It is no secret a growing number of Christian campuses are openly accepting homosexuality in the name of “tolerance” and “acceptance,” and even defending it in the name of Christian love, and Baylor has followed that pattern. The student senate passed a resolution last year demanding the university change its statement on human sexuality, and the faculty senate also voted last year to support a charter recognizing Gamma Alpha Upsilon, or GAY.
Going back to 2019, 3,000 students, faculty, and alumni signed their names to a petition demanding GAY be recognized at a school founded by the Texas Baptist Society in 1845.
The pressure on the campus is not going away: An April 7 editorial by student newspaper The Baylor Lariat complained university leaders promised “listening sessions” over the issue but never followed through on that promise. That failed promises mirrors one made to a similar LGBT group in 2011, the Baylor students write.
Where did Baylor University go wrong? According to talk show host Janet Mefferd, who routinely warns on-air about the left-wing drift of the Christian faith, the school let down its guard over the fundamental issue of biblical truth.
“This is one of the things that I think Christians always have to put up a guard against,” she tells AFN, “and that is allowing the world to set the agenda for any Christian endeavor, much less a Christian school.”
Baylor chased away 'fundamentalists'
Back in the 1990s, Baylor was applauded by Newsweek when the university’s “moderate” leaders “rescued” the campus from oversight by the Texas Baptists Convention. At a regular meeting of trustees, the hated “fundamentalists” were outsmarted and blindsided when the university adopted a new charter right under their noses that created a new board of regents.
The plot had taken two years of backroom planning, the national media reported at the time, and even the fax machines were even turned off so an emergency court order wouldn't come through.
Bill Grubbs, one of the outsmarted trustees, told Newsweek it was a "classical story on how to steal a school."
“They disapprove of higher education in the classical sense," Mike Bishop, who was then Baylor’s vice president of communications, said of the orthodox believers who got outfoxed. “What they want is indoctrination."
That same article, now 30 years in the past, ridiculed Baptist-affiliated schools for demanding professors believe in a literal Adam and Eve to join the faculty.
According to Mefferd, the pool of Bible-believing Christian universities is shrinking after prominent campuses such as Wheaton College and Southern Methodist have caved to homosexual activism. That makes it harder, she says, for parents to trust a college campus to remain faithful to orthodox beliefs when their children step foot in their first class.
“It’s very concerning to see Christian colleges and universities capitulating to the LGBT movement,” he says, “because it is absolutely opposed to biblical truth."
