Religious Freedom Institute launches new group to protect students of faith on college campuses
An organization centered on defending religious freedom has launched a new initiative aimed at protecting such rights on college campuses amid rising intolerance and antisemitism.
The Religious Freedom Institute announced last week that it was launching the Campus Faith Alliance group, which will be found at several universities this fall semester.
RFI President David Trimble told The Christian Post via email that the Campus Faith Alliance was created in response to “growing challenges for students of faith on America's college campuses.”
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“Religious student groups have common cause to defend religious freedom for all based on a shared commitment to the human dignity of all,” he explained. “And we concluded that they would benefit from building a coalition with one another on their campuses to address threats to their religious freedom.”
“The widespread unrest and antisemitism on display on campuses last spring, especially at elite universities, only added to our sense that this Campus Faith Alliance could provide an important antidote to some of the harmful forces fueling this unrest.”
Trimble also told CP that RFI believes there are “a variety of more subtle pressures that undermine students in living out their faith on campus and their opportunities to learn how to model peaceful pluralism in society during this formative time in life.”
“Religious freedom doesn't depend on the false notion that all religions are equally true but rather the fundamental premise that all people are equal in dignity and have the right to seek answers to ultimate questions free from violence, coercion or intimidation,” he continued.
“Religious freedom says, ‘I can disagree with you even on life's most important questions while still respecting your dignity.’ This message needs to be relearned on many campuses today, and the Campus Faith Alliance can be a vehicle for such renewal.”
Several schools will have pilot chapters of the Alliance, with RFI facilitating the student group’s events in cooperation with other religious student organizations on campus.
Trimble hopes to build the Alliance by highlighting “our initial pilot sites to show how it is working on the ground, in support of real religious student groups on real college campuses.”
“People of faith are increasingly pushed to the margins of American society, and this marginalization is occurring with even greater intensity on public university campuses,” he said. “Government regulations and institutional rules continue to challenge the freedom of these groups to organize and express themselves in accord with their faith tenets.”
“But at a deeper level … a pernicious conception of radical individual autonomy that approaches ‘self-apotheosis’ is displacing foundational American principles of God-given human dignity and ordered liberty in our public life. This destructive vision of ‘radical individual autonomy’ is predominant on far too many secular campuses, and it is antithetical [to] the view of reality that religious students continue to hold.”
RFI was founded in 2016 by multiple college-level academics with the stated goal of advancing “religious freedom around the world and helping people who are being persecuted because of their religious beliefs.”
