Calvin College - Where Identity Trumps Diversity

Below you will find another story dealing with a Baptist and the issues of race and diversity.

Denise Isom is an EDUCATION professor at Calvin College in Michigan. Isom is African-American and is a Baptist. This past fall Isom requested an exemption to Calvin's requirement that all faculty join a Christian Reformed Church (or one in another denomination in “ecclesiastical fellowship” with the Dutch-rooted church, known as the CRC). Such acceptable denominations include the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Reformed Churched in America and the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America.

Isom requested an exemption so that she could join a black Baptist church instead. In a letter to Calvin's President, Isom writes:

The needs surrounding my racial and cultural identity consist of a complicated set of issues that derive from the unique positionality I find myself in as a person of color on this campus and in this community. Each day, in formal and informal ways, I must address the issues of race and culture, often engaging in ways that carry a psychological, emotional, social, and physical cost. Though there are CRC churches and communities that are striving to reflect a multicultural vision in the church's make-up and worship content, they are not "there" yet. As a person who has long worked towards those ends in predominately White settings, I find myself at a place where, for emotional, social, and spiritual health, I need a place of worship that is already consistent with my culture and able to grapple with issues of race in ways which make it a respite, a re-charging and growing place for me, as opposed to another location where I must "work" and where I am "other."

As someone for whom research, scholarship, and service are centered around issues of social justice, race, culture, and gender, I need to be intimately tied to populations of people of color. My current work on racialized gender identity in African American children will be conducted in a church setting to establish the role of religiosity in those identity constructs. That work and numerous other projects and community connections would be greatly enhanced by my attending a Black church. My membership in said community will not only strengthen my work, but my ability to minister to and be ministered by those communities, gaining the kinds of spiritual development that informs by research and makes me a better scholar and Christian.

According to Inside Higher Education, Isom's request was rejected by Calvin's Board of Trustees back in October. Isom must join a church in accordance with Calvin's requirement or her tenure-track appointment will end at the end of 2008-2009. Calvin's Provost followed the announcement with this rather absurd statement:

For more than 130 years Calvin has been affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church, and we believe that Reformed theology and a Reformed world and life view and heritage have served the college well. The history of Christian institutions of higher education in this country justifies caution in this area. Nearly all Christian colleges and universities that distanced themselves from their founding denominations and theological traditions eventually also drifted away from being Christian in any meaningful way.

The article notes that the conflict at Calvin highlights the challenge of recruiting and maintaining a diverse faculty, staff and student body at Christian institutions rooted in particular churches - that tend to predominantly attract members from one race over any other.

Alan Wolfe, a well-known scholar out of Boston College points out that there is indeed a shortage of African-American Calvinists! Noting the Dutch roots of the Christian Reformed Church, Wolfe points out that "Calvin's in somewhat of a unique tradition because its faith test is essentially both religious and ethnic. Imagine a national search trying to find an African-American Calvinist. It's going to be difficult." Another scholar asks, "If your church is non-diverse, and you limit your faculty to members of the church, how can you ever expect to {have a diverse campus}"

It's very clear that such strict church membership requirements are a huge obstacle to achieving real diversity among faculty. And when diversity is nonexistent among the faculty and administration - the student body won't be diverse either. Other Christian colleges and universities in addition to Calvin College have much work to do on this front.