In October of 2015, I received one of those vaguely mysterious e-mails which journalists sometimes get. It came from an account under the name of “K. Lee,” generic enough to be un-Googleable. “I wasn’t sure to whom to send this message,” the note began. “I am gay and teach at a member institution of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.”
That got my attention. The council, known as the C.C.C.U., is America’s most prominent association of evangelical Protestant schools. A few weeks earlier, two schools had left the organization after announcing that they would start hiring married gay and lesbian faculty, an unacceptable theological position for most member institutions. If this e-mail was really from a gay faculty member at a C.C.C.U. school, the sender’s identity would likely need to remain a secret. Otherwise, he or she would probably be fired.
There wasn’t much more to the e-mail—a few links, a story suggestion. I replied with something quick and polite. During the next couple of years, I continued to receive short messages from K., usually about the latest news in Christian higher education. Slowly, I started to learn more about my correspondent. Her name was Kathy Lee. She taught political science at Whitworth University, a school with around twenty-seven hundred students in Spokane, Washington. Now I could look up her picture: she was in her late fifties, with short, silvery hair, and she wore rectangular glasses and a chunky, colorful scarf—the kind that baby-boomer liberal-arts professors love.
After a while, it became clear that Lee was thinking about coming out. She began looking into what legal protections she had. “I had a very good meeting with the attorneys in Seattle,” she wrote in September of 2017. “Mulling over their advice.” She was worried about losing her job. But she was also worried about putting Whitworth’s leaders on the defensive and making them feel like they had to double down on not hiring L.G.B.T.Q. faculty. Unlike some other Christian colleges, Whitworth didn’t make its faculty sign a statement of faith with clauses affirming that marriage is between one man and one woman. The status quo was something closer to “Don’t ask, don’t tell”: university administrators assumed that there were lesbian and gay faculty among their ranks, but they made a point not to inquire into their employees’ sex lives. That delicate balance might be disrupted if a professor came out, Lee thought. She mulled over the situation some more.
Two months later, Lee sent a letter to Beck Taylor, who was Whitworth’s president at the time. “For many years, I have not talked about my sexual identity and let people sometimes assume that I am straight,” she wrote. “I am not a profile in courage.” But she was finally coming out, Lee continued, because the lack of clarity about who is and isn’t welcome at Whitworth “grinds down” on her. “It sends the wrong and harmful message to our students and colleagues, a message inconsistent with our articulated values.”
Lee met with Taylor. “While he was gracious and kind,” she wrote in an e-mail to me later, “it is going to take longer for Whitworth to be a completely welcoming place than I thought.” Taylor assured her that she wasn’t going to be fired, but afterward she sat in her car and wrote down everything she could remember—that way, she and her lawyer would have a record. She felt dispirited. “The idea of ‘boring from within’ i.e., changing things from inside, may not be worth the toll for me emotionally,” she wrote.
That was all five years ago—the beginning of Lee’s long and winding process of coming out at Whitworth. Since then, similar stories have played out repeatedly on other Christian-college campuses. A group of students at Baylor University, in Texas, lobbied to get an L.G.B.T.Q. support group recognized. A gay professor at Milligan University, in Tennessee, was reportedly forced to resign. Just this month, protesters gathered at Calvin University, a school affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church, in Michigan, denouncing the Church’s decision to reaffirm traditional marriage.
I spoke with Christian-college professors who described these new standoffs as head-spinning; it seems like, even a decade ago, hardly anyone was talking about L.G.B.T.Q. rights on their campuses. Several people told me that they think some C.C.C.U. schools are shifting further to the right end of the political spectrum, polarized by the culture wars just like every other institution in American life. But Shirley Hoogstra, the president of the C.C.C.U., told me, “I don’t think the campuses are actually changing much.” It’s just that “everything that used to be implicit has to be made explicit.”
The theological vibe of Lee’s Christian upbringing was not hellfire and brimstone. “It was very quiet,” she said. “You acknowledge Jesus as your Lord and Saviour. And then you treated people well. It wasn’t complicated.” She grew up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, which is something of a Jerusalem for Reformed Presbyterians. The denomination controls Geneva College, a C.C.C.U. school in the area, where Lee’s grandfather was the president and her father was an economics professor. Lee spent every Sunday at one of the small town’s four Reformed Presbyterian churches, watching her mother direct the choir. The church’s members were split over whether it was O.K. to watch television on Sunday, but Lee’s family never missed a Steelers game. Her dad used to lecture Sunday-school classes on the virtues of not drinking or smoking, and his straitlaced attitude extended to all parts of life; he had a habit of flipping all the macaroni boxes upside down in the grocery store to reveal, through the cellophane windows on the front, how shoppers were getting ripped off.
After graduating from Wake Forest University, Lee went on to graduate school, for political science, at Johns Hopkins University. From the moment she arrived, she felt unsure of her place; it seemed like everyone was talking about books and thinkers she had never heard of. She gravitated toward the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a campus ministry group, because it was comfortable; the conversations and people felt familiar to those she’d encountered back in Beaver Falls. Lee formed a close relationship with one of the staffers there, a Chinese American woman who loved food and laughed easily. When the woman left for a position at another school, Lee realized it was more than a friendship. She had a crush.
Lee tried to put the crush out of her mind. But the issue seemed to chase her as she took her first assistant-professor job at Whitworth, in 1984. One day, a favorite student of hers, Jill Gill, came by during Lee’s office hours. Gill confided that, the previous summer, she had started a relationship with a fellow Whitworth student—another woman. At Whitworth, unmarried students weren’t supposed to be having sex, period; the idea of a sexual encounter between two women on campus was scandalous. “I crossed the precipice, and it felt fantastic,” Gill told her. Lee absorbed the confession quietly, neither challenging it nor affirming it.
Over the next few years, Lee cycled through teaching jobs at different Christian colleges. She was practically a poster child for the Christian higher education: in the early nineteen-nineties, while she was at Seattle Pacific University, a Free Methodist school, Lee wrote an advertorial in Christianity Today, explaining that “Creation, the Fall, and Redemption form a backdrop against which I teach political science” and that helping “students encounter God’s truth wherever it may be found” was her job. In 1993, she took a position at Eastern University, an American Baptist institution near Philadelphia, where she was asked to sign a statement of faith affirming basic tenets of Christian doctrine. The school would not hire openly gay faculty, but, by chance, Lee’s office was in a hallway with theatre and dance and English professors—a raucous, artsy crew that was very supportive of gay rights. Their conversations echoed the kind that freshmen tend to have in their dorm rooms at 1 a.m.; they discussed the nature of truth and how to interpret the Bible. Out of curiosity, Lee started reading the work of writers who argued that homosexuality could be compatible with Christianity. It was this community—her friends, these writers whom she admired—which helped her admit to herself that she was gay. She started a relationship—her first serious one with a woman. She was forty-five.
Over all, Lee wasn’t happy at Eastern, which was relatively traditional in its policies; she had hoped for more formal L.G.B.T.Q. acceptance. When a political-science job at Whitworth opened up, in 2011, Lee started asking friends who worked there whether it would be a welcoming place for a gay professor. One friend in the office of student affairs, Dayna Coleman Jones, had a son who recently graduated from the university; as a gay man, he’d had a terrible experience. Male students were afraid to shower in the same bathroom with him. A little group formed in his dorm to pray for his repentance. One evening, while he was riding his bike a few blocks off campus, a few people pulled up in a truck, called him a “fag,” and beat him until he lost consciousness. Coleman Jones had many tearful conversations with Bill Robinson, Whitworth’s president during those years. “He was very sympathetic. I don’t know if he knew what to do with the situation,” she told me. (Robinson declined to comment.)
Still, Coleman Jones told Lee that she was feeling optimistic about Whitworth’s future. The student body seemed to be growing more open and calling for more inclusion on campus. Other Christian colleges saw Whitworth as “out there” and progressive—there was talk that the school might potentially be the first in the C.C.C.U. to change its hiring policy to include openly L.G.B.T.Q. faculty and staff. Lee packed up and headed west to Spokane.
For many people, the term “evangelical university” probably calls to mind the famous training grounds of the old religious right—Liberty University, in Virginia, or maybe Bob Jones University, in South Carolina. These schools are not in the C.C.C.U.; most colleges in the organization have a lower profile, although some are just as theologically and politically conservative as Liberty. There’s also quite a bit of theological diversity in the C.C.C.U.; the two schools that left in 2015 over L.G.B.T.Q. hiring, Goshen College and Eastern Mennonite University, which are both Mennonite institutions, withdrew to avoid creating further division, out of a commitment to their Church’s peacemaking tradition. In the Christian-college firmament, Whitworth is on the academically rigorous end of the spectrum, ranked as one of the top regional schools in the Pacific Northwest by U.S. News & World Report. Whitworth is basically a liberal-arts school where students are expected to engage seriously with the life of Christ.
Whitworth is clearly worried about getting saddled with culture-war baggage. On its Web site, the school markets itself as “a different kind of evangelical university.” By “evangelical,” “we don’t mean the sociopolitically loaded term that can be identified with a certain voter bloc,” Forrest Buckner, the Whitworth campus pastor, says, in a promotional video on the school’s YouTube channel. “We mean the historical use of the term: the good news that Jesus Christ is Lord.” That throat-clearing might suggest anxiety about attacks from the left, but there are also indications that the school is watching its right flank. Despite its historic ties to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a mainline denomination that ordains L.G.B.T.Q. pastors and supports same-sex marriage, Whitworth loosened its ties to the denomination around the time that the P.C.U.S.A. was considering a more affirming stance toward L.G.B.T.Q. people, in the early twenty-tens.
Whitworth’s leaders often describe the school’s mission by using the metaphor of “the narrow ridge.” (Robinson, the former president, came up with this, riffing on a concept from the philosopher Martin Buber.) On one side of the ridge are secular institutions that don’t believe religious faith is a serious entry point for scholarly inquiry. On the other side are Christian schools that crack down on doctrine, making faculty and staff sign narrow statements of faith that don’t leave room for individual discernment. Whitworth tries to follow a path between those two extremes. But it’s no accident that this image evokes the tree-less exposure of a mountain’s ridgeline, where travellers feel vulnerable to attacks from all around.
For the most progressive C.C.C.U. schools, contending with L.G.B.T.Q. issues is a liability. No matter what these schools do, they’ll leave some part of their constituency feeling betrayed. One could argue that Whitworth’s decision to leave the L.G.B.T.Q. issue unsettled—never actively welcoming gay or trans faculty, staff, and students, but also never adopting a formal position on sexuality and gender—is a way of walking the narrow ridge, making sure that there’s space for Christians in the school’s community to disagree in good conscience. (The school’s current leadership refused to explain their perspective or approach on this subject; even after weeks of trying, I could not get them to respond to my requests for comment.)
Bill Clinton reportedly joked that U.S. Presidents get to live in the White House, the crown jewel in the American penal system. A similar quip could be made about Christian-college presidents: they might think that they are laboring for the Kingdom of Heaven, but the job description turns out to be more like Hell. Donors, trustees, parents, and alumni are often more conservative than faculty, students, and staff, setting up endless conflicts over sensitive issues. Meanwhile, every decision has to be vetted for potential legal exposure—especially faith-based hiring policies that might be construed as discrimination. L.G.B.T.Q. issues can easily get deprioritized as presidents struggle to keep their schools afloat; many Christian schools have small endowments, high tuition, and declining numbers of students to pay the bills. Whitworth is no different. The school budgeted for six hundred first-year students in the fall of 2022, but, so far, fewer than five hundred have enrolled.
For some conservative schools in the C.C.C.U., affirming a traditional stance on marriage and sexuality can be a strength—a signal to skittish Christian parents that they are maintaining their traditional biblical commitments. Hoogstra, the president of the C.C.C.U., gave another reason for the organization’s stance. Christian higher education “is for families and for students who would like to have the freedom to examine truth from all perspectives—in particular, truth from Scripture,” she told me. “When institutions believe that the Bible does not allow for intimacy between same-sex people, it is not an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. statement. It is a pro-truth statement.” Mark Yarhouse, the director of the Sexual and Gender Identity Institute at Wheaton College, a C.C.C.U. school, said, “From the outside, you could say, ‘Why are you behind? Why aren’t you where everyone else is?’ But I don’t think that’s how those institutions think about themselves.” He went on, “On the inside, the question is: Is there a compelling reason to move away from historic Christian teachings?”
After Lee told Taylor, Whitworth’s president at the time, that she was gay, she spent the spring of 2018 quietly informing her closest colleagues. “On Friday I came out to my department and to the assoc vp for diversity and inclusion,” she wrote me in an e-mail that February. “Thank goodness I had a happy hr scheduled!” Over another drink that same week, she came out to a high-level administrator, who hinted that L.G.B.T.Q. identity had become a hiring issue; Lee later heard a rumor that a top applicant for a faculty position wasn’t being brought to campus for interviews because he was openly gay. (Whitworth declined to comment.) That year, students had chosen Lee to deliver the commencement address. She was not out to her students. But, on an impulse, Lee shared her identity with a graduating senior who was also speaking at the ceremony. To Lee’s surprise, the student told her that she herself was bisexual, as was the other student speaker. “In hockey, as you probably know, there is the term, ‘hat trick,’ used to refer to one player scoring three goals in one game,” Lee wrote me in an e-mail. “The LGBT community scored a ‘hat trick’ at commencement this spring.”
Even though Lee managed to maintain a sense of humor about it, coming out was not like one of those movie montages of self-acceptance and empowerment. “Am feeling a bit drained,” she wrote me in the spring of 2019, after she spoke to a friend’s political-science class about being gay on a Christian-college campus. “When I got home, I just kind of sat there.” A few months later, Lee introduced a friend’s Constitution Day lecture on L.G.B.T.Q. issues and talked a little about her identity. “I did wake up this morning, having that feeling of ‘oh no what have I done,’ ” she e-mailed me the next day. She wanted to push her community, but she was also unsure of how public she could be without jeopardizing her job. One evening, she went up to the microphone during a public forum where provost candidates were being interviewed and asked a question about L.G.B.T.Q. inclusion on campus, mentioning that she was part of that community. Taylor was sitting right in front of her. “He gets out a piece of paper, and he writes something on it, and then he hands this paper to me. And I’m thinking, Oh, my gosh, what’s it going to say?” Lee told me. “And all it said was, ‘You’re awesome.’ ” She paused for a moment. “Did it touch me? Yes, it did. Do I understand what exactly was being communicated? No, not really.” (Taylor declined to comment.)
Lee was going through a different kind of transformation, too. Her Christian identity gradually became “thinner than it was,” she told me. She questioned what she saw as the “arrogance” of Christian higher education, premised on the idea that only Christians could understand and impart truth to students. She resonated deeply with the Gospels and the story of Jesus’ life—these were her templates for how to be in the world. But she came to believe that strong ethical commitments could be derived from other sacred texts, too. She grew ambivalent about Heaven and doubtful about Hell; she gave up on the idea of penal-substitutionary atonement, a central theological principle of the Reformed tradition, which holds that Jesus died on the cross as penalty for humanity’s sins. For some people at Whitworth, Lee said, “I’m not sure what would be more disturbing: my sexual identity, or the fact that I haven’t been in church regularly for eleven years.”
One way to think about Christian higher education is as a covenant, a set of binding boundaries that defines each community, within which there is room to disagree, explore, and debate. At evangelical Christian universities, the price of entry is a willingness to order your life according to the Bible—to learn from its richness, and to submit even when it chafes. At many Christian colleges, Lee would no longer fit in the covenant—not because she is gay but because she is no longer what these schools would see as a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian. According to Hoogstra, many institutions would say that they’re fine with having unmarried gay faculty and staff members in their communities. At Whitworth in particular, Lee’s sexual identity may not explicitly violate any policy, since the school has deliberately never taken a stand on homosexuality. And yet people in Whitworth’s community clearly perceive a risk to being out. To Lee’s knowledge, she is the first openly gay professor in the school’s history; she believes at least three or four other employees are closeted on campus.
Every Christmas, Lee returns to Pennsylvania to fulfill a long-standing tradition: an evening with a few old friends from Eastern. They meet at a friend’s home, an old farmhouse, and their conversations often go late into the night. One person who typically comes is David King, the outgoing president of a C.C.C.U. school where a beloved tenured professor had to resign last fall after deciding to marry her female partner. Christian-college leaders often face an unresolvable tension, being called to steward their institution’s policies—and follow denominational guidelines—while also trying to empathize with their L.G.B.T.Q. friends and colleagues. King told me that Lee became a metaphorical figure in his head—someone he thought about all the time as he tried to figure out how his institution should handle L.G.B.T.Q. issues, and who had made the decisions feel personal, not just abstract. “Our relationship with Jesus—that doesn’t bring us certainty. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be called faith,” he said. “I feel called to wrestle with this, because I know Kathy Lee.” At the end of one of those Christmastime get-togethers, among the last before covid hit, King pulled Lee aside. “I think of you often, and I’m trying to do this well, for you,” he told her. Recounting this moment to me recently, over Zoom, King started choking up and had to take a moment to gather his breath. “I also acknowledged to her that I feel as if I haven’t been able to do enough.”
No matter how much Lee has changed during her four-decade career, her presence is a fact. She is part of the Whitworth community. She is part of this world of Christian higher education. Because of her, other Christians “have to confront it in a way that’s different. They now actually know somebody. It’s not this theoretical issue,” Lee told me. “For me, coming out at Whitworth was important to let people know, yeah, there’s someone like this here.”
After years of trading e-mails, Lee and I finally met over Zoom this spring. She wore small hoop earrings and a dark-gray hoodie with the slogan “Love Conquers Hate.” A box of papers sat on the floor of her office next to a recycling bin and an air purifier; the bookshelves were dishevelled. She was in the middle of packing up her things, getting ready to leave Whitworth for good.
Last fall, Lee decided that she would retire at the end of the school year. The tensions over L.G.B.T.Q. issues were part of her decision. But, mostly, she is retiring because she can afford it. In November, she bought a house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which has been sitting empty. She’s hoping to do some advocacy work in retirement, and perhaps some oral-history projects. Dating in Spokane never suited her much. “I found out very quickly that I don’t fit the profile of a Pacific Northwest lesbian,” she told me. (She hates backpacking, she’s allergic to cats, and she drives a Subaru Forester only for the ground clearance during snowy winters.) But, unexpectedly, she recently met someone on Match.com who lives in Maryland. They’ve been corresponding.
It took a long time for Lee to agree to be featured in a story. Although she was nervous about what might happen to her at Whitworth, her biggest concern was her mom. “For better or for worse, she cared about what other people thought. And, in our circle, this would have not been well received,” she told me, quietly. Lee adored her dad, the macaroni-box flipper, and she believes that he would have accepted her if she’d come out to him. But she didn’t want to burden him with a secret he couldn’t share with his wife. Lee made me promise I would never name her in an article while her mom was alive. Last year, her mother died at the age of ninety-six, never knowing about this part of her only daughter’s life.
I asked Lee whether she regretted being single for so long. “I’m tempted to say, ‘In God’s timing,’ but I’m not going to use that,” she said, with a small smile. She would have had to keep any relationship secret from her parents, which felt unacceptable to her. Now “I am free,” she said. “And I’m also sad.”
Lee is an unlikely standard-bearer for gay rights. She confessed to me that she gets mixed up on the subject of pronouns, and she doesn’t feel like she has much guidance for queer students since she was such a “late bloomer.” On our Zoom call, Lee tended to fidget and laugh sheepishly whenever I asked her personal questions. For someone so eloquent on big ideas about Christian identity and L.G.B.T.Q. legal issues, she was surprisingly uncomfortable talking about her own story.
Gill, the student who came out in Lee’s office in the eighties, whom Lee has stayed in touch with, told me, “It was such a big thing for her to be ready to do that—to be fed up and be willing to force that institution to deal with that issue through her.” Kathy isn’t the type to stage a sit-in in a university administrator’s office. “She’s not an activist person,” Gill said. A few years ago, Gill and her partner took Lee to her very first Pride parade in Boise. In that city, “by God, we have a lot to fight for,” Gill told me. Idaho still has charged political debates over L.G.B.T.Q. rights; in 2020, for example, it became the first state to ban transgender girls and women from competing in women’s sports. Gill said that the parade “still has that old-fashioned Stonewall sense to it”—the feeling that gathering is political and powerful. “Kathy lived in hiding all the time at Whitworth,” Gill said. “This is a chance for her to feel a community out in the streets—to touch them and see them.”
The parade was a small affair—maybe a few hundred people and a dozen floats. Gill told me that there were no pasties or assless chaps, like you might see at a Pride event in New York City; the dress code was closer to rainbow-optional. The whole thing was calibrated perfectly for Lee: a small act of celebration in a place where gay rights are still being adjudicated. She fit right in wearing a white T-shirt and tan slacks. ♦
Emma Green is a staff writer at The New Yorker who covers education and academia.
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