Faithful Love for Our Non-Christian Neighbor: Should We Exclude Non-Christians from Key Student Leader Positions?

Christian universities and colleges that accept non-Christian students, which is the majority of Christian universities, always face the challenge of loving our non-Christian neighbors sacrificially while remaining faithful to our love for God (and by extension the institution’s Christian mission).

The reason why doing both is so difficult stems from a common human reality: We usually do not like people to feel excluded—especially from good things. Understandably, we want them to feel accepted and have a sense of belonging. Plus, Christians are commanded to show hospitality and love to strangers (Heb. 13:2). Thus, Christians often argue for making adjustments to Christian higher education to be hospitable to non-Christians.

These arguments came up some time ago in a controversy we had at our university over whether to allow non-Christian students to be Welcome Week leaders, Baylor University’s name for the first week of student orientation. As I have done before, in this essay, I will discuss why I think certain arguments for problematic forms of hospitality or love to non-Christians fail to consider the leadership necessary for engaging in faithful Christian higher education.

Misguided Christian Hospitality

Those arguing for greater inclusivity presented five arguments for why non-Christian students should be Welcome Week leaders. First, some argued that non-Christian students should be included out of faithfulness to our educational mission. Once it admits students, they contended, an educational institution should not deprive students of educational opportunities based on religion.

When it comes to participating in educational opportunities, I would largely agree. For example, in the Conyer’s program I lead, whose purpose is to help graduate students think about the relationship between the Christian faith and education, we admitted a Muslim student since we thought it would be a great opportunity for them to learn about how Christians approach teaching and scholarship.

Yet, participating is different than leading. To understand the Welcome Week leader role, we must first understand its purpose. Some of the student advocates for abandoning the Christian identity restriction articulated it accurately:

Baylor University’s Welcome Week leaders are among the first individuals incoming students meet when they arrive for their first semester at Baylor. These dedicated students serve as guides, mentors, and friends to freshmen during not only the first few confusing days here on campus, but throughout their first year here at Baylor.

They claimed the students serve as guides and mentors. What kind of guides and mentors?

Well, at Baylor University, they should introduce students to the Christian identity, unique educational mission, and Christian nature of the institution. Here are a few of our community’s core convictions or goals:

• Encourage the integration of Christian faith and the intellectual life;

• Equip individuals to understand life as a divine calling and thus serve society and the world in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ;

• Promote the health of mind, body, and spirit as these are understood in the Christian tradition and by the best of modern physical and psychological science;

• Strive to illuminate and enrich human experience by the word of God and the best of human science and culture;

• Encourage the understanding and care of the natural world as a matter of Christian stewardship;

• Facilitate the discovery of new knowledge to the glory of God and the betterment of humanity;

If we understand our Welcome Week leaders, as well as our Community Leaders (what most campuses call Resident Assistants or RAs), as guides or mentors to an institution with these types of core Christian convictions, they need certain qualifications to undertake this guidance. They need to demonstrate leadership experience in thinking Christianly about these various topics to introduce them to newcomers. One also needs to be personally living them out. Leaders need expertise and prior experience in ways that participants do not.

For example, I remember visiting a group of Romanian Orthodox Churches that are part of a famous group of painted churches from the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As a novice participant, I had only a partial idea of what some of the paintings, images, and symbols in the monastery meant. Fortunately, we had an English-speaking Romanian Orthodox priest with us who served as an expert guide. Thus, when I initially interpreted (in my mind) a Star of David on a step on which we placed our feet as a possible antisemitic expression common in Eastern Europe, the tour guide helpfully noted that the Star of David was there to understand that the Church is built on the Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish tradition. Any worshipping educational community needs to make sure its entering students are exposed to wise guides regarding what a Christian university represents and seeks to accomplish.

In fact, failing to do so is unfair to students. Upholding fairness and integrity requires that we provide the education we claim to offer in our admission advertisements to all students. If we profess to offer a Christian education, we must choose leaders, whether administrators, faculty, staff, or students, who can provide it.

Second, there was a religion professor who argued, “I would see no reason that a person of any religious tradition or a person of no religious tradition could not wholeheartedly support our mission.” Sure, non-Christians can affirm support for the Christian mission of the university. But affirming support for the mission is different than making a significant contribution to it. On my sports team or rock band, I don’t want fans; I want significant contributors to the team or group’s excellence. A Christian university should want student leaders who can contribute to the Christian mission as Christian educators, mentors, and guides, and not simply as fans. Fans can easily change sides when the team suffers losses; team members cannot. Fans are also incredibly critical and have unrealistic expectations because they are not players.

Third, a number of faculty and students made the argument that it would be an expression of Christian love for one’s neighbor to allow non-Christian students to participate as Welcome Week leaders. One group wrote that Baylor should seek “not only to love the Lord our God, but also to love our neighbor as ourselves by providing them with the same invaluable opportunity to lead and participate in this community.”

Again, the advocates did not consider love for one’s neighbor in light of the standards necessary “to lead” in a Christian educational community. I think it is loving to want everyone to have a chance to participate in and lead an orchestra. Yet, knowing how to read music is not extraneous to this engagement. It is not loving to have someone lead an endeavor if they do not know the theological language, theological reasoning, and internal Christian experiences intrinsic to being excellent in this position. Similarly, to lead and guide during Welcome Week, one needs not merely to be nice or hospitable. One needs to help initiate students into the Christian intellectual tradition and moral life of a community. Christians have unique theological language, motives, reasoning, and lived communal experience for undertaking these endeavors, and part of Christian education involves helping all students understand them.

Without that knowledge and experience, leaders cannot pass along the institution’s identity and core convictions. In my study of Christian higher education, it is quite clear from historical evidence that the Christian faithfulness of an institution necessarily involves prioritizing Christians in leadership roles, as president, faculty, staff, and yes, student leaders who can articulate what Christian faithfulness in higher education involves. Faithfulness to God comes first.

Fourth, related to this educational mission argument is the claim that failing to allow non-Christian students to be welcome week leaders means that we also fail to prepare students for a diverse world. Two social work professors made this argument.

Keeping in mind these ideals of preparing students for a diverse and interconnected global society, and our university’s expressed value of the diversity of our students from more than 85 countries, it would seem incongruent to keep student leaders from diverse religious identities from leadership opportunities like Welcome Week. Restricting this opportunity to only those students who identify with the Christian faith could limit the exposure to fellow students and future leaders that represent that diverse and interconnected global society.

I find the diversity argument the least compelling because it fails to connect its argument to the purpose of a Christian university. I would hope that a Christian university believes the best way to prepare students for a diverse and interconnected global society is to think Christianly about that society and what it means to be an excellent citizen and professional, and then to act on those theological convictions. “Exposure to diversity,” apart from particular ideas about personhood and virtue, is not some magic pill that makes everyone treat others with human dignity.

To do that, students must be taught that the diverse people they know are image bearers of God. That is not a teaching that simply comes from general revelation. It must come from the Jewish-Christian tradition, and it has been the source of social and political movements for equality and human dignity over the past two thousand years (see, for example, here, here, and here). One of the first things a Welcome Week leader should do at Baylor University is to make sure all students know we value each of them as image bearers of God, that their worth and value should be derived from that reality, and that, despite differences, we expect them to demonstrate God’s virtues toward other image bearers. It is Christian and believing Jewish students whose Scriptures contain that content, and hopefully they understand its implication and can incarnate it (unfortunately, I have found only 25% of Baylor seniors I have interviewed have built their worth and value on this truth—a Christian educational failure of intellectual discipleship).

Finally, there was the usual pragmatic argument. Some argued that allowing diverse students to serve during Welcome Week might help the retention of students (an unsupported empirical claim). Economic arguments are often the ones to undermine Christian institutions’ faithfulness. Universities that are unfaithful to their Christian mission are more comfortable surviving as something other than what they were than dying for what supposedly is their central identity.

Of course, all of these arguments could be used to contend for more non-Christian staff, faculty, and administrators. The core assumption behind them all is that qualified, thoughtful, and virtuous Christian leaders at various levels do not offer something essential to Christian higher education leadership and mentorship. In reality, they do.