C.U. school in the area, where Lee’s grandfather was the president and her father was an economics professor. Lee spent every Sunday at one of the small town’s four Reformed Presbyterian churches, watching her mother direct the choir. The church’s members were split over whether it was O.K. to watch television on Sunday, but Lee’s family never missed a Steelers game. Her dad used to lecture Sunday-school classes on the virtues of not drinking or smoking, and his straitlaced attitude extended to all parts of life; he had a habit of flipping all the macaroni boxes upside down in the grocery store to reveal, through the cellophane windows on the front, how shoppers were getting ripped off.
After graduating from Wake Forest University, Lee went on to graduate school, for political science, at Johns Hopkins University. From the moment she arrived, she felt unsure of her place; it seemed like everyone was talking about books and thinkers she had never heard of. She gravitated toward the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a campus ministry group, because it was comfortable; the conversations and people felt familiar to those she’d encountered back in Beaver Falls. Lee formed a close relationship with one of the staffers there, a Chinese American woman who loved food and laughed easily. When the woman left for a position at another school, Lee realized it was more than a friendship. She had a crush.
Lee tried to put the crush out of her mind. But the issue seemed to chase her as she took her first assistant-professor job at Whitworth, in 1984. One day, a favorite student of hers, Jill Gill, came by during Lee’s office hours. Gill confided that, the previous summer, she had started a relationship with a fellow Whitworth student—another woman. At Whitworth, unmarried students weren’t supposed to be having sex, period; the idea of a sexual encounter between two women on campus was scandalous. “I crossed the precipice, and it felt fantastic,” Gill told her. Lee absorbed the confession quietly, neither challenging it nor affirming it.
Over the next few years, Lee cycled through teaching jobs at different Christian colleges. She was practically a poster child for the Christian higher education: in the early nineteen-nineties, while she was at Seattle Pacific University, a Free Methodist school, Lee wrote an advertorial in Christianity Today, explaining that “Creation, the Fall, and Redemption form a backdrop against which I teach political science” and that helping “students encounter God’s truth wherever it may be found” was her job. In 1993, she took a position at Eastern University, an American Baptist institution near Philadelphia, where she was asked to sign a statement of faith affirming basic tenets of Christian doctrine. The school would not hire openly gay faculty, but, by chance, Lee’s office was in a hallway with theatre and dance and English professors—a raucous, artsy crew that was very supportive of gay rights. Their conversations echoed the kind that freshmen tend to have in their dorm rooms at 1 A.M.; they discussed the nature of truth and how to interpret the Bible. Out of curiosity, Lee started reading the work of writers who argued that homosexuality could be compatible with Christianity. It was this community—her friends, these writers whom she admired—which helped her admit to herself that she was gay. She started a relationship—her first serious one with a woman. She was forty-five.
Over all, Lee wasn’t happy at Eastern, which was relatively traditional in its policies; she had hoped for more formal L.G.B.T.Q. acceptance. When a political-science job at Whitworth opened up, in 2011, Lee started asking friends who worked there whether it would be a welcoming place for a gay professor. One friend in the office of student affairs, Dayna Coleman Jones, had a son who recently graduated from the university; as a gay man, he’d had a terrible experience. Male students were afraid to shower in the same bathroom with him. A little group formed in his dorm to pray for his repentance. One evening, while he was riding his bike a few blocks off campus, a few people pulled up in a truck, called him a “fag,” and beat him until he lost consciousness. Coleman Jones had many tearful conversations with Bill Robinson, Whitworth’s president during those years. “He was very sympathetic. I don’t know if he knew what to do with the situation,” she told me. (Robinson declined to comment.)
Still, Coleman Jones told Lee that she was feeling optimistic about Whitworth’s future. The student body seemed to be growing more open and calling for more inclusion on campus. Other Christian colleges saw Whitworth as “out there” and progressive—there was talk that the school might potentially be the first in the C.C.C.U. to change its hiring policy to include openly L.G.B.T.Q. faculty and staff. Lee packed up and headed west to Spokane.
For many people, the term “evangelical university” probably calls to mind the famous training grounds of the old religious right—Liberty University, in Virginia, or maybe Bob Jones University, in South Carolina. These schools are not in the C.C.C.U.; most colleges in the organization have a lower profile, although some are just as theologically and politically conservative as Liberty. There’s also quite a bit of theological diversity in the C.C.C.U.; the two schools that left in 2015 over L.G.B.T.Q. hiring, Goshen College and Eastern Mennonite University, which are both Mennonite institutions, withdrew to avoid creating further division, out of a commitment to their Church’s peacemaking tradition. In the Christian-college firmament, Whitworth is on the academically rigorous end of the spectrum, ranked as one of the top regional schools in the Pacific Northwest by U.S. News & World Report. Whitworth is basically a liberal-arts school where students are expected to engage seriously with the life of Christ.
Whitworth is clearly worried about getting saddled with culture-war baggage. On its Web site, the school markets itself as “a different kind of evangelical university.” By “evangelical,” “we don’t mean the sociopolitically loaded term that can be identified with a certain voter bloc,” Forrest Buckner, the Whitworth campus pastor, says, in a promotional video on the school’s YouTube channel. “We mean the historical use of the term: the good news that Jesus Christ is Lord.” That throat-clearing might suggest anxiety about attacks from the left, but there are also indications that the school is watching its right flank. Despite its historic ties to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a mainline denomination that ordains L.G.B.T.Q. pastors and supports same-sex marriage, Whitworth loosened its ties to the denomination around the time that the P.C.U.S.A. was considering a more affirming stance toward L.G.B.T.Q. people, in the early twenty-tens.
Whitworth’s leaders often describe the school’s mission by using the metaphor of “the narrow ridge.” (Robinson, the former president, came up with this, riffing on a concept from the philosopher Martin Buber.) On one side of the ridge are secular institutions that don’t believe religious faith is a serious entry point for scholarly inquiry. On the other side are Christian schools that crack down on doctrine, making faculty and staff sign narrow statements of faith that don’t leave room for individual discernment. Whitworth tries to follow a path between those two extremes. But it’s no accident that this image evokes the tree-less exposure of a mountain’s ridgeline, where travellers feel vulnerable to attacks from all around.
For the most progressive C.C.C.U. schools, contending with L.G.B.T.Q. issues is a liability. No matter what these schools do, they’ll leave some part of their constituency feeling betrayed. One could argue that Whitworth’s decision to leave the L.G.B.T.Q. issue unsettled—never actively welcoming gay or trans faculty, staff, and students, but also never adopting a formal position on sexuality and gender—is a way of walking the narrow ridge, making sure that there’s space for Christians in the school’s community to disagree in good conscience. (The school’s current leadership refused to explain their perspective or approach on this subject; even after weeks of trying, I could not get them to respond to my requests for comment.)