Reverend Gomes and Religious Freedom

This year, every incoming freshman read a work by Rev. Dr. Peter Gomes, which is ironic given the current debate about Vanderbilt’s policy forbidding campus religious organizations from ensuring that student leaders share the group’s creedal commitments. Gomes, Harvard’s long-time Plummer professor of Christian morals and the Pusey minister of Memorial Church, was an openly gay, black Baptist preacher who, upon his death last year, The New York Times called “one of America’s most prominent spiritual voices against intolerance.” His work against intolerance included powerfully condemning a stance at Harvard that was identical to Vanderbilt’s current policy, stating that it “is not tolerant, neither is it pluralistic, nor inclusive. Let us call it what it is: hostile, rampantly secular and overtly anti-Christian.”

In 2003, Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, an evangelical group at Harvard (which is affiliated with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship), was accused of violating the university’s nondiscrimination policy because they required student leaders to affirm basic Christian doctrine and were threatened with losing their status as a registered student organization unless they dropped this requirement. Unlike Vanderbilt’s administration, Harvard soon reconsidered. Recognizing the inherent importance of self-governance in religious communities for the preservation of religious identity, Harvard’s Committee on College Life voted to allow campus religious groups to retain belief-based requirements for leaders. Thereafter, a student-run paper, The Harvard Crimson, published an editorial accusing the religious group of intolerance and condemning Harvard’s new policy.

Gomes replied with strong rebuke in a letter to the editors, writing that the argument that “an organization based upon religious beliefs should not be able to discriminate on the basis of those same religious beliefs in its leadership suggests either a fundamental ignorance of the nature of religious belief, or a determination in the name of ‘nondiscrimination’ to discriminate against a Christian student group which takes its Christian identity and principles seriously.”

The Crimson’s argument was essentially that of Vanderbilt’s administration: All students, regardless of personal beliefs, should have access to leadership in any campus group. Gomes brilliantly articulated what religious groups at Vanderbilt have been advocating when he stated that belief in, for instance, the resurrection of Jesus is irrevocably essential for leadership in a community who finds its entire identity and purpose in the proclamation of Christ’s resurrection. Gomes continues, “If there is any discrimination going on in this debate, it is the unseemly discrimination … against an explicitly Christian student group, and the particulars of the faith which provides the basis of its identity.” In a subsequent interview with Christianity Today, Gomes condemned heavy-handed control of campus religious groups saying, “Religious communities have to come to their own decisions, as opposed to being coerced by the civil liberty establishment.”

Rev. Gomes continued to defend religious pluralism and evangelical groups at Harvard until his death. When Gomes died, my Intervarsity colleague at Harvard Graduate School Christian Fellowship published a tribute expressing the profound support and honest friendship he and Gomes shared across differences in race, sexuality and theology, the kind of friendship that the robust pluralism Gomes sought makes possible.

It is worth noting that the top Vanderbilt administrators promoting this policy are lay people who, despite whatever personal religious commitments they hold, have admitted that they do not think faith should guide one’s public, daily life. At the recent town hall meeting, Provost McCarty argued vehemently that it would be wrong for students to “have personal religious views intrude on good decision-making on this campus.”

Gomes, who saw religious expression as an essential part of university life, would not have endorsed this privatization of faith. He supported creedal distinctiveness and religious liberty, despite knowing these commitments would allow the existence of campus religious communities where he might not be entirely accepted or understood. His was and is a profoundly mature, thoughtful and humane way to approach diversity and non-privatized devotional communities at a university.

I assume Vanderbilt chose Gomes’ book as required reading hoping that incoming students would be challenged by Gomes’ legacy and thought. I hope top university officials will do the same.

Rev. Gomes ends his condemnation of a stance identical to Vanderbilt’s current policy, saying, “Such an attitude toward Christian groups, the fundamentals of the Christian faith and the student leadership of a Christian community of faith is … unacceptable at Harvard.”

Why then ought we accept it here at Vanderbilt?

—Tish Harrison Warren is a Campus Minister at Vanderbilt’s Intervarsity Graduate Christian Fellowship. She can be reached at .