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Related: About this forumColleges and Evangelicals Collide on Bias Policy
BRUNSWICK, Me. For 40 years, evangelicals at Bowdoin College have gathered periodically to study the Bible together, to pray and to worship. They are a tiny minority on the liberal arts college campus, but they have been a part of the schools community, gathering in the chapel, the dining center, the dorms.
After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college. Already, the college has disabled the electronic key cards of the groups longtime volunteer advisers.
In a collision between religious freedom and anti-discrimination policies, the student group, and its advisers, have refused to agree to the colleges demand that any student, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, should be able to run for election as a leader of any group, including the Christian association.
Similar conflicts are playing out on a handful of campuses around the country, driven by the universities desire to rid their campuses of bias, particularly against gay men and lesbians, but also, in the eyes of evangelicals, fueled by a discomfort in academia with conservative forms of Christianity. The universities have been emboldened to regulate religious groups by a Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that found it was constitutional for a public law school in California to deny recognition to a Christian student group that excluded gays.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/us/colleges-and-evangelicals-collide-on-bias-policy.html?hpw&rref=us
After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college. Already, the college has disabled the electronic key cards of the groups longtime volunteer advisers.
In a collision between religious freedom and anti-discrimination policies, the student group, and its advisers, have refused to agree to the colleges demand that any student, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, should be able to run for election as a leader of any group, including the Christian association.
Similar conflicts are playing out on a handful of campuses around the country, driven by the universities desire to rid their campuses of bias, particularly against gay men and lesbians, but also, in the eyes of evangelicals, fueled by a discomfort in academia with conservative forms of Christianity. The universities have been emboldened to regulate religious groups by a Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that found it was constitutional for a public law school in California to deny recognition to a Christian student group that excluded gays.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/us/colleges-and-evangelicals-collide-on-bias-policy.html?hpw&rref=us
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Colleges and Evangelicals Collide on Bias Policy (Original Post)
SecularMotion
Jun 2014
OP
pinto
(106,886 posts)1. I have mixed feeling about Bowdoin's call, unless the group was proselytizing in conversion mode.
Strongly support the SCOTUS decision in the CA case - that was a clear cut case of discrimination at a public university, imo.
Overall, I feel one approach to religion and education would be "comparative religion" courses. Objective, informed and neutral in POV.
Act_of_Reparation
(9,116 posts)2. Bowdoin is a private school.
The Christian Fellowship doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. They are guests of the college, and the college is well within its rights to ask them to leave.
Bowdoin is too beautiful a place to host such vitriolic garbage.