How Christian universities crash and burn

By John G. West, Op-ed contributor Thursday, March 20, 2025

The campus of Seattle Pacific University, a Christian school located in Seattle, Washington | Seattle Pacific University

Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and many other universities were founded explicitly as Protestant Christian institutions, only to devolve over time into something else. So, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Evangelical Protestants in America started again, creating a new generation of colleges and seminaries that they hoped would avoid the mistakes of their predecessors.

But as the current controversy over Wheaton College attests, history seems to be repeating itself. And the problem reaches far beyond Wheaton.

For 12 years I served as a professor at Seattle Pacific University (SPU). Founded by pious Free Methodists in the 1890s, the school is another historically Evangelical institution like Wheaton. While there, I was able to witness firsthand how a Christian university deconstructs.

To be sure, Seattle Pacific still publicly identifies itself as a “Christian university” that is both “historically orthodox” and “clearly Evangelical.” The school remains a member of the Christian College Consortium along with Wheaton and other self-identified evangelical Christian colleges. Prospective students continue to be told that “At SPU, everything we do is rooted in faith … faculty integrate their faith into how they teach and how they live.”

Alumni might wonder, however, precisely what faith SPU faculty are integrating into their teaching and their lives. In 2021, the university made national headlines when 72% of its faculty voted no confidence in the school’s board of trustees. Why? Because the board wouldn’t repeal the university’s Statement on Human Sexuality, which affirmed that “sexual experience is intended between a man and a woman” and “the full expression of sexuality is to be experienced and celebrated” within “the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.”

How can you have a faithful Christian university when more than 70% of its faculty reject basic biblical teaching on marriage? The answer is simple: You can’t.

SPU’s heterodoxy isn’t just confined to sex. Lincoln Keller graduated from SPU in 2021 and wrote a book about his disillusionment. According to Keller, his professors taught him that the Bible is flawed, contradictory, factually wrong, and unclear. As a consequence, “for certain professors and students, the Word of God was not supreme authority. Instead, contemporary scholarship, science, or culture had the final say on what professors and students should believe.”

It may seem surprising, but I don’t place most of the blame for SPU’s downfall on its theologically liberal faculty. Those faculty are wrong in my view, but they have the courage of their convictions. No, the real responsibility for what SPU has become lies elsewhere, and it isn’t as obvious.

A squandered legacy

When I was first hired by SPU for a tenure-track position, a faculty member who interviewed me said something I will never forget. He warned me that the school had a very theologically conservative board of trustees. In fact, I was told in confidential tones, that the board had just recently rejected for tenure a religion professor because the board thought he had unorthodox beliefs. The faculty member telling me this thought he was revealing something scandalous.

Little did he know that when I heard his confession, I thought “good for the board of trustees.” That’s precisely what I believed the board of a Christian institution was called to do: defend the integrity of its mission. SPU was still an Evangelical institution when I joined its faculty in the mid-1990s because those in authority had tried their best to keep the university tied to its mission. They hadn’t been perfect, and there already were many faculty who weren’t biblically orthodox. But they had to be careful, because they knew there were limits to what would be tolerated.

The board’s denial of tenure of a faculty member on grounds of unbiblical theology was probably the most powerful message it could have sent to the campus community. Many faculty didn’t like the message, but they understood it. The board’s decisive action chilled the faculty’s enthusiasm for going further afield and hiring even more unorthodox people. When I came to SPU, the school still had a fighting chance to maintain its Christian identity.

Alas, during the 12 years I was there, I saw the legacy of SPU squandered. Soon a new president was hired. To the delight of many faculty, he gradually convinced board members that they were too involved. The board became less focused on the details, and more and more people were hired who pushed the institution in a new direction.

The watershed moment

In retrospect, the watershed moment in the school’s history came during 2000-2001. That was the school year SPU’s president drafted a plan to revamp the boards of all Free Methodist colleges, effectively removing the power of the denomination to hold them accountable.

The president’s plan proposed the creation of “a new Board of Trustees, no longer selected by the denomination or its sponsoring conferences.” Free Methodist representatives would be demoted to a new and largely advisory “Board of Governors” whose only real authority was to confirm the board of trustees’ nomination of the university President.

By the time SPU entered into its debate over governance, there had been a great deal of research about how formerly Christian universities had become secularized in America. As I delved into some of this scholarship, it seemed to me that SPU was following the exact same path trod by earlier Christian institutions that failed.

One of the most insightful studies I came across was James Burtchaell’s magisterial book, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches (1998). (Unbeknown to me at the time, Fr. Burtchaell had been seriously accused of sexual misconduct with male students at the University of Notre Dame and had resigned his post.)

According to Burtchaell, a key signpost along the road of secularization was the end of church control of college governance: “The critical turn, as we have seen, often involved forcing those who spoke for the church out of college governance.” Despite the best of intentions, ending church control often removed a vital structural safeguard that helped maintain the religious integrity of colleges and opened the door to secularization in the generation following the change. Trustees have the final say not only over budgets, but over tenure, top administrative positions, and college programs. A change in board composition almost inevitably will have long-term consequences for a school’s character and mission.

When SPU’s board members finally learned the details of the plan to replace them, they should have fired the president. Instead, they faltered. They did not discharge the president, although his plan was placed on hold.

Once the board showed its failure of nerve, the president waited for things to quiet down, regrouped, and continued his push. By 2005, Free Methodist members of the board were reduced to a mere third of the board, and they were no longer selected directly by the Free Methodist Church. The church nominated people, but the Trusteeship Committee of SPU’s board now had to approve them. The board had been neutered.

One of my last experiences at SPU before deciding to leave was telling. I tried to defend a faculty member who was being denied tenure. He was an outstanding colleague and one of the few theologically and politically conservative faculty members hired in the last years I was there. But in the end, neither the president nor the board was willing to overturn the verdict of the increasingly progressive (and intolerant) faculty.

Recall that when I arrived, the board had denied tenure to a theological liberal. Now it was ratifying the expulsion of a theological conservative.

Here is the most important point: The SPU board that capitulated was not itself theologically liberal. It was populated by personally devout and theologically conservative Christians, many from the business world.

In my view, these conservative Christians bear more responsibility for SPU’s transformation than the liberal faculty. Unlike the theological liberals, they did not have the courage of their convictions.

By the 2020s, the university was led by a new president, and there were just enough Evangelical board members left to prevent a formal change of the school’s official statement of faith or its statement on sexuality because those formal changes required a supermajority. But there were no longer enough biblically solid members to actually enforce things like denying tenure to unorthodox professors.

The previous board of conservative Christians had sown the seeds, and now the bitter harvest was left to others to reap.

After the public blow-up on campus over human sexuality, SPU’s president resigned and so did key board members. It now appears that current board members may be trying to steer the school back toward its Evangelical identity. How serious they are remains an open question.

Last year, the university allowed its gym to be used for a LGBT festival that “was teeming with queer joy and affirmation” according to the student newspaper. If the new leadership was truly committed to restoring the school’s Evangelical identity, shutting down that event should have been an easy decision. More critically, the university needs to recruit new faculty and staff who affirm historic Christian teachings or nothing will change.

The current leadership may not have much time. As SPU became increasingly woke over the past decade, student enrollment plummeted. As a result, the school has announced plans to slash 40% of its faculty and staff and eliminate 19 majors.

Abraham Lincoln spoke famously about the challenge of perpetuating institutions after their founding. SPU is a cautionary tale about what happens when personally orthodox board members fail to take that challenge seriously when it comes to their Christian university.

Originally published at Clear Truth Media.

John G. West, Ph.D., is Vice President of Discovery Institute and author of Stockholm Syndrome Christianity: Why Christian Leaders Are Failing — and What We Can Do About It.