The Institute on Religion & Democracy is the organization named in “Globalizing the Culture Wars” as the prime mover in the the upsurge of harsh anti-gay legislation in Africa, so I went to their Web site and looked around.
Apparently, there is something of a ruckus at Calvin College just now because the Board of Trustees issued a memo to faculty that specifically proscribed “advocacy of homosexual practice and same-sex marriage.” Fine; it’s their club and the Board certainly has that right. But neither the faculty or students are much impressed by the memo, and here is a quote from an article about the dispute that IRD approvingly reprints on its Web site.
So from an historical point of view, there was nothing in the least bit controversial about the trustees’ memo. It merely reminded the faculty of their confessional commitments to a traditional Christian and Reformed understanding of sexuality and marriage, commitments that had been in place for centuries and are, in some quarters of the Church being challenged.
Of course, that wasn’t how the Calvin faculty or the students received the memo. They viewed it as an assault on academic freedom, as a trampling of due process—the faculty senate had not been consulted—and as a pronouncement having a chilling effect on, as Christianity Today put it, “Calvin’s tradition of vibrant Christian inquiry.”
They, in effect, said that despite more than two thousand years of agreement in the Church on sexuality and marriage, college faculty and students get to make up their own minds as to what Scripture says and what obedience to God looks like today.
Can you imagine!? Why … it would lead to chaos if people went around having their very own personal unauthorized thoughts!
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