Religious Freedom Under Fire at Bowdoin College
The school won’t recognize an evangelical student group and even smeared the group’s unpaid advisers.
John Leo of Minding The Campus reports.
Bowdoin: Is Religious Freedom Discriminatory?
Last Monday, Bowdoin College made page one of the New York Times with its decision to de-recognize an evangelical student group for refusing to sign an anti-discrimination pledge. This meant the group could not use the chapel, the multicultural center, any room at Bowdoin, or even campus bulletin boards. The pledge said all campus groups and their leadership positions must be open to all students. The group said it would accept non-believers as members, but not as leaders, because leaders are the custodians of doctrine, so religious freedom is at stake.
Bowdoin managed to change its mind twice during the week, rebutting the Times story on Tuesday, (“Religious freedom and spirituality are alive and thriving at Bowdoin. Contrary to the Times article, the College continues to recognize the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship (BCF) and has no plans to drop that recognition after this summer. ”) then switching again on Friday to acknowledge that the Times had been right, saying that the BCF is “discriminating and that is a violation of our policy, …so they would lose their recognition.”
Bowdoin in effect fired the longtime unpaid advisers to the student group, Robert Gregory and his wife Sim, disabling their keycards. Bowdoin added a nasty slur to Gregory as a departing gift. According to the Bowdoin Orient, Tim Foster, dean of student affairs, said the initiative for the pledges grew partially as a reaction to the Penn State scandal in 2011 in which assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted of child molestation. “One of the things we realized,” Foster told the Orient, “is that we have people on our campus working with students, spending a significant amount of time with students, and we don’t know a lot about a lot of these people.” But the Gregorys have worked with the group for almost a decade, and their dedication and helpfulness is not in dispute.
Comments
It must be atheists making a stupid “anti-discriminatory” rule like this which, ironically, discriminates against the right of religious groups to select their leaders in accordance with their faith.
There is but one reason a non-believer or atheist or agnostic would want to “join” a Christian Student Group: To participate in its destruction.