Good ed., Joe. With more research, I’m sure one could demonstrate that good old ENVY is a basic problem here, in that IVCF and the other evangelical groups have probably had many more students consistently attending meetings than these Protestant groups for which Georgetown supplies chaplains.

I was a student leader in IVCF in my undergrad days back at SDSU, and can report that 1)while the national and regional leadership is always evangelical, student leaders and even some staff have often been from Protestant denominations not known to be very evangelical, with occasional Catholic student leaders, and that 2) IVCF was a place of broad political affiliation, a place where Jim Wallis/Tony Campolo/Ron Sider people could feel more or less at home, and finally 3) IVCF agressively sought out what it calls "multi-ethnicity" well before the advent of the diversity-first 90s. The point here is that it is an organization that, while having a definite creedal bottom line, and a strong commitment to evangelism, has always tended to try to work in as pluralistic a manner as its commitments make possible.

The Georgetown decision is very creepy--were GU committed to Catholic identity in some serious way, a la Ave Maria, or as Catholic colleges were prior to the 70s, then a former-IVCFer like me could swallow the decision. But Communist-sponsored churches really is the right analogy to what is going on in this power play.

I can also report that word has gotten out about GU’s decision among evangelicals rapidly--at a prayer group at our PCA church someone abruptly urged Christians to pray about the "heresy" at Georgetown. Odd language, I know, but there it is.

Carl,

Thanks for the additional "texture." I suspect that you’re right about some of the factors involved at Georgetown--that, above all, the "official" chaplains weren’t meeting either the ritual or spiritual needs of a significant percentage of Protestant students.

I hope that Georgetown can be embarrassed into walking back this decision, which is surely the best that can be hoped for (since it’s much less likely that they’d be faithful to traditional Roman Catholicism).