News
Christian Union perpetuates culture of homophobia at elite universities
Matt Bennet founded organization in 2002
The Christian Union was founded in 2002 by CEO Matt Bennet to fight what he saw as the secularization of top universities and to raise up a generation of global leaders with Christian values. Since it established its first ministry program at Princeton University in 2002, Christian Union has established chapters at all eight Ivy League Schools, as well as at Stanford University and Harvard Law School.
To most onlookers, the Christian Union appears to be a relatively benign presence on these campuses.
Christian Union’s Dartmouth College chapter, for example, until the middle of last year made waffles late on Friday nights to give to students walking home from Frat Row, and these “Christian waffles” made the group somewhat of a hit among the college’s partying community. Dartmouth Christian Waffles, which now operates independently of Christian Union, now makes the waffles.
Behind the Christian Union’s friendly aesthetic and glossy promotional materials, however, there is a sinister and well documented history of homophobia, and queer student members have felt the consequences of the organization’s fundamentalist approach to sex and sexuality.
In the wake of the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, the Christian Union Magazine published an article titled “After Obergefell: What Can the Church do?”, describing the ruling as “egregious” and calling on the church to reach out to “those with same-sex attraction and gender identity confusion” and help them form a “Biblical view of themselves.” Under all of the coded religious language, this means, at worst, praying the gay away, and at best, celibacy.
On July 21, 2016, the Christian Union Magazine published an article titled “Christianity Can’t Be Stretched to Endorse Homosexuality,” directly in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Fla. Instead of mourning this instance of extreme violence against the LGBTQ community, the article launched into a defense of the organization’s non-affirming theology, arguing that a true Christian could never accept “gay sexual practices” while remaining faithful to the Bible.
This article is one of many on the topic of what the Christian Union calls “same-sex attraction” — even that phrase robs queer people of humanity and minimizes what it means to be gay — and all are available on Christian Union’s website for the world to see. However, the Christian Union is first and foremost an organization that engages with college students, and to understand the human impact of their fundamentalist theology, the Washington Blade reached out to several current and former Christian Union members about their experiences with the group.
Darby Aono, who graduated from Yale University in 2017, became involved in Yale Christian Union at the end of her freshman year. She was invited to the group by a friend from her dorm, and Aono’s interactions with the first ministry fellow she met were overwhelmingly positive. She continued to get involved with Christian Union, including joining a Bible study later that year.
“I was at Yale over the summer, and I was invited to their Bible study, so I started going to that. There were definitely suspicious things — not about queer stuff, yet — but at that time they did not have women in leadership roles, and it was understood that were would not be,” Aono said.
Valentina Fernandez is a current sophomore at Dartmouth College, and she shared that her experience with Christian Union at Dartmouth has been generally positive. But, similarly to Aono’s initial experience at Yale, Dartmouth’s chapter had an off-putting approach to gender.
Fernandez shared that everyone in the group was very welcoming during her first year, and as someone who was raised Christian but wasn’t very knowledgeable about traditions or the Bible, she was mostly there to find community.
“The reason why a lot of [sophomores], particularly girls, are not as involved this year is because apparently a girl can’t be president by herself — she needs to be co-president with a guy. And a lot of us were like, what?! I wish I knew more about that,” Fernandez said.
While the Christian Union’s approach to women in leadership was concerning for both Fernandez and Aono, it was when Aono started to question her own sexuality that more contentious conversations about queer identities started to surface within Yale Christian Union.
“I think it was maybe during my sophomore year, when I was like, oh, like, maybe I’m not straight. And so I would sometimes talk to my friend in my dorm who was in Christian Union, who originally invited me, and we would get into arguments about homosexuality,” Aono said.
“The party line of Christian Union at that time was ‘love the sinner, hate the sin,’ where we all sin, so we aren’t going to excommunicate anyone for feeling same sex attraction, but just don’t act on it. Don’t sin. I would say that was generally how people seemed to feel about it.”
Then, Aono joined a Christian Union book club, where they read Wesley Hill’s book “Washed and Waiting,” in which Hill advocates for gay Christians to live celibate.
“I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I will say I personally joined the book club because I knew I was queer,” Aono said. “A large part of the discussion was about how to acknowledge the fact that you experience same-sex attraction without acting on it.”
Aono described reading Bible passages in the book club about being gay alongside other passages about being a drunkard or a thief, and feeling a sense of deep incongruity between the two.
“I remember being in the book club and being like: Being gay just is categorically different than stealing. I don’t understand why those two things are listed together,” Aono said.
However, one of the most pivotal conversations about being queer during Aono’s time with the Christian Union happened in the wake of the Obergefell ruling. After seeing the articles Christian Union was publishing about homosexuality after the ruling, Aono reached out to Christian Union via email, asking them to stop spreading incorrect and harmful messages. This email is what got her a meeting with Chris Matthews, the ministry director of Yale Christian Union at the time.
“Somehow, the ministry director figured out that I had sent this email. And so eventually we ended up deciding to have a meeting. At first, we were just arguing about whether you could change the fact that you were gay. At some point, I basically came out to him as queer,” Aono recalled. “And he said, ‘I understand how you’re feeling, because when I was a teenager, I used to have sexual feelings towards office supplies, but I grew out of that.’ I didn’t even know what to say in response to that. I didn’t fight him, because I think I was too shellshocked.”
“I remember walking out of there and then having to go to a ‘welcome the freshmen to Christian Union’ event. And I was like, I don’t know how I’m supposed to go welcome some fucking freshmen after this,” Aono said.
While comparing being queer to being attracted to office supplies is a truly unique instance, moments of casual — and non-casual — homophobia are all too common in the Christian Union. This doesn’t mean that students don’t find meaningful community in the group, or that all of its members are non-affirming of queer people, but the organization itself has a long track record of unsupportive and sometimes outright discriminatory practices.
Harvard University’s chapter of Christian Union, called Harvard College Faith and Action, ignited controversy in 2018 for forcing a student leader to step down after finding out that she was in a celibate same-sex relationship. This led to HCFA being put on probation for violating the university’s anti-discrimination policies for student organizations, only to be re-recognized a year later, despite failing to disaffiliate from Christian Union as the college had required.
A recent Harvard graduate and former member of HCFA, who asked to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns, recalled being caught off guard by how non-affirming the organization was.
“I became interested in HCFA because of some racial justice work that they were doing,” they said. “I didn’t expect them to be fully affirming. I didn’t realize quite how bad it would be.”
A few months after HCFA pressured the student leader to step down for being in a same sex relationship, they again stirred controversy by inviting writer and self-identifying former lesbian Jackie Hill-Perry to Harvard to speak with Christian Union in February 2018. While HCFA characterized this as an “internal” event, Hill-Perry’s presence on campus drew attention, and protesters bearing rainbow flags showed up to the event.
Princeton University’s chapter of Christian Union had also hosted Jackie Hill-Perry in February 2017, so the practice of Christian Union paying a self-identified “speaker to preach on the sins of homosexuality was nothing new.”
The recent Harvard graduate, who attended Hill-Perry’s Harvard speech, recalled the event and HCFA’s efforts to re-characterize it as an internal, scriptural conversation instead of an anti-gay public forum.
“It was very much spun as, she’s going to talk about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane before he decided to sacrifice himself,” the graduate said. “The HCFA kept pushing the idea that this was going to be about this particular Bible story, which is a very important Bible story amongst Christians. Now, she did preach on that — and there was no program given before — but she very much preached on the immorality of same-sex relationships and how you can overcome same-sex attraction.”
Unlike Aono, who ended up talking with Yale Christian Union leadership about her concerns, the anonymous Harvard graduate recalled generally being ignored by HCFA leadership.
“I never got any meeting with any leadership. No one was pulling me into their office — I think they were just hoping I’d shut up,” they said.
Like this former Harvard student, the Blade also had trouble getting a meeting with Christian Union leadership. Almost everyone to whom the Blade reached out to for this article declined to comment.
Don Weiss and Noah Crane, ministry directors at Harvard and Dartmouth, respectively, both declined requests for an interview. Multiple Dartmouth students who are or were Christian Union student leaders, and neither the communications staff of Christian Union nor Tyler Parker ever responded to multiple requests for comment.
“I imagine a lot of people don’t want to talk to you because they were so incredibly damaged. I have no regrets — I’m glad that I brought this up because I have no idea if other people would have,” said the Harvard graduate. “I’m glad that people know that HCFA can be so harmful.”
The White House
Hundreds protest ICE killing of Renee Nicole Good in D.C.
Married queer woman shot in Minneapolis on Wednesday
Hundreds of people took to the streets of D. C. on Thursday night to protest the killing of a U.S. citizen by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
Protests began at the busy — and increasingly queer — intersection of 14th and U Streets, N.W. There, hundreds of people held signs, shouted, and made their way to the White House to voice their dissent over the Trump-Vance administration’s choice to increase law enforcement presence across the country.
The protest, which also occurred simultaneously in cities large and small across the country, comes in the wake of the death of Minneapolis resident Renne Nicole Good at the hands of ICE Agent Jonathan Ross. Good left behind two children and a wife, Rebecca Good.
Records obtained by the Associated Press found that Ross was an Iraq War veteran and nearly two decades into his career with U.S. Border Patrol and ICE.
Good was gunned down just blocks away from where George Floyd was killed by police in 2020, sparking weeks of national protests. Minnesota officials say the FBI has blocked their access to an investigation into the fatal shooting, according to a BBC story published on Friday.
In the nation’s capital, protesters marched from the intersection of 14th and U Street to Lafayette Square, right outside the White House. Multiple D.C. organizations led the protest, most notably Free DC, a nonprofit that works to ensure the right of “self-determination” for District residents, as many local laws can be reviewed, modified, or overturned by Congress. Free DC had organized multiple protests since the Trump-Vance administration was elected.
The Washington Blade spoke to multiple protesters towards the tail end of the protest about why they came out.
Franco Molinari, from Woodbridge, Va., crossed the Potomac to partake in his first-ever protest.
“I don’t appreciate ICE and the use of federal agents being pretty much militarized against America,” Molinari said while holding a “Justice for Renee” sign. “The video of Renee being executed cartel style in her car was enough for me to want to come out, to at least do something.”
Molinari, like many others the Blade spoke with, found out about the protest on Instagram.
“It was my friend there, Sarah … had sent a link regarding the protest to a group chat. I saw it in the morning, and I thought, ‘You know what, after work, I’m head out.’”
He also shared why protesting at the White House was important.
“I already saw the response that the president gave towards the murder of Renee, and it was largely very antagonizing,” Molinari said.
President Donald Trump, along with federal leaders under him, claimed that Good “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.” The president’s claims have been widely discredited through multiple videos of the incident, which show Good was attempting to leave the scene rather than attacking the officer.
“I hope that anybody would be able to see that and see the response and see for themselves that it just is not correct,” Molinari said.
The Blade also spoke with leftist influencer Dave the Viking, who has more than 52,000 followers on TikTok, where he posts anti-fascist and anti-Trump videos.
“We’re out here to make sure that this regime can’t rewrite history in real time, because we all know what we saw … we’re not going to allow them to run with this narrative that they [ICE agents] were stuck in the snow and that that poor woman tried to weaponize her car, because we all saw video footage that proves otherwise,” he told the Blade. “We’re not going to let this regime, the media, or right-wing influencers try to rewrite history in real time and try to convince us we didn’t all see what we know we saw.”
Dave the Viking continued, saying he believes the perceived power of ICE and other law enforcement to act — oftentimes in deadly and unjustifiable ways — is a product of the Trump-Vance administration.
“There’s a line between fascism and anti-fascism. These motherfuckers have been pushing that envelope, trying to label an idea a terrorist organization, to the point of yesterday, crossing that line hardcore. You face the point of looking at history and saying there was this 1989, 2003 America, where we’re just going in, raiding resources. Where is this fucking 1930s Germany, where we’re going in and we’re about to just start clearing shit and pulling knots? Yeah, nope. We proved that shit yesterday.”
Two people were injured in another shooting involving federal agents, this time Border Patrol in Portland, Ore., on Thursday afternoon.
KC Lynch, who lives near American University, also spoke about her choice to protest with a group.
“I came out today because everything that ICE has done is absolutely unacceptable, not only killing this one woman, but also the fact that they’ve been imprisoning people in places that are literally, that have been literally on record by international organizations shown to be human rights violating. It’s unbelievably evil.”
Lynch also echoed Dave’s opinion about parallels between the Trump-Vance administration and the rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.
“It’s literally what happened before the Holocaust. We should all be scared. We should all be angry. I’m so angry about it … even talking about it — I’m sorry,” she said before getting choked up.
Lynch emphasized that despite the circumstances in which people were protesting together, the sense of community was strong and powerful.
“I feel like it’s important for people to know that we’re angry, even if no policy changes come out of it, and it’s just nice to yell and be angry about it, because I feel like we’ve probably all been feeling this way, and it’s nice to be around people that are like minded and to like have a sense of community.”
Venezuela
AHF client in Venezuela welcomes Maduro’s ouster
‘This is truly something we’ve been waiting for’ for decades
An AIDS Healthcare Foundation client who lives in Venezuela told the Washington Blade he welcomes the ouster of his country’s former president.
The client, who asked the Blade to remain anonymous, on Thursday said he felt “joy” when he heard the news that American forces seized Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, at their home in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, during an overnight operation on Jan. 3.
“This is truly something we’ve been waiting for for 26 or 27 years,” the AHF client told the Blade.
Hugo Chávez became Venezuela’s president in 1999. Maduro succeeded him in 2013 after he died.
“I’ve always been in opposition,” said the AHF client, who stressed he was speaking to the Blade in his personal capacity and not as an AHF representative. “I’ve never agreed with the government. When I heard the news, well, you can imagine.”
He added he has “high hopes that this country will truly change, which is what it needed.”
“This means getting rid of this regime, so that American and foreign companies can invest here and Venezuela can become what it used to be, the Venezuela of the past,” he said.
The AHF client lives near the Colombia-Venezuela border. He is among the hundreds of Venezuelans who receive care at AHF’s clinic in Cúcuta, a Colombian city near the Táchira River that marks the border between the two countries.
The Simón Bolívar Bridge on the Colombia-Venezuela border on May 14, 2019. (Washington Blade video by Michael K. Lavers)
The AHF client praised U.S. President Donald Trump and reiterated his support for the Jan. 3 operation.
“It was the only way that they could go,” he said.
The Venezuelan National Assembly on Jan. 4 swore in Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president, as the country’s acting president. The AHF client with whom the Blade spoke said he is “very optimistic” about Venezuela’s future, even though the regime remains in power.
“With Maduro leaving, the regime has a certain air about it,” he said. “I think this will be a huge improvement for everyone.”
“We’re watching,” he added. “The actions that the United States government is going to implement regarding Venezuela give us hope that things will change.”
Minnesota
Reports say woman killed by ICE was part of LGBTQ community
Renee Nicole Good shot in Minneapolis on Wednesday
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis as she attempted to drive away from law enforcement during a protest on Wednesday.
The Star Tribune newspaper identified the victim as Renee Nicole Good, 37, a Minneapolis resident who lived blocks from where she was shot in the Central neighborhood, according to reports. Donna Ganger, Good’s mother, told the Star Tribune that her daughter lived in the Twin Cities with her wife.
Multiple videos of the shooting have gone viral on social media, showing various angles of the fatal incident — including footage that shows Good getting into her car and attempting to drive away from law enforcement officers, who had their weapons drawn.
In the videos, ICE agents can be heard telling Good to “get out of the fucking car” as they attempted to arrest her. Good, who press reports say was married to a woman, ended up crashing her car into an electric pole and other vehicles. She was later transported from the scene of the shooting and died at the hospital.
President Donald Trump defended the ICE agent on Truth Social, saying the officer was “viciously” run over — a claim that coincides with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s assessment of the situation. Noem, a South Dakota Republican, insisted the officer “fired defensive shots” at Good after she attempted to run over law enforcement agents “in an attempt to kill them — an act of domestic terrorism.”
Multiple state and local officials disputed claims that the shooting was carried out in self-defense at the same time Noem was making those assertions.
An Instagram account that appears to belong to Good describes her as a “poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN,” accompanied by a rainbow flag emoji.
A video posted to X after the shooting shows a woman, reportedly her wife, sitting on the ground, crying and saying, “They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do.”
“We’ve dreaded this moment since the early stages of this ICE presence in Minneapolis,” Mayor Jacob Frey said during a Wednesday press conference. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly that [the DHS’s claim of self-defense] is bullshit. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed.”
“I have a message for ICE. To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” Frey continued. “We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. Long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy are being terrorized, and now somebody is dead. That’s on you, and it’s also on you to leave.”
Across the Capitol, members of the House and the Senate condemned the actions of the officer.
“There’s no indication she’s a protester, there’s nothing that at least you can see on the video, and therefore nothing that the officers on the ground could see that identify her as someone who’s set out to try to do harm to an ICE officer,” U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Wednesday night on MS NOW’s “The Weeknight.”
“There is no evidence that has been presented to justify this killing,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a statement on his website. “The masked ICE agent who pulled the trigger should be criminally investigated to the full extent of the law for acting with depraved indifference to human life.”
“ICE just killed someone in Minneapolis,” U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, posted on X. “This administration’s violence against communities across our country is horrific and dangerous. Oversight Democrats are demanding answers on what happened today. We need an investigation immediately.”
In a statement to the Advocate, Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson wrote, “Today, a woman was senselessly killed in Minneapolis during an ICE action — a brutal reminder that this agency and the Trump regime put every community at risk, spreading fear instead of safety. Reports that she may have been part of the LGBTQ+ community underscore how often the most vulnerable pay the highest price.”
National LGBTQ Task Force President Kierra Johnson also responded to Good’s death.
“We recognize and mourn the loss of Renee Nicole Good and extend our condolences to her family, loved ones, and community,” said Johnson in a statement. “This loss of life was preventable and reprehensible, particularly coming at the hands of federal agents.”
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