This coming school year, I am leaving the public school where I taught for the past two years to join the faculty at a Jewish private school in the Los Angeles area. Because I still need to finish clearing my teaching credential, I have been researching local university programs. As part of that search, I reached out to Biola University. I spoke to some administrators, and initially, things looked positive. However, when I started filling out the application, I discovered a mandatory section on "Christian Commitment."
While I knew Biola was a Christian school, this rigid insistence on personal Christian belief surprised me. I previously attended Azusa Pacific University, another Christian institution, and there was never any expectation that students had to be professing Christians. It is true that professors occasionally brought up Christian content, and a few assignments required looking things up in the New Testament. As readers of this blog know, I have absolutely no problem with that. My professors appreciated me because, even when I disagreed with them, I respected their beliefs and took them seriously; I am still in contact with several of them today.
I inquired with a Biola administrator to see if some kind of exception could be made for my situation. Considering how easy it would be to lie on an online application—and that many applicants likely do precisely that—if I were running an admissions department, I would want to recruit unbelievers who respected Christianity enough not to lie about their lack of faith, perhaps finding a back door to let them in. It is not as if I grew up in a church and later rejected it; as a child, I never set foot in a church and, with the exception of Father Schmutz stories and polemics against Christian biblical exegesis, received no instruction in Christian doctrine. While our exchange was entirely positive, the administrator stood his ground: affirming Christian doctrine was not something he could compromise on.
While it is annoying that I will have to apply to a different school, I am honestly grateful to Biola for discriminating against me. I believe in freedom of discrimination as an essential component of free speech. If Biola were an Aryan Christian Church and wished to turn away Black applicants, I would support their legal right to do so. The fact that I have now been discriminated against as a non-Christian demonstrates that when I say private discrimination should be legal (however despicable it may be in practice), I am genuinely standing on principle.
Furthermore, as a Jew, I am grateful to Biola for forcing me to actively live out my rejection of Christian doctrines like the Trinity. I easily could have checked a box claiming I believed in it. Much like the early Christians who were ordered to offer a pinch of incense on an altar to Caesar, I could have told myself that no one takes an online admission form seriously. I chose not to do that because, regardless of what anyone at Biola thinks, I take my faith seriously. I am a Jew who believes that God is One, with no parts—that He is entirely divine, with no human aspect. Whether I believe this deeply enough to die for it is something I hope to never find out. At the very least, I am willing to be inconvenienced for it. In this, I stand with the generations of Jews throughout the early modern period who were barred from higher education because European universities—with the rare exception of Padua’s medical school—required students to formally profess a belief in Christian doctrine.
By turning me down, I would like to think I did that Biola administrator a favor, as a Christian, too. He had every excuse to bend the rules for my sake, but he refused. Perhaps that is simply because he is a soulless, Pharisaic, legalistic bureaucrat. But maybe he is an actual Christian who cares that there should still be at least one place left in this country outside of a church where it actually matters if someone believes in the Trinity. I allowed him to put his principles into practice. Because of me, Biola really does stand for something.
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