Just before the beginning of the fall semester, officials from
Georgetown University’s Office of Campus Ministry met with
representatives of six evangelical parachurch organizations and
handed them a letter, informing them they were no longer welcome on
campus. “[Y]our ministries,” they were told, “will no longer be
allowed to hold any activity or presence (i.e. bible studies,
retreats with Georgetown students, Mid-week worship services,
fellowship events, move-in assistance, SAC Fair, etc.) on campus.
As well, there will be no Affiliated Ministry presence or
participation at our annual Campus Ministry Open House held at the
end of August.” What’s more, “Your ministries are not to publicize
in any literature, media, advertisement, etc. that Georgetown
University is or will be an active ministry site for your
ministry/church/denomination.” Henceforth chaplains employed by the
University will minister to the spiritual needs of the thousand or
so Georgetown students who self-identify as Protestants.
For evangelicals, Georgetown looks kind of like a domestic
version of China, with officially-recognized and monitored worship
services conducted by employees of the state church and “house
churches” operating secretively at the margins.
I exaggerate, of course. Nothing prevents students from praying
and studying Scripture together informally, on or off campus, and
they’re free to worship where they please. It’s just that they can
no longer do so under the auspices of groups — like the
Intervarsity Christian Fellowship — that had long been active on
campus.
The contrarian in me is actually tempted to defend the
University. After all, there are two kinds of religious freedom at
stake here. One is captured in the allusion to China: individuals
ought to be free to worship when and where and how they please.
Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Georgetown isn’t
really abridging that freedom.
The other is the freedom of a group or institution to cultivate
its religious identity without undue interference from the state.
By centralizing control over formal worship and religious activity
on campus, Georgetown could be said to be pursuing its religious
mission and promoting its religious vision. As a University
spokesman told reporters, this move came from “a desire in the
Protestant chaplaincy to build the ministry from within Georgetown
and its Protestant student leaders rather than rely on outside
groups or fellowships.” This would produce “a more consistent and
focused effort” for students.
Sounds great, but what exactly is Georgetown’s religious
identity and mission? According to its founder, Father John
Carroll, S.J., as the university conveys his views today:
The school was, in the emerging tradition of American
religious tolerance, to be open to “every class of citizens” and
students of “every religious profession.”
Carroll saw Georgetown as an academically rigorous Catholic
academy with a diverse student body. The vision of John Carroll
continues to be realized today in a distinctive educational
institution — a national University rooted in the Catholic faith
and Jesuit tradition, committed to spiritual inquiry, engaged in
the public sphere, and invigorated by religious and cultural
pluralism.
The Campus Ministry fulfills this mission by providing support to a
designedly religiously diverse student body. In particular,
Protestant Ministry provides a welcoming environment
for undergraduate, graduate, and other members of the university
community to grow in their faith and share their spiritual journey
with other Christians.
The Protestant Ministry serves a diverse community, honoring the
religious traditions of its members while affirming their oneness
in Christ.
While the University celebrates its Catholic and Jesuit roots, it
seems almost equally proud of its commitment to pluralism and
diversity.
To fulfill that commitment to its Protestant population, the
University employs seven Protestant chaplains (not all of them
full-time). Four are Baptist (three black and one white); the
others are ordained in the Episcopal, A.M.E., and Christian
(Disciples of Christ) churches. While some of them might pass as
evangelical, none looks plausibly like a theologically conservative
evangelical.
That they weren’t adequately serving the needs of some
evangelical students is clear enough. After all, a few hundred of
them were active in the recently expelled parachurch groups. Kevin
Offner, who works with IVCF, put it this way: “It’s not that our
students hate [the official Protestant chaplains]. This just isn’t
how they want to worship, and we don’t all worship the same way.”
Recent alumna Alyson Thoner told World Net Daily that
campus ministry doesn’t “encompass the full range of diversity of
the Protestant faith at Georgetown.”
You’d think that a university genuinely committed to meeting the
diverse spiritual needs of all its students would want to cooperate
with parachurch groups, whose efforts would extend the reach of the
Campus Ministry. But you can’t help get the impression that
Georgetown’s commitment to diversity doesn’t go so far as to
encompass those really different theologically and morally
conservative faith commitments.
I suppose you might defend the University by saying that the
conservative evangelical groups don’t play well with others. Rather
than embracing and celebrating diversity as a good in itself,
rather than modestly contributing their own little flavor to the
multicultural stew, they, er, evangelize, which requires,
of course, that they believe that they have something (universally)
good and true to share.
There’s the root of Georgetown’s conflict with its erstwhile
evangelical affiliates. It demands that everyone subscribe
wholeheartedly to a thoroughgoingly pluralistic vision and suspects
that the evangelicals don’t.
Let me state it another way. Georgetown’s evangelicals are
practical or pragmatic pluralists. They experience and negotiate
the intellectual, moral, and religious differences that
characterize life on a contemporary university campus. They know
that there will be disagreement and that all they can do is share
the Word and let their lights shine. They cannot and would not
compel anyone to accept even what they regard as a saving
truth.
But that’s apparently not good enough for the authorities at
Georgetown, who seem to want everyone to love pluralism
with all their hearts, souls, and minds. Of course, if everyone
affirms pluralism in this way, what you really end up with is a
kind of deep uniformity, not genuine pluralism at all. Yes, there
are differences, but everyone regards them as accidental and
superficial, not worth shouting about, let alone (perish the
thought!) fighting over.
Perhaps, in the end, Georgetown does have a religious mission
that’s inconsistent with the goals pursued by the evangelical
parachurch groups. Ironically, it’s not a traditionally Catholic or
Christian mission. It’s even hard to distinguish it from those
articulated by its moralistic and action-oriented secular
counterparts. In its commitment to “deep” (but really shallow)
pluralism, Georgetown University looks likes it has become just
another school.
