Evangelical college's contraception lawsuit proves divisive

WHEATON, Ill. — Three times each week during the school year, Wheaton College’s 2,400 undergraduates gather at a large chapel on the campus’ west end. Outside the Georgian-style building one sunny Friday in September, students hugged their friends in greeting and fiddled with their cell phones. Once inside and seated at their assigned spots, however, most of the students turned attentive. They raised their hands during an emotive worship song, closed their eyes for prayer and listened to a pastor from Tennessee deliver a sermon on “Finding Our Joy in God the Trinity.”

The door to Edman Memorial Chapel closes promptly at 10:35 a.m., and as chapel begins, student workers with clipboards stand in the balcony and count off the unoccupied seats. There’s a telling kind of tension here: Students attend chapel freely, for the most part, but attendance is also enforced.

Wheaton College is a selective and academically rigorous liberal-arts school, but thrice-weekly mandatory chapel services are just one of countless ways that it is unmistakably a Christian institution, too. (Disclosure: I graduated from Wheaton in 2002.) All students and full-time employees sign a “Community Covenant” that asks them to eschew alcohol and pornography, as well as traits like pride, dishonesty and hypocrisy. Faculty and staff annually reaffirm their commitment to the college’s statement of faith, which “defines the biblical perspective which informs a Wheaton education.” Prominent signs at two entrance points to the suburban Chicago campus bear the motto “For Christ and His Kingdom.”

Wheaton’s distinctly Protestant Christian character has been a core part of its identity since its founding by abolitionist and pastor Jonathan Blanchard in 1860. Now it also at the crux of a lawsuit that has thrust the school into the center of the national debate about religious freedom, sexual ethics and what it means to be a conservative Christian institution in a socially progressive culture. From the outside, Wheaton can look like a unified, even homogenous, community. But its lawsuit has prompted some otherwise sympathetic people — including some of Wheaton’s own faculty, students and alumni — to question whether this is a battle that needs to be fought at all.

Philip Ryken had been the president of Wheaton College for just two years when, in the summer of 2012, he made a bombshell announcement. With the pro bono help of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a combative and publicity-friendly legal firm, the college filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration. The suit challenges a component of the Affordable Care Act that requires employers to provide insurance coverage for emergency contraception, a requirement from which churches and other purely religious organizations are exempt. (The Becket Fund also represented Hobby Lobby, the retail chain whose objection to emergency contraception led to a landmark Supreme Court decision last June that said some corporations do not have to pay for insurance coverage of contraceptives that offend their religious beliefs.)

“I was really surprised and very disappointed,” recalled Leah Seppanen Anderson, who had been teaching political science at Wheaton for almost a decade when the college announced the suit. Anderson, whose areas of focus include gender and the politics of health care, was startled that the relatively new president had taken up the case. “My initial response was, this doesn’t seem like where we want to spend our social capital.” 

Wheaton and the Becket Fund seem determined to keep the conversation about the lawsuit focused on religious freedom. To be sure, it is an issue with serious potential consequences for the school. Many of the professors here seem to view the suit as a kind of defensive measure, intended to establish the college’s bona fides as a distinctly religious institution deserving of exemptions to new laws that encroach on its long-held values. In particular, they surmise, the college is concerned that in the future it will be forced to hire noncelibate LGBT people. (Out LGBT Christians who are committed to celibacy are increasingly accepted in evangelical circles; Wheaton, in fact, recently hired a self-identified celibate lesbian as a ministry associate in the chaplain’s office.)

“There was a long game going on, in addition to a short game,” said Bryan McGraw, a political-science professor who described himself as “broadly sympathetic” to Wheaton’s position. As McGraw pointed out, the worst-case scenario for Wheaton may be Bob Jones University v. United States, a 1983 Supreme Court case in which the judges ruled that the IRS could revoke a religious university’s tax-exempt status if the institution violated federal anti-discrimination policy. It’s an issue that is clearly on the minds of other Christian colleges. The president of evangelical Gordon College signed a widely publicized letter from faith leaders on the topic this summer to President Obama.

But if the case now known as Wheaton College v. Burwell was intended as a precautionary parry, say critics, it is one being executed on dangerously rickety scientific and moral scaffolding. For one thing, Wheaton’s assertion that emergency contraception causes abortion is, to put it generously, far from settled. Wheaton, like many anti-abortion groups, points out that the FDA’s own labels say ella and Plan B may affect implantation of a fertilized egg. But doctors are increasingly doubtful of that idea. “If these medications don’t in fact do what [Wheaton officials] are religiously opposed to, then there’s no clash between their religious beliefs and the provisions of medicine women need,” said Caroline Mala Corbin, a law professor at the University of Miami who has been critical of the suit. “You’re granting them an exemption for no reason whatsoever.”

Wheaton stated in an email, “Our decision was based on a careful review of the medical literature by scientists and medical ethicists who reviewed primary sources.” (The college’s media-relations office agreed to answer a small number of questions by email but declined to make a member of the administration available for an interview. The Becket Fund replied to a request for an interview with a brief written statement.)

Ryken has held several town hall discussions for faculty and staff about the suit and has convened a faculty advisory board. But some employees are still frustrated: If emergency contraception incontrovertibly causes abortions, then can’t employees be trusted to use their own moral judgment to avoid it? “There’s a demonstrated lack of confidence in their female employees, and that is really demeaning,” Anderson said.

The shakiness of Wheaton’s scientific position is compounded by the fact that there is far less moral agreement in the evangelical community about emergency contraception than there is about abortion, which most evangelicals fiercely oppose. Near the end of the summer, a frustrated Anderson met with about a dozen female faculty members to discuss the issue.

“There’s this external, out-facing argument to the federal government that ‘we believe these to be abortifacients, and this is part of our core religious identity,’ ” she said. “As an insider at Wheaton, I feel like we have not had that conversation.” She and most of the women she spoke with agreed that in their own lives, they would probably err on the side of not using emergency contraception. But Anderson said she’s simply not comfortable with the college making that decision for her, let alone presenting it to the world as a definitive evangelical value. “It seems like people at best aren’t sure, so why are we drawing the line on the sand on this issue?” 

On August 22, the Obama administration released new regulations on the contraceptive mandate, meant to comply with the Supreme Court opinion in July: Instead of filling out a form to register their objection, institutions like Wheaton could write a simple letter to claim their exemption. Wheaton has not issued a formal response yet, but the Becket Fund seems inclined to fight on. “It is disappointing that, even in its eighth version of the Mandate, the government is still claiming the right to decide who is religious enough for protection,” Mark Rienzi, senior counsel for the firm, wrote in an email.

As the government has issued accommodation after accommodation, Wheaton and the Becket Fund’s objections have become almost as technical as the arguments about what, exactly, constitutes an abortion. Critics like Corbin, the University of Miami law professor, point out that if merely writing a letter represents a “substantial burden” — the standard for exemption required by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — then this could allow almost any employer to claim exemptions from any law. Even sympathetic observers wonder whether the college can successfully argue they are being overburdened by simply writing a letter. “I wouldn’t place a lot of money on the college winning,” McGraw said.

No matter the outcome of the case, Wheaton’s choice to become so prominently involved in it will continue to prompt conversations within its own walls about its priorities, its reputation and the deep complexities of its character as a distinctly evangelical institution. “Theologically, we’re committed to being in the world but not of the world,” said Jones, the Wheaton theology professor, echoing a passage from the Book of John that has become something of a slogan for American evangelicalism. “Figuring out what that means in any particular case is always really difficult.”