My Exile from Christian Higher Ed

Just 10 years ago... but a different story

On July 15, 2015, the South Bend Tribune hit doorsteps with the front page headline: “Professor Resigns After College Stance on Human Origins.” That professor was me. The piece (you can still read the online version ) told the public what my family and a handful of others had known for several weeks: after 17 years at Bethel College as a professor and administrator, after several generations of family attending the school, the likes of me were no longer welcome there. I had to leave my tenured position as professor of philosophy, because I accepted the well-attested scientific consensus that humans evolved.

That’s the image from the online version of the South Bend Tribune on July 15, 2015.

Several weeks previously the severance papers were signed quietly and without fanfare. I packed my office alone, and drifted off into the next phase of my life, hardly believing what had happened, but a little relieved it was over. Then, out of nowhere, Inside Higher Ed broke the story on July 12. Once that article appeared, the dominoes fell: front-page splashes in two local papers, a Fox News camera crew in my driveway, a HuffPost write-up. To this day I have no idea who alerted the press. If you do, drop me a line — I’m genuinely curious.

In my book The Sacred Chain I described the tense two-hour meeting that sealed my fate. A dozen suited men in the board room, arms crossed, one of them interrogating me with, “Jim, what happened to you?” Their concern wasn’t my scholarship or teaching reviews; it was the threat they believed evolution posed to students’ faith. I had started working part-time (with the explicit blessing of the administration) for BioLogos. But when that became more widely known within the college’s constituency, an inquisition ensued.

The president of the college (the one who gave me permission to work for BioLogos) had hoped that a compromise position would be adopted, whereby the college would affirm an official anti-evolutionary statement, but it wouldn’t be mandated that all members of the college community agreed with it (kind of like the University of Notre Dame is a Catholic research university, but not all members of that community are Catholic). But that wasn’t good enough for the inquisitors. Their version of the compromise was that faculty didn’t have to believe the anti-evolution stance, but they couldn’t teach against it; they couldn’t do scholarly work that contradicted it; and they certainly couldn’t keep working for organizations that believed otherwise.

So what was I to do? I could have stayed at the institution I had poured my life into… so long as didn’t question the official position, and gave up the scholarship I’d been working on, and quit working for BioLogos. I admit that the fears of the inquisitors were not unfounded: you can find plenty of people who, once they understood the overwhelming evidence for human evolution, gave up their faith. The problem, though, was not with the science, but with a version of faith that so tightly wed a particular (and peculiar, historically speaking) version of reading the Bible to anti-evolutionism, so when the anti-evolutionism was found to be untenable, the whole package was thrown out. I left to work for BioLogos full-time to try to show as many people as possible that there is another way.

I miss teaching. Nothing replaces the look in a student’s eyes when an idea ignites or when months and months of mentorship results in positive changes in a student’s life. My work at BioLogos lets me reach far more people, but the impact is thinner, spread across podcasts, articles, and conferences rather than embodied in a classroom over the course of a semester. That’s a trade-off I still feel.

I know other people who have lost their jobs at Christian colleges because of science. Their stories are typically more tragic than mine. I landed softly. Yes, it’s a tragedy that a community forces out a member over an issue that is demonstrably true. But working for BioLogos full-time has been the best thing that ever happened to my professional career. I think it’s accurate to say that I was a pretty big fish in very little pond; now I’m a little fish in a very big pond. Sometimes I’m still gobsmacked by the people in my email inbox and by the opportunities I’ve had (see my report here in a couple of days from NYC for one such amazing opportunity). BioLogos is not a perfect place to work, but it’s been very rewarding for me.

Do I wish the college had chosen differently? Of course. But I’ve very intentionally cultivated an attitude that rejects bitterness. I affirm a private college’s right to define its theological boundaries (whether they should be accredited by governmental agencies is a different question… though one that won’t be raised by the current government, I’m sure). My concern is pastoral: when institutions cast mainstream science as spiritually toxic, students are the ones who pay — sometimes with their faith, but always with their witness to a world that needs to know the way, the truth, and the life. When they can’t defend (or even understand) the truth of something discovered and confirmed through empirical evidence, why would the world put any credence in their claims of truth about more esoteric matters? That’s a tried and true way of becoming irrelevant to the rest of the world, to which we were called to be salt and light.

A few weeks after the news broke and things started to settle down, one of the inquisitors asked me to lunch at an Applebees. I decided to go, now having nothing more to lose. It was cordial and there was even an attempt at conciliatory conversation. At the end I said, “I want you to know that I believe you thought you were doing what was best. But I also believe — and I’m sure you won’t agree — that what you did harmed the Kingdom of God.” I stood up, shook his hand, and walked away. I told my wife when I got home that I suspected I’d never hear from him again (and we had been pretty close previously). Ten years on, that prediction has stayed true. My exile from my community of origin has been complete.

It’s an interesting question, though, whether what they did harmed the Kingdom of God. I continue to believe it is not what God had intended, but I have a high enough view of providence to believe that God can work good out of bad situations. I believe much good has been accomplished for the Kingdom through my work at BioLogos.

As for my former institution, I don’t know. Quoting Aslan from the Horse and His Boy, “Child, I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.” I wish them well, but my story has gone a different direction.