Just before it became clear how serious the COVID-19 pandemic would become two years ago, Brigham Young University was in the news for their policies concerning LGBTQ+ students, seemingly allowing them more freedoms to express themselves, then backtracking on those supposed changes. Understandably, that story quickly got lost in the coverage of how COVID-19 was affecting higher education, but such stories come up almost every year. Christian colleges have had a variety of responses to the presence of LGBTQ+ students on their campuses over the years, but that reality was brought into clear focus after the Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015. Before this decision, many Christian colleges largely took the don’t ask, don’t tell approach, where they had policies in place that forbade same-sex relationships, but many of those colleges also knew they had a population who were involved in same-sex relationships and rarely did anything about that situation. The Christian college I attended in the 1980s certainly took that approach, as one of my friends slowly became more and more open about his sexual orientation until the school finally expelled him. If he would have remained even partly closeted—not worked in a gay bar, for example—he would have graduated without a problem. There are and were extremes, of course, who receive media attention, schools such as Bob Jones University or Pensacola Christian College, but many Christian colleges have allowed LGBTQ+ students to attend their schools without any overt policing, as long as the students were quiet about their relationships.
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