Baylor University, a prominent Baptist institution in Waco, Texas, has been a large part of religious culture in Texas, and up until a couple of days ago — before backlash from religious conservatives like BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey — that was all about to change.
The university was undergoing a progressive shift, and its recent acceptance of an almost $700,000 grant from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation was only speeding that shift up, as the goal of the grant was to “foster LGBTQ inclusion and belonging in the church.”
The school publicly highlighted this funding through a press release from its Diana R. Garland School of Social Work. The grant was planned to go toward research that would focus on “understanding and addressing the disenfranchisement and exclusion of LGBTQIA+ individuals and women within congregations to nurture institutional courage and foster change.”
“Baylor put out a press release about this. That in and of itself is a story. They are proud of this. They are excited about this. They are thankful for this grant money. This is not something that they are trying to slip under the rug,” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey said when criticizing Baylor’s initial reaction to the grant.
The specific project the grant was funding is called “Courage from the Margins: Inclusion and Belonging Practices for LGBTQIA plus.”
“OK, that ‘plus,’ what does that even mean?” Stuckey asked, noting that the project would include interviewing women across the country in two groups of 25 young adults ages 18 to 24 to gather information about their experiences in church settings.
The findings from the research would be used to “develop trauma-informed training resources for churches with the aim of encouraging more inclusive practices and environments for LGBTQIA plus individuals and women.”
“This is what it looks like to actually manifest toxic empathy,” Stuckey said. “So what this grant is going to fund is research that will be used to then guilt churches into not only including but affirming those who identify as homosexual or as the opposite sex.”
“This research will be weaponized, will be used as a tool of emotional manipulation, a mallet of manipulation to hit you, believing person, over the head, biblical Christian person, into accepting that which God calls sin. That is what this research will be used for. That is its express purpose,” she added.
Now, Baylor has rescinded its initial acceptance of the funds.
In a letter posted to the university’s website, Baylor University President Linda Livingstone explained that returning the funds “is the appropriate course of action and in the best interests” of the school.
While Livingstone wrote that Baylor remains “committed to providing a loving and caring community for all — including our LGBTQIA+ students,” she explained that after reviewing the “details and process surrounding this grant,” the concern was in “the activities that followed as part of the grant.”
“Specifically, the work extended into advocacy for perspectives on human sexuality that are inconsistent with Baylor’s institutional policies, including our Statement on Human Sexuality,” she wrote.
That Statement on Human Sexuality says that Baylor “affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God. Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm. Temptations to deviate from this norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior.”
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