How Woke Interlopers Are Transforming Christian Higher Education

In March 2019, I received a text from a friend who’s a faculty member at Azusa Pacific University, a conservative, Christian college in a suburb of Los Angeles. She wanted to know if I’d seen the Christianity Today report that her institution, founded in 1899 with the motto “God First,” had updated its student handbook to allow “romanticized relationships” between students of the same sex.

About a year later, I heard from another Azusa friend that the administration had sent out a school-wide notice to teachers asking them to make a “commitment to read, watch, or listen” to resources on “Allyship and Anti-racism.” The recommendations read like an enthusiastic endorsement of Critical Race Theory (CRT), including everything from Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” to the New York Times’ “1619 Project” to Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be Anti-Racist.”

As Rod Dreher noted at the time in The American Conservative, “If this were a list at a secular university, it would still be startlingly unbalanced.”

Azusa is hardly the only private, Christian institution bowing to the prevailing winds of left-wing culture. The Baptist university Baylor in Waco, Texas, too, has changed its policies. While the administration insists it remains committed to biblical sexual ethics, in June, the board of regents nevertheless opened the door to officially recognizing an LGBT student group.

Last year, Baylor President Linda Livingstone issued a letter commending “5 Tips to Cultivate Cultural Humility and Antiracism” from the school’s diversity initiative chair, a woman who has argued that societal efforts to become less racist must never end. If one were setting out to create a parody of CRT propaganda, her suggestions wouldn’t look much different, linking to a list of “white supremacist” characteristics that include individualism, logical thinking, and, for some inexplicable reason, memo writing.

Not to be outdone, Billy Graham’s alma mater, the Evangelical Wheaton, held a “Racialized Minority Recognition Ceremony” for students of color during graduation week this past spring. It also removed a nearly 70-year-old plaque honoring one of its most famous sons, Jim Elliot, a 1950s missionary who was martyred while witnessing to an Ecuadorean tribe, because the inscription described his murderers as “savage.”

Even the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University, widely viewed by progressives as the most belligerently right-wing of religious higher ed, has launched a department christened with those ubiquitous corporate buzzwords that cover a multitude of agendas — Equity and Inclusion.

It was with this background in mind that parents, students, and alumni at Grove City College became so alarmed last year when they begin to see what they describe as evidence of Critical Race Theory and LGBT activism creeping into their conservative Christian institution.

It Started With a Petition

Outside of perhaps, Hillsdale, to which it is often compared, if there was one college in the country that might have seemed immune to wokeness, it was Grove City. The school is famous for refusing to accept any form of federal funding — a policy born of fierce independence that has allowed it to escape the fate of so many other religious schools that wriggle under the rainbow thumb of ever-shifting discrimination regulations. In fact, it was after Grove City College (GCC) won a 1984 Supreme Court case regarding Title IX law that requires government-funded schools to treat gender, sexual orientation, nationality, etc. as protected classes, that Hillsdale, too, decided to shake off Uncle Sam’s purse strings.

Even more iconoclastic, GCC declines to offer tenure to faculty, not even to revered conservative intellectuals like Reagan biographer Paul Kengor or best-selling historian Carl Trueman.

And yet, parent Scott Klusendorf tells me that the same tactics used to smuggle left-wing ideology into other Christian institutions have recently been at work at Grove City. That was why he and a group of fellow parents, alumni, and students launched a petition in November to ask the school’s administration to “save GCC from CRT.”

“Many of us first wrote to [GCC President Paul] McNulty privately about our concerns and did not get a response,” shares Klusendorf. “That’s when we knew we were going to have to go public.”

Klusendorf, who is no stranger to dissecting and debating worldviews as the president of the Life Training Institute and author of “The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture,” says he and other parents first began to feel that an issue was developing in the Summer of 2020.

As riots sparked by the death of George Floyd decimated cities across the country, a group of Black Lives Matter activists demanded, among other things, that GCC institute “anti-racist-based bias trainings,” create a new “office of diversity and inclusion,” invite more black speakers to chapel to speak about minority issues, and establish education courses that “require anti-racist pedagogies.”

All of it was, of course, to be done under the auspices of the Gospel’s command to “love one another.”

Yet for all its references to the New