Is Tufts Tough Enough for Religious Pluralism?

The Tufts University community is facing a growing struggle over the existence of the Tufts Christian Fellowship as a recognized student group on campus. At stake is the ability of Tufts students to organize around shared religious beliefs—and, more broadly, whether the Tufts campus still accepts the American conception of religious pluralism. 

There are three sides in this fight. First is the Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF), a chapter of the national student organization InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. TCF wishes to be able to select its leaders based on their beliefs and exclude from leadership those who do not share the group's doctrinal understanding. Second is a faculty/student committee called the Committee on Student Life, which recently decided that groups like TCF should be able to make such belief-based decisions on leadership as long as they convince the head chaplain of Tufts that their need to make such choices is based on legitimate religious needs. And third is a group of students, many of whom recently organized under the banner of the Coalition Against Religious Exclusion (CARE) at Tufts, that believes that TCF should not be able to "discriminate" in its choice of leaders based on beliefs.