When Diversity Drops: Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Pursuing Common Goals

49 In the public’s mind, evangelical Christians are known more for their aggressive advocacy on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage than for their commitment to racial justice. Sandy explained how she struggled to justify IVCF’s emphasis on race to fellow Christians: I think [racial reconciliation is] just a harder issue for people to swallow. I don’t think that even evangelism, as hard and challenging as it is, no one’s going to argue about it being a biblical value, right? No one’s going to argue. Now they might argue whether or not they’re responsible for it because “I’m not gifted and blah, blah, blah,” but no one’s going to argue about it. But everyone argues with you about whether or not issues about race or multiethnicity are biblical values. I mean, there are people out there that really think they’re not, and they think that we’re the devil that we’re teaching this stuff. Considering that race and racial reconciliation are often not seen as “biblical values,” how did IVCF persuade students to think otherwise? It did so by positioning race consciousness and faith as complimentary value systems. As Gordon Allport () wrote, “prejudice . . . may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and minority groups in the pursuit of common goals” (). Rather than working to foster a new identity that transcended race (Gaertner and Dovidio ; Marti ), IVCF pursued the goals of Christianity without downplaying the uniqueness or relevance 3 Pursuing Common Goals Building Congruence between Race and Faith 50 WHEN DIVERSITY DROPS of race. Borrowing Edgar Schein’s () terminology, this chapter probes the third layer of IVCF’s organizational culture schema, underlying assumptions , which Schein defines as “the ultimate source of values and action,” to reveal how this evangelical subculture had to position faith as its ultimate motivation for taking on issues of race and diversity. Most evangelicals lack a toolkit or frame of reference to discuss and recognize the significance of race (Emerson and Smith ). In addition, due to residential and educational segregation, most students come to college without meaningful exposure to racial diversity (Gurin et al. ; Orfield ). Faced with this dynamic, IVCF made the choice to equip its students with tools, frameworks, and approaches that encouraged them to develop race consciousness and embrace racial reconciliation. Specifically , it used five tools to construct congruency between race and faith: it () looked to the Bible for insight on issues of race and racial conflict, () relied on the foundations of Christian community to discuss race, () reframed ethnic identity, () rejected colorblindness, and () distanced itself from secular diversity initiatives. Race and Faith: Complementary or Contradictory? Why do so many evangelical Christians resist addressing race? At the very least, they fall into step with the rest of the colorblind United States, which perceives race and racism as issues of the past, irrelevant to today’s American meritocracy. Evangelicals are influenced by their cultural context, and western individualism lends itself to colorblindness as the dominant framework for addressing race (Emerson and Smith ; Rah ).1 Historical context also influences evangelicals’ general myopia on race. Peter Heltzel () proposes that “evangelical resistance to civil rights was based on its deep roots in apolitical fundamentalist thought, often shaped by a nexus of beliefs that included orders of creation, social conservatism, and white racism” (). After years of actively promoting explicit, colorconscious racism, evangelical Christians veered to the other extreme and embraced colorblindness as an appropriate way to address race, claiming that it was indicative of fair treatment and equality (Hawkins ).2 Colorblindness also provided a convenient way for many white evangelicals to PURSUING COMMON GOALS 51 avoid addressing contemporary manifestations of racism and racialization in society and the church. Many contemporary evangelicals also overlook issues of race because they see existence as divided into two, mutually exclusive realms: the heavenly/eternal and the secular/worldly (Bramadat ). To many evangelicals , issues of race, diversity, and social justice are temporal, worldly concerns and thus irrelevant to faith.3 Reflecting this cultural context, IVCF staff in the early to mid-s recalled making few connections between race and faith before college. Fred, a staff member, explained, “I think for the longest time race and identity were separated from spirituality so there were certain things that kind of fell under the spirituality category and it did not entail your identity in general. I’m not even talking about race, but also...