Lawsuit alleges LGBTQ discrimination at Christian colleges: ‘I felt so unwelcome, and it hurt so much to be there’

CHICAGO – Megan Steffen had completed all her college coursework at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and was at home with her parents in Michigan, waiting to graduate, when she got an email from the school, telling her an administrator needed to talk with her.

She agreed to a meeting via Zoom, where she learned that faculty members at the conservative Christian college had raised objections to her graduation.

Then the two administrators on the Zoom call began asking questions, among them: Had Steffen ever had romantic or sexual relations with a woman? Had she ever dated men? Did she envision dating women in the future?

Steffen, who had faced pushback at Moody ever since coming out as a lesbian two years before, answered the questions as best she could, in the hope that she would be allowed to graduate.

“I had a lot of meetings with (administrators) and they always got worse,” said Steffen. “But that felt the most violating, for sure.”

Steffen, 24, of Chicago is one of 33 plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education calling for enforcement of Title IX anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ students at religious institutions.

The lawsuit complains of “abuses and unsafe conditions” at hundreds of religious colleges and universities that receive federal funding but don’t have to adhere to Title IX in the case of LGBTQ students, due to a religious exemption. Plaintiffs allege they have been denied admission, expelled, subjected to anti-gay slurs, pressured into conversion therapy and otherwise treated unequally.

“There’s a really big need for LGBTQ students at these campuses to be protected,” said Paul Southwick, director of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, which filed the lawsuit.

“Right now nobody is protecting them,” he said.

Moody, where Steffen graduated in 2020, responded to questions from the Tribune with a written statement saying, “as a faith-based institution, Moody Bible Institute holds to a number of biblical convictions, including a historic, biblical understanding of marriage as part of broader religious convictions around human sexuality and gender.” Moody noted that students “voluntarily agree to support” school policies upon admission.

Moody’s website says, “Based on Scripture, nonmarital sex, homosexual sex, same-sex romantic relationships, and gender identification incongruent with one’s birth-sex all violate God’s generous intention for human relationships. Such practices misrepresent the nature of God Himself, and therefore are sinful under any circumstance.”

The school declined to discuss Steffen’s case, saying her records are confidential and protected by federal law, but stated a commitment to “deepening our understanding of how we can best provide and strengthen support for all students on our campuses.”

“We believe all persons are created in the image of God and possess full dignity, value, and worth, and therefore, bullying, harassment, and assault of any kind are not tolerated on our campuses,” according to the statement.

Steffen, who grew up in a conservative Christian household in Michigan, said that her first two years at Moody went well. Then, in spring 2018, administrators concerned that she and some classmates had attended the second Women’s March Chicago, called her in for a meeting. Administrators’ concern, she said, appeared to be that they perceived the march as pro-abortion rights.

In the course of the meeting, Steffen, who had only been out as a lesbian for two months at that point, brought up concerns that her fellow students were responding negatively to her sexual orientation.

“I never expected them to be allies or heralding me at a Pride Parade — I knew that wasn’t the circumstance I was in,” Steffen said of administrators. “But to see the lack of concern when I expressed the way I was being treated by my peers, the lack of respect, that was just (hard).”

Some students told her, to her face, that they disapproved of her sexual orientation, she said; there were also a lot of disapproving messages online. Once, she got an anonymous letter in the mail saying she should be ashamed of herself. Classmates would ask her to go out for coffee on the pretext of wanting to learn more, and then try to make her renounce her sexual orientation.

As a devout Christian, the hardest thing was being told by students that she had offended God, she said.

“To hear that this God that you’ve believed in all your life does not love and accept you for who you are (makes it) hard not to hate yourself,” she said.

Meanwhile, administrators repeatedly called her into meetings — about 10 in all — and expressed a range of concerns related to her sexual orientation. After she posted a joke on Facebook about the irony of being an out lesbian at Moody in fall 2019, she received a formal warning about her “inappropriate media posts” saying that her behavior was “dangerously close to the probationary level.”

After she finished her academic requirements in December 2019, she debated whether she even wanted to return to campus for her diploma.

“I felt so unwelcome, and it hurt so much to be there,” she said.

In a written statement, the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities , which opposes the lawsuit, said the key issue is religious freedom.

“What faith-based colleges and universities are doing is exercising their First Amendment right to maintain a campus community in which everyone is committed to living out a historic, biblical understanding of human sexuality, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” the statement said.

“Others might disagree with the underlying theology, but implementing this theology on a Christian college or university campus is not the same as ‘discriminating’ against LGBTQ students. Believing differently is not discrimination.”

Southwick said the students’ constitutional rights to equal protection and due process should take precedence over the schools’ First Amendment rights.

“If you look to the civil rights era, many of these same religious colleges also prohibited interracial dating and interracial marriage on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs,” he said. “It wasn’t until the government intervened and said, ‘We’re no longer going to tolerate racial discrimination in education — we’re not going to subsidize it,’ (that) a bunch of the schools all of a sudden no longer believed that.”

During her final meeting with administrators two weeks before graduation, Steffen, the daughter of a gym teacher and a day care provider, did what she could to deflect intrusive questions, but she was also keenly aware of what was at stake: She had to keep her head down and get her diploma, she said, because she could not financially afford to do anything else.

In the end, she received her diploma.

Now working as a barista in Lincoln Park, Steffen said she’s begun to fully heal from her Moody experience with the help of friends, family and therapy. She’s in touch with some current LGBTQ students at Moody and is putting together a list of resources to help them.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit is just beginning to wind its way through the courts. There are scenarios in which the exemption could be lifted within months, Southwick said, and others in which the legal battle could go on for years.

Steffen said she sees the lawsuit as a fight for the basics: respect, decency, and equal protection.

“I don’t think Moody’s ever going to become what in the Christian world they call affirming, which just means fully accepting of LGBTQ people,” Steffen said.

“However, as much as I find their beliefs so, so, so hurtful, you can still hold those beliefs and not actively discriminate.”