Homosexuality At Christian University
The
morning interviews at the Christian university went fine, as did the lunch with
the students, although
only one of them sounded Christian. After lunch, the young man
giving me a tour of the campus pointed to a door in the distance and said,
"And there's our
transgender bathroom." When I asked how long the school has had it, he beamed with pride
and replied that it had just been installed.
I asked the interviewers of my first afternoon session, "If the students ask me about homosexuality, do I have the right to show them what the Bible says?" All three interviewers seemed taken aback by the question and one of them answered, "That would not be good." The last interviewer of the day, the provost of the university who had been its pastor for two decades prior to his 'promotion,' seemed like a better bet, so I repeated to him the question about homosexuality. He frowned and replied, "No, you don't have the right to tell the students your interpretation of what the Bible says about it."
I returned from the interviews, told Kristin what had happened, that the only Christian I had met was a student, and that the provost had even twisted my question and was likely to reject me. I told her that I didn't want to teach anyways at a "Christian" university that has a transgender bathroom, and that if I took the job, it would be to take the Gospel into enemy territory. This was neither the Christian university nor the Christian environment that we had come for. She heard the news in silence and seemed disappointed.
The next day, the dean made me an offer. The salary was good, and he said I would be granted tenure after just three years. I was surprised by the offer and thanked him for it but didn't know how long I would last at a "Christian" university that told me not to tell the students what the Bible says about homosexuality, as I was going to tell them anyway. So I told him that I would accept the offer if it would be okay for me to teach a Bible study to the students as an unpaid extracurricular activity. The dean, who wasn't a Christian, seemed fine with my request and eager to move forward, and said that he would touch base and get back to me right away.
An hour later, he emailed me that the university rescinds its offer to me. I surmised that when the dean, who can run his department as he sees fit and therefore had sounded so confident about bringing me onboard, took my request to the provost, he had stepped in to kill the offer. I felt a burden lifting from my shoulders at the news, but sat back to absorb it. The first two universities in China had known that I was teaching the Bible to their students but had turned a blind eye. In this day and age, I could teach the Bible at Communist universities in China but not at a "Christian" university in America...
I revisited the website of the university and it clearly identified itself as a Christian university. So I emailed the leader of its small denomination, which has seven universities, shared what had happened, and informed him that he had lost control of one of them. He replied, thanked me for my email, sounded despondent, and shared that his denomination had in fact lost control of all seven universities.
Thinking that I had replied to an appointment announcement by an apostate denomination, I later applied to more conservative Christian universities, interviewed with two more, and posed the same question during both interviews: "If the students ask me about homosexuality, do I have the right to show them what the Bible says?"
The dean of one of them said no, and added, "Christian students just have a more open definition of gender today." When I asked him if that will be his response when he stands before Jesus and the Lord asks him why he didn't teach what the Bible says about gender and homosexuality to the young people placed in his care, the interview quickly ended.
When I posed the same question during the other interview, one of the interviewers began to laugh in a mocking manner, while his colleagues looked down, so I told them that people who remain silent about homosexuality or even condone it to earn a paycheck shouldn't be teaching at a Christian university, and then stopped applying to "Christian" universities in USA.