Staying out of the conversational fray around Trinity Western University’s many legal battles over the years has been tough for a former student who really loved the place but is also gay.
Every time I read a new round of news stories telling how the private evangelical Christian university has either won or lost some Supreme Court battle (teacher training program, law school) I’m just itching to chime in.
I usually don’t, though, because, especially in these screaming-at-each-other-across-the-void times, no one wants to hear about what a great time I had there or how some people at Trinity actually set me on a path away from the rigid fundamentalist thinking I’d adopted of my own volition when I was a teen.
Like many a youth today yearning for a more meaningful life, I was drawn to fundamentalism.
TWU’s infamous community covenant was a joke. Sex before marriage? Puh-lease.
I was busy trying to learn how to save the world, Mother Teresa-style.
Without bashing my beliefs, though, there were people at Trinity who helped me challenge them, think through them critically.
At SFU or UBC, rigid religious beliefs (Christian, Muslim, what have you) too often just go underground because, let’s face it, who’s going to pipe up in a first-year university class there and ask, “Hey, what about homosexuality being a sin?”
Like it or not, there are people who sincerely believe that, and simply forcing them to march along as though they don’t doesn’t make them more inclusive.
That’s why I’ve always thought it was ridiculous to think making Trinity kids go to secular universities for their final year of teacher training or their years of law school would somehow scrub clean the fundamentalist taint.
If they do end up waving the rainbow flag of inclusion as teachers and lawyers, it won’t be because of that. It'll be because a fellow student or some brave soul on TWU’s faculty – and I hope there are still some left – has challenged them, Christian to Christian.
For that reason, part of me is disappointed by the Supreme Court of Canada’s 7-2 ruling last week recognizing the B.C. and Ontario law societies’ power to refuse accreditation to grads of Trinity’s proposed law school.
At the end of the day, though, I have to marvel at TWU’s leaders – and evangelical Christians generally – continually choosing homosexuality as their hill to die on.
“It is a sad (and dangerous) day for Canadian Christian institutions who hold to a Biblical standard of conduct,” proclaimed a Twitter post by @envangelicalOPS after the Supreme Court ruling.
Surely there’s still plenty of biblical conduct left for these institutions?
Feeding the hungry, comes to mind, as does taking in the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and all those other things that separate the sheep from the goats.
I don't remember that preventing gay and lesbian people from having sex even made the list.
