Religious Bigotry Disguised as Inclusiveness

A Prison Fellowship essay by Mark Earley titled and subtitled respectively, Selective History; The Cross and William and Mary, cites an instance of intolerance masquerading as inclusiveness. From the essay:

"Founded in 1693, the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia—my alma mater—is the second-oldest college in the United States after Harvard. Like Harvard, William and Mary was founded for explicitly Christian purposes: The Royal Charter listed the training of “ministers of the gospel” and the propagation of the Christian faith among the “western Indians” among the school’s founding purposes.

Not surprisingly, given the school’s history, one of the oldest buildings on campus is the chapel, designed by Sir Christopher Wren who also designed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. On the altar stood a gold cross that was donated to the school by the nearby historic Bruton Parish church in the 1930s.

I say “stood” because in October, William and Mary President Gene R. Nichol ordered that the cross be removed from the altar. His goal was to “make the Wren Chapel less of a faith-specific” place and to “make it more welcoming” to people of “all faiths.”

As you probably guessed, Nichol could not cite a specific instance of non-Christians being made to feel unwelcome by the presence of the cross."

But he was in a position that enabled him to act on his own subjective feelings toward Christianity. Too bad he had to cover this as an attempt to safeguard the feelings of others. The fact that Muslims, Jews, Hindus and members of other groups did not complain is telling but not surprising. There is good reason to think they would have been wary of attempts to remove religious symbols from a chapel. After all it might be a synagogue or a mosque next time.