In November 2017, just months into his freshman year at Oral Roberts University, Andrew Hartzler was sitting in the school’s chapel, listening to the university president preach a sermon called “Holy Sex” and wondering if someone was trying to out him.
Attendance at the twice-weekly service was mandatory for students at the conservative evangelical college in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At this service, William M. Wilson invoked the biblical “Song of Solomon” to extol the thrills of married sex, enticing students to chase a “Ring By Spring,” a marriage engagement within their first year. Wilson then made a dark pivot to remind them that there was only one path to this happy ending. Under Levitical law, he intoned, “if a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable, they are put to death.”
Hartzler, who is gay, did not raise his hand, acutely aware that at ORU, being gay is an honor code offense punishable by expulsion.
At any other non-religious college, such a pledge would be a violation of a 1972 federal law that protects against sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funding. Since the mid-2010s, as courts and policymakers began interpreting “sex” in federal civil rights statutes to include gender identity and later, sexual orientation, these protections have expanded to LGBTQ students. But none of these protections exist for an estimated 100,000 LGBTQ students at over 200 religious colleges and universities that have taken advantage of the law’s expansive religious exemption. To qualify for the exemption, a religious college or university need only notify the Department of Education of how complying with the law’s nondiscrimination provisions would conflict with its religious tenets.
ORU wasn’t Andrew Hartzler’s first choice for college. But his father, who had raised him in a deeply conservative Christian environment, told him it was the only university he would pay for his son to attend. . . . During his time at ORU, Hartzler, now 23, assiduously concealed his sexual identity from school officials in order to avoid a punishment that would jeopardize his degree. In his junior year, he was summoned to a dean’s office after he was reported for having his boyfriend, who was not an ORU student, in his dorm room. Faced with the possibility of punishment and even expulsion from the university, Hartzler got an unexpected reprieve when Covid shut down the campus. He managed to avoid a series of “accountability meetings” with deans, move off campus and finish his degree in psychology remotely, graduating in May 2021.
Within three months of graduation, Hartzler joined a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Education, asking the court to strike down the religious exemption as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and of the students’ equal protection rights. The complaint, filed in federal court in Oregon in 2021, recounts vivid details from the initial 33 plaintiffs. One plaintiff alleges authorities at Bob Jones University combed her social media and disciplined her for refusing to disavow her support for LGBTQ rights. A gay man alleges that Union University rescinded his offer of admission after discovering he was engaged to a man; another, who felt called to ministry and enrolled at Fuller Seminary, was expelled after only a few days because he is married to a man. A common theme, according to the complaint, is how school authorities examine students’ social media posts for evidence of their sexual orientation or gender identity, or their support for LGBTQ rights.
Paul Southwick, director of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, which advocates for the rights of LGBTQ students at Christian colleges and universities, and counsel for the plaintiffs, says that even students who are not disciplined endure a culture of pervasive anxiety and fear. . . . “your identity is forbidden.”
The Title IX religious exemption ensures that, despite historic advances in LGBTQ rights over the past decade, religious colleges and universities are not required to change their policies in accordance with those new laws — all while receiving the benefits of taxpayer-subsidized funding.
The REAP lawsuit arrives at a moment when the religious right is experiencing a surge in political power. The movement is poised to claim a major victory in its decades-long fight against abortion, and Republican legislatures and governors across the country are passing anti-LGBTQ laws such as Florida’s hotly debated law dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by critics, banning LGBTQ books and criminalizing gender-affirming care for trans minors. But the lawsuit challenging the religious exemption represents a potential existential threat to a bedrock of the evangelical movement. Christian schools have trained the thinkers who have promoted and defended a legal strategy that dates back to the 1970s, when the early organizing of the modern religious right centered not on abortion but on shielding Christian K-12 schools and universities from requirements to comply with racial nondiscrimination policies. Christian schools lost the battle on race decades ago, but the core argument they use to perpetuate anti-LGBTQ policies is the same: For a secular government to require Christian educational institutions to comply with civil rights law is an unacceptable violation of their religious beliefs, regardless of the discriminatory impact on the students who attend them.
If the REAP lawsuit were to succeed, universities with the religious exemption could face the same consequences as secular schools for anti-LGBTQ discrimination. (In the meantime, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has opened six investigations into the discrimination claims of REAP clients at Christian colleges and universities.) If Christian schools refuse to comply with Title IX, it could force the government to choose between enforcing the law and ensuring that taxpayer dollars do not fund unlawful discrimination, or letting LGBTQ students’ rights go unprotected, lending implicit government support to a religious view that contravenes established public policy.
The original battleground for Christian schools was not abortion or gay rights. It was race. In 1976, when the Internal Revenue Service revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of the fundamentalist South Carolina school’s ban on interracial dating, it set off a firestorm that has defined the modern religious right.
The government, the school and its defenders argued, had no place interfering in the institution’s core biblical beliefs. Together with the IRS’s efforts to desegregate private Christian K-12 schools, by revoking the tax-exempt status of explicitly segregationist schools, and by proposing regulations to diversify others, the Bob Jones case — not abortion — was the key inflection point for the political advocacy and organizing of evangelicals into national politics and their enduring alliance with the Republican Party.
In 1983, after a protracted battle, the Supreme Court held the IRS could legally revoke the school’s tax exemption when its policies are “contrary to established public policy” — in that case, ending race discrimination in education. The logic of the Bob Jones decision was that taxpayers should not have to subsidize discrimination that the courts have determined is unlawful.
[W]ide majorities of Americans support nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. Recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 79 percent of Americans favor such protections, including even 61 percent of white evangelicals. But as public opinion supports legal expansion of LGBTQ rights, at evangelical organizations, particularly educational institutions, policies have gone in the opposite direction of law, policy and the broader culture.
Fundamental religion -be it Christian, Muslim, or something other - is a pervasive evil that needs to be erased.
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