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"That was a difficult decision, because we have never been a litigious organization," Hill says. "But at each of the three times when the Apostle Paul calls on the civil powers in Acts, he uses his rights to ensure that the church is strengthened when he leaves. We were compelled to go this route not just for our sake, but for the sake of other ministries."

On December 30, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a Philadelphia-based civil liberties organization, issued an open letter putting pressure on UNC chancellor James Moeser to reverse his staff's decision. The Wall Street Journal, along with a host of others, picked up the story, including this ironic tautology from FIRE president Alan Charles Kors about the Rutgers case: "It is prohibited at this public university for a Christian organization to be Christian."

But to activists like Jason Lurie, the tautology ran the other direction. How could any group at an institution dedicated to non-discrimination so explicitly discriminate? As Lurie documented for the Undergraduate Council, many other large religious organizations at Harvard, from the Catholic Students Association to the Islamic Society, had no such restrictions in their constitutions. Why was it evangelical Christians alone who insisted on tests of belief for their leadership?

At the same time, activists like Lurie found it impossible to imagine that their passion for non-discrimination could be leading them into a form of discrimination that the First Amendment specifically singles out: interference with religion. They also admitted that nearly every organization had standards for their leaders, even if they weren't spelled out in their constitutions.

Why all the furor over a faith statement that many of the faithful didn't seem to need, and a pluralism that even the pluralists admitted was not truly enforceable? Discovering what is at stake in these conflicts requires two kinds of time travel—into the largely forgotten past (which has shaped both evangelicals and the secular universities where they study) and into the future.

The history behind the "doctrinal basis" in InterVarsity fellowships' constitutions is key.

At the turn of the 20th century, Darwinism, historical criticism, and modern optimism ushered in Western Christianity's most sweeping realignment since the Reformation. Christian student movements experienced sometimes gradual, sometimes wrenching changes as liberal modernism gained momentum.

The liberal Christians who gained control of organizations like England's Student Christian Movement (SCM) did not wish to repudiate Christianity altogether—instead, they sought to reinterpret it in forms more congenial to modern science and scholarship.

Disenfranchised from a movement that had been a source of major evangelistic and mission momentum only a few years earlier, more conservative students at schools like Cambridge and Oxford dissociated themselves from the SCM. When their "Inter-Varsity Fellowship" crossed the Atlantic, it brought along their concern for doctrinal specificity.

The "statement of faith" in InterVarsity constitutions is an inscribed memory of the instability of Christian institutions in the face of cultural pressure. What seems to Lurie to be an unnecessary imposition of dogmatic uniformity was to this earlier generation of evangelicals a minimum bulwark against the erosion of their faith.

The events of 2002-2003 had roots in more recent history as well. In April 2000, a student governing board at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, "derecognized" InterVarsity's Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF), effectively banning it from campus. The grounds were a complaint by TCF member Julie Catalano that she had been denied a leadership role in the organization because she was a lesbian.

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October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10