Christian colleges shamed by discrimination disclosures

Over 200 Christian colleges, and growing, have claimed a Title IX exemption in order to discriminate against transgendered students. But, according to the Christian Post, that’s not the story. The story is that the Department of Education is publishing a list of the schools that have done so, at the behest of those mean old human rights activists, in order to bully and embarrass those poor helpless Christians once again.

LGBT activist groups have been calling on the government to publish the list as part of a shaming campaign called the “Shame List” to pressure Christian colleges to consent to their agenda…

The article goes on to quote Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) saying, “the Department of Education has been bullying schools to comply with policies that simply do not have the force of law.”

But here’s the thing: why don’t Christian colleges want people to know they’re using taxpayer money to fund discrimination against transgendered people, as an expression of their religious belief? If they’re doing God’s will, and if God’s will is supposed to be a good thing, why are they upset that their counter-cultural witness is getting free publicity from the government?

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The name is not the problem

When I was young there were still a fair number of fundamentalist Christian churches around, and by that I mean churches that were proud to be fundamentalist and often even used the term “fundamentalist” as part of the name of their church. To them, fundamentalist meant they had abandoned the accumulated centuries of man-made traditions, and gotten back to the fundamentals of the faith. They had separated the wheat from the chaff, the gold from the ore, the essentials from the distractions. And they were proud of it.

As time went on, though, these groups became famous for other things: narrow-mindedness, judgmentalism, dogmatism, and ignorance. The term “fundamentalist” started accumulating negative connotations, and being linked to stereotypical attitudes and behaviors. Believers grew reluctant to identify themselves as fundamentalists, and wanted to be known as evangelicals instead. Evangelicals, you see, were the ones who understood what was really important about the faith. They wanted to get away from all this divisiveness and denominationalism, and go back to what was truly important about the faith.

As a young believer, I was glad I was an evangelical rather than a fundamentalist. Fundamentalism was bad. Fundamentalists did bad things and had bad attitudes. But you know what? As time went on, I realized that the evangelicals were doing the same things and promoting the same attitudes. Narrow-mindedness. Judgmentalism. Dogmatism. And a really, really proud and defiant ignorance. They weren’t called fundamentalists any more, but they were still doing the same behaviors and preaching the same attitudes, and thus acquiring the same stigma.

What I learned from that experience is that, in the long term, changing the name does no good if the underlying attitudes and behaviors don’t change with it. It happened with fundamentalism and with evangelicalism, and now it’s happening with plain old bigotry.

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