Trueman: Expressive Individualism LGBTQ Style Comes To Baylor

The news that Baylor University has officially chartered Prism, an LGBT student organization on campus, marks an important moment in Christian higher education in the USA.

The charter itself is interesting. It contains no reference to Christ or Christianity, an odd lacuna for a group at a Christian university. Especially for a group whose stated mission is to “help students gain deeper understanding of their own and others [sic] complex and intersectional identities, including gender and sexuality and faith and spirituality” and to “provide resources to navigate essential services including physical, mental, or spiritual well-being at Baylor and beyond.” We are all now familiar with spirituality Hollywood-style, which lacks objective content and represents little more than self-affirmation. It is unfortunate that a Christian school would endorse such language without requiring some explicit reference to the Christian faith.

Significant too is the group’s desire “to create a safe and respectful environment for LGBTQ+ community.” On one level, this is laudable: Campuses should be places where all students are safe from physical harm and from verbal abuse. The problem, of course, is that the language of safe environments is today remarkably flexible. It often means a place where ideas that a given group finds uncomfortable or offensive are not tolerated. The danger of this kind of charter is that it might easily come to be used as an instrument for the kind of conceptual and linguistic cleansing that now grips the culture of other universities. In effect, it begins to establish a rightward boundary on what is deemed acceptable to think and to say on campus—conservative views on sexuality start to be deemed offensive and intolerable, and outside the bounds of acceptability. Baylor is scarcely unique in this. Progressive pieties are disenfranchising conservative views and more throughout higher education. Examples abound, but the recent case of the radical feminist disinvited from Harvard for her rejection of transgender ideology is a case in point. Read moreraquo;

Carl Trueman | “Baylor University Charters LGBTQ Group” | April 28, 2022

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