Glen Davis

Am I the only one who finds it iron­ic that the mul­ti-site church con­fer­ences are all sin­gle-loca­tion events? Just google for “mul­ti-site church con­fer­ences” and you’ll see what I mean.

It just seems… odd.

As pro­gram­mers are want to say, eat your own dog food.

A thought­ful friend drew my atten­tion to this sto­ry about North Cen­tral Uni­ver­si­ty and the Equal­i­ty Rid­ers. To sum­ma­rize: gay activists are barred from hold­ing events at an Assem­blies of God uni­ver­si­ty.

I find sto­ries like this very inter­est­ing, because I find myself in the same sit­u­a­tion as the Equal­i­ty Rid­ers. I am on a pri­vate uni­ver­si­ty not exact­ly enthu­si­as­tic about my views and have to labor under cer­tain restric­tions as a result. Hav­ing said that, Stan­ford is much more gra­cious to me than North Cen­tral has been to the Equal­i­ty Rid­ers (even if the rid­ers’ ver­sion of events proves to be exag­ger­at­ed). I am allowed to be on cam­pus, to hold meet­ings with oth­er inter­est­ed stu­dents on cam­pus, and
to uti­lize cam­pus resources.

At first blush, it seems that the Assem­blies of God (who spon­sors both my min­istry and that of North Cen­tral Uni­ver­si­ty) wants to have it both ways: they want to be allowed to express their views via peo­ple like me at pri­vate uni­ver­si­ties while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly deny­ing oth­er groups that right at their own schools (such as NCU).

I’m not sure that’s a com­plete­ly fair assess­ment, since there’s a cat­e­go­ry dif­fer­ence between denom­i­na­tion­al schools and some­place like Stan­ford or Yale. These lat­ter schools, although pri­vate, like to think of them­selves as self-con­scious­ly neu­tral on reli­gious and moral mat­ters, where­as denom­i­na­tion­al schools have reli­gious and moral
posi­tions to which all stu­dents are required to con­form. The upshot is that NCU can rep­re­sent the stu­dent body in a way that Stan­ford can­not.

Still, it does seem a lit­tle hyp­o­crit­i­cal (the gold­en rule seems rel­e­vant in this con­text) and unwise. As a pro­fes­sion­al who works with col­lege stu­dents, I assure you that NCU did every­thing they could to intrigue stu­dents with the Equal­i­ty Rid­ers’ mes­sage. If they tru­ly want­ed to side­line the rid­ers, the admin­is­tra­tion should have invit­ed them onto cam­pus, giv­en them a pub­lic forum, and then offered a calm and
thor­ough rebut­tal. As it is, they’ve like­ly fanned a spark into flame.

And fir­ing reporters for report­ing is always a short­sight­ed move (although legal). Fir­ing reporters always leaves peo­ple feel­ing suspicious–what is being hid­den? Again, the way to derail any sto­ry is by being calm and rea­son­able in your response (sup­pos­ing that you have a bet­ter case, that is). If the reporters write sto­ries that the admin­is­tra­tors find trou­bling, let­ters to the edi­tor (or even an edi­to­r­i­al col­umn, depend­ing on the paper’s gov­er­nance) are supreme­ly appro­pri­ate.

Still, I would be very inter­est­ed to hear NCU’s offi­cial per­spec­tive on the events described by the Equal­i­ty Rid­ers. It does­n’t take much read­ing between the lines to notice that the Equal­i­ty Rid­ers were hyp­ing the lev­el of force used by the uni­ver­si­ty, so per­haps oth­er details are also mis­lead­ing.

[UPDATE: this is pre­cise­ly the uni­ver­si­ty’s asser­tion. They claim that the Equal­i­ty Rid­ers have mis­rep­re­sent­ed the events. Read the uni­ver­si­ty’s response at http://www.northcentral.edu/news/soulforce.php

• down­load eliz­a­beth­town free

and also hear a mes­sage from the uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent about the events.]