Why Does Baylor University Have a Pro-Choice, Gay-Affirming, Trans-Affirming Professor?
A woke professor at Baylor University has come under fire for blasting acclaimed Harry Potter author J.K. Rowing for her opposition to normalizing the transgender movement, calling her out for her apparent ‘hatred of trans-people.’ While this is deeply troubling, it is hardly the worst thing about him.
Founded in 1845 and claiming 16,000 students, Baylor University is the world’s largest Baptist University and one of the oldest. Like many once-faithful institutions that have gone before her, however, Baylor is deeply compromised and is inexorably on the downgrade.
Not only have they hosted Beth Moore and Jemar Tisby for a conference on “Racism in the White Church,” an embarrassment of cringe if there ever was one, but Baylor recently hosted a “Queer Sex-Ed Night whose advertisements featured a Planned Parenthood logo.
Despite affirming that “The mission of Baylor University is to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community” and “the biblical understanding that sexual relations of any kind outside of marriage between a man and a woman are not in keeping with the teaching of Scripture,” they don’t actually believe this, and it’s easy to see why.
Enter Greg Garrett, Baylor’s pro-choice, gay-affirming, trans-affirming professor of Literature and Culture. He recently gained a couple of million views after chastising Rowling for posting a lengthy Twitter thread where she repeatedly called a bunch of trans-women “men” on Trans Day of Visibility, something he found intolerable.
While this earned him some much-needed heat, it’s not the first theologically perverse position he’s held. A longstanding Episcopalian who also serves as a lay preacher at the LGBT-affirming St. David’s Episocopal Church, Garrett came out in support of gay marriage as early as 2013, writing in Patheos:
Now, many conservative Christians, particularly young men and women who have grown up among openly gay friends and older men and women who love their gay children and grandchildren, can no longer reconcile the harsh words of the Bible with their experience of gay people as fully human and equally beloved by God.
I know this journey well; in the course of my life, I have gone from a homophobic conservative Christian raised in a small town to a person who recognizes that the gay men and women I have known are often more faithful to God and to those they love than I have been.
… Republicans should be on the right side of history—and not just because gay marriage is a voting issue.They should be on the right side of history because it is the right side of history.
That same year he came out in support of abortion, decrying it as “cruel” and “unchristian” to deprive women the right to murder their children.
Nothing’s changed in the decade since. Over the years he has repeatedly advocated for LGBTQ theology and acceptance, writing in the Baptist News Global that being gay-unaffirming “impairs Baylor’s Christian witness to the larger world:”
Baylor’s adherence to traditional biblical teaching as its standard for dealing with LGBTQ individuals has harmed our students, as well as our closeted faculty and staff. Material accompanying the regents’ statement notes the high incidence of mental health problems and suicidal ideations among LGBTQ youth, and I have seen the emotional and spiritual cost in my classrooms and in my office across three decades — students afraid to be their true selves
This tracks with his Twitter history, where apart from dropping his personal pronouns, he has publicly shared his view that #loveislove” many times:
Baylor University is a faithless organization that refuses to deal with sin or adhere to its own policies, and we can’t imagine how many other educators work there that are just as bad as Garrett, and worse.
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Yet another individual who has turned from God to be one with this sinful, fallen world. I pray for his students who are being deprived of Biblical truths.