Junior Makenna Cofer, a bisexual student at John Brown University, faced online harassment last semester. She and a friend protested a speaker brought to the Christian campus, Eric Metaxas, a conservative author and radio host who supports conversion therapy. Pictures of them popped up on a campus meme site with comments making fun of them and questioning whether they belonged on campus.
It fed into feelings of alienation she was already having. The school’s community covenant, a document signed by all students, only condones heterosexual relationships. It’s diversity statement makes no mention of students like her. She’s heard speakers at mandatory campus chapels encourage LGBTQ students to abstain from sexual desire or plugs for conversion therapy.
A digital cinema major, she produced a film about LGBTQ students’ experiences on campus called “Part of the Kingdom.” She found that “some students have experienced worse than others, but … the majority of students don’t feel like they’re in a space where it’s safe to be known and where their individual uniqueness is celebrated,” she said. “The students that I talked to want to be in a space where they still feel like they’re seen and celebrated and their sexual orientation doesn’t have to be a boundary and they can still pursue a relationship with Christ without being encouraged to change.”
A new report by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP) and the survey company College Pulse, confirmed Cofer and her peers aren’t alone. The study surveyed 3,000 full-time LGBTQ students at 134 four-year Christian colleges with discriminatory practices, most of which are members of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU).
The study found that about 2% of students at Christian colleges identify as a gender minority and nearly 11% of students identify as non-heterosexual. But using a broader definition that included any same-sex attraction – language commonly used at Christian colleges – that number doubled to about 22%.
But many LGBTQ students at Christian colleges aren’t out. About 19% of LGBTQ students didn’t disclose their sexual or gender identity to anyone at their college and 18% had only told one or two people. Another 19% had told three to five people at their school.
“It’s not a tiny minority on these campuses,” said Paul Carlos Southwick, director of REAP.
